紅色十字架上的基督受難圖之三 The Suffering of Christ on the Red Cross (III), 2016

Ink on paper, 27 ½ × 12 in. (70 × 33 cm)

Gift of the artist

Dao Zi (whose given name is Wang Min) was a highly esteemed Chinese painter, poet, art critic, and professor, who showed this work in his 2018 exhibition “Turning Blood into Ink” in Regent’s Dal Schindell Gallery. Using a traditional Chinese ink painting technique, he made this work to be in dialogue with Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim crucifixion (1512–16) (see the nearby copy of that painting by Maria Gabankova). 

This striking image emphasizes the lateral expanse of Christ’s suffering body, accentuated by his arms stretching and distorting across the image between two huge spikes through his wrists. These elongated (seemingly transhistorical) proportions of Christ’s open-armed suffering are amplified by the cross’s uniformly saturated redness, a colour associated not only with bloodshed but also, especially in Chinese culture, with vitality, fecundity, and life-force. This sprawling red cross rises from a small red mound, Golgotha, around which a spherical form is swirling with black, white, and gold, suggestively “placing” the crucifixion at the center of the cosmos. A crowd of mostly anonymous, gold-faced figures surrounds the cross, with three singled out by distinctive clothing, haloes, and facial features. The calligraphic inscriptions accompanying them identify them as Saint John and Saint Mother Mary to the right of Christ and Mary Magdalene to the left (cf. John 19:25-27), all of whom seem to wear modern monastic clothing. Rather than portraying the crowd at the cross that day (which would include soldiers, temple lawyers, and so on), Dao Zi is here depicting the intergenerational, intercultural, interdenominational church made alive “in” Christ (cf. 2 Cor 5:14-21).