By Richard Vine

Over the past 30 years, Chinese-born artist Hudson Shaoxia Zhang has established himself as the world’s preeminent painter of golf course landscapes. Recently, his solo exhibitions have appeared at cultural venues in Nanjing, Florence, London, Paris, and Louvain-la-Neuve. His artistic dedication, already rare in its single-theme intensity, is even more remarkable given that Zhang has also crafted exceptionally successful careers as an art historian and a real-estate entrepreneur.

     Why would such an accomplished individual devote so much time, effort, and skill to one subject, transforming bucolic golf sites around the world, usually portrayed in photography or commercial illustration, into a focus for contemporary art? What draws him to these extraordinary places, and what does he make of them artistically and philosophically?

     Golf courses can sustain such scrutiny—from the artist and from viewers—because they are physically enchanting, paradoxical environments, crafted to induce a “natural” experience while being among the most cunningly designed landscapes on earth. Moreover, Zhang knows, they hold a distinct position in the history of leisure and sport, emblematizing the vital importance of recreation for human well-being.

     All living organisms undergo cycles of activity and stasis, and those with nervous systems require sleep. In the Judeo-Christian scriptures, even God rested on the seventh day. Spiritualism in the East, meanwhile, has long centered on stillness, detachment, and inner calm. Zhang, well-versed in both these world systems, sees golf courses as at once physical terrains inducing relaxation through exercise and mental landscapes for active reflection. His process of walking the course, photographing, sketching, then distilling his experiences into finished paintings in the studio is, in effect, a modern ritual of renewal. His personal diaries on golfing and painting offer both catharsis and insight. “There is a quiet benefit to solitude on the course,” he writes; “for three or four hours, I can fully immerse myself in the structure of the landscape and the visual poetry it offers.”

     That sense of freedom is an addictive pleasure, one we need to sustain us, physically and psychologically, through the hard work of living. Historically, that collective necessity has bifurcated into action and observation, sports and leisure.

The Art of Recreation

Crucial to Zhang’s artwork is the fact that all sports, at their highest levels, come to have dedicated spaces. Reserved for a single purpose, meticulously tended and popularly revered, these special locales—fields, courts, alleys, arenas, and courses—are infused with a sense of ceremony and spiritual communion, almost a shrine-like holiness. It is not uncommon to hear fans today speak of making a “pilgrimage” to Yankee Stadium or the Augusta National Golf Club.

     It is this ritual significance that Zhang emphasizes by depicting landscapes rather than individual players. “The course for me represents eternity, while the golfers who create miracles upon it are fleeting,” he writes in his essay for this volume. “I seek to capture the ever-changing appearance of nature within that eternity—where human figures are always a passing adornment.”

     Giving added significance to Zhang’s thematic choice of golf is the surprising fact that sports have rarely featured in the long history of Chinese art. A few tomb-wall paintings from the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE) show courtiers playing polo, which had recently reached China from Central Asia via the Silk Road. Roughly half a millennium later, Ming dynasty (1368-1644) court paintings depict elite personages engaged in chuiwan, a game remarkably like golf, involving a landscaped playing area, small balls, various clubs, a sequence of holes, colored flags, and an elaborate set of regulations codified in the Wan Jin (Ball Treatise, 1282). The game, played by men and women alike, was popular from the Song dynasty (960-1279) until nearly the end of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912), China’s last.

     Zhang’s courses--invariably shown in good weather, never amid storms or under snow—seem to promise his viewers the same natural vitality that these well-tended landscapes radiate. Golf courses are designed, after all, to encourage disciplined action and mental diligence. They do not accommodate sloth. Zhang’s paintings, like the game itself and its environment, encourage a robust state of being.

     The courses, in Zhang’s unblinking depictions, affirm a fundamental and time-honored insight. In the first century CE, the Roman poet Juvenal formulated the principle mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body)—a tenet that has operated throughout history. We tend to think of leisure as a by-product of affluence, but in fact, given the human animal’s innate need for rest and regeneration, it has been built into every social stratum in every age.

     In modern times, under the sway of empiricism, corporate managers have carefully quantified leisure. They know that occasional respite, properly regulated, pays off in increased productivity. “Advanced” societies have therefore made a norm of the tripartite day: eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours of discretionary time. Physical education and recess are now required in schools, and the 40-hour workweek is standard for adults. So vital is leisure to the contemporary notion of well-being that it is mandated in a number of international covenants. For example, Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, instituted by the UN General Assembly in 1948, specifies: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”

     Yet anyone looking at Zhang’s paintings senses immediately that they convey, in their construction and their concerns, more than a pleasant revitalizing of the human body. They serve, indeed, as emblems of a higher aspiration.

     Lying behind modern time management is a long philosophical tradition. “What is the fruit of leisure, if not culture?” asked the Roman statesman Cicero in the first century CE, drawing on even earlier Greek precedent. (Tellingly, the Greek word for “leisure” can also mean “school.”) Aristotle argued that “eudaimonia” (fulfillment, happiness) was best attained through a contemplative life.

     The beauty of Zhang’s work lies in the merger of the contemplativeness that golf induces, especially when one plays alone as the artist occasionally does, with minute and constant observation of the environs. The slant of ground, the density and height of grass, the position of trees, the strength and direction of a breeze, the effects of changing light on the perception of distances—all these here-and-now factors and more are continuously monitored by the golfer and painter. Yet there is an undeniable inner restfulness in the elevated, removed perspective that Zhang most frequently employs for his compositions. The hint of transcendence feels at once innate and honestly earned. We should not be surprised; that midair point-of-view, expressing tender appreciation for a world from which the mind ultimately stands apart, has a long cultural history.

     The Greek model of contemplative virtue, suitably modified, was adopted by the Catholic Church during its long reign over the post-Classical world. “We work,” Aristotle had written, “in order to have leisure.” But Saint Augustine carefully distinguished between sin-inducing idleness and its much purer counterpart. Otium sanctum, “holy leisure,” was time devoted to biblical study, prayer, and contemplation of the Divine. Going even further in his Summa Theologiae, Saint Thomas Aquinas later made meditation upon God the supreme human endeavor. The entire monastic tradition, from the Middle Ages to the present, has sought to balance labor for sustenance (especially farming and gardening) with leisure for spiritual elevation. The same can be said of the major faith practices—especially Buddhism and Taosim—in the East.

     In China, the cultivation of noble leisure long took a form of particular relevance to Zhang’s work. About 1,300 years ago, Wang Wei, a poet, musician, painter, and politician, launched a new style of ink painting that contrasted with the rigidly detailed court art of the Tang dynasty. Concentrating on landscapes and symbolically freighted plants and animals, this “literati” work aimed to fuse painting and poetry (sometimes on the same sheet of paper) through the use of ink wash, gestural brushstrokes, evocative areas of emptiness, and a mode of depiction that seeks to capture the spiritual essence of a subject rather than its optical appearance. Above all, the artistic aim was to convey an emotional response to the natural world.

     This aesthetic was adopted by many wenren “scholar-amateurs,” as opposed to professional artists, persisting through all the subsequent dynasties down to the present day. Zhang, in fact, might be seen as just such a figure, adapted to today’s fluid globalism. Highly educated, these individuals tended to be either teachers or officials in the imperial state. (For centuries in China, one had to pass rigorous examinations in the literary and philosophical classics to become eligible for governmental service.) Eventually, fearing the dangers of court intrigue or simply seeking inner peace, many literati—most famously the 3rd-century Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove—retreated from public engagement in order to cultivate the Four Arts of poetry, calligraphy, painting, and music.

     Zhang’s classical studies began with calligraphy at three, and his early artistic training was in traditional ink painting. He is, therefore, thoroughly imbued with this Chinese tradition, especially its reliance on floating rather than a fixed-point perspective. Yet Zhang is a 21st-century artist, fully aware of international currents. His tools (pen and ink for drawing, oil and canvas for painting) and his aesthetic sensibility (centered on realism and retinal perception) are closely tied to Western practice. Deftly, through a strong affinity for proto-modern work in 19th-century France, he has created a transcultural mix of the current modes of seeing and representation.

     Zhang’s impulse is virtually diplomatic, bringing together Eastern and Western visual languages. His formative experiences give depth to his later practice and underscore the continuity between his youthful grounding in Chinese traditions and his mature work in oil. His paintings, though executed in a naturalistic Western style, resonate with the literati tradition, emphasizing the pursuit of spiritual essence and an emotional engagement with the natural world. Golf courses, in this light, become a very appropriate—and very rich—thematic choice for his culturally hybrid art.

Golf

The underlying paradox of golf, and probably the well-spring of the game’s appeal to Zhang and many others, is that it is at once an escape from the demands of business and daily life, and yet a reaffirmation of “responsible” civic virtues. The course is a place to develop your given talent, work hard, play by the rules, be considerate, dress appropriately, and receive a just reward. In short, golf epitomizes middle-class values.

     That politesse, for Asian players like Zhang, may also feel like an updated form of Confucian propriety. It is through li (correct, respectful manners and behavior) that one cultivates yi (a sense of morality and justice), which in turn fosters zhi (moral wisdom) and ultimately ren (compassion, empathy, benevolence). This summary of virtuous action as defined by Confucius reads remarkably like a manual of golf course etiquette, making the links a training ground for modern-day gentlefolk.

     Golf’s subtle, almost addictive allure results in equal measure from its history and its phenomenology. Whatever its antecedents in Rome’s paganica (played with bent sticks and a ball of stuffed wool), China’s chuiwan (discussed above), and kolf (whose Dutch enthusiasts sped across frozen fields and canals in the 13th-15th centuries), golf as we know it today began in Scotland in the 15th century. Banned in 1457 by King James II, who complained that it distracted his archers from their practice, the game was legalized again in1502 and became a pastime of the nobility. The rules were first codified by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in 1744. The St Andrews course, which originally offered 22 holes until some were consolidated, set the convention of 18 holes in 1764.

     The 19th century, with its industrialization of labor and spread of transportation lines, brought a democratization of golf. Many public courses sprang up to serve middle- and even working-class players, prompting the wealthy to create private clubs with exclusive social and financial requirements. In 1867 the St Andrews Ladies Club was established, confirming the sport’s gender-neutral openness. By the late 20th century golf had become a global phenomenon—on approximately 38,000 courses and on TV. Today the game is played in over 200 countries by some 60 million people, mostly amateurs.

     That last statistic reveals much about golf as a lived experience. In many popular sports—football, baseball, basketball, hockey, etc.—adults who play the game professionally or semi-professionally are sharply divided from those who only watch it. In contrast, golf fans like Zhang tend to be players themselves, impassioned hobbyists endowed with a kinesthetic sympathy. They know firsthand how it feels to hit a great shot, or to dub one; to see your ball land in an ideal position on the green, or watch it go astray into the rough or a bunker. They realize that golf is a game you play against your opponents, yes, but primarily against yourself—your own earlier performances, your overall handicap, your current expectations, and your dreams.

     The sport’s subjective nature is another reason that Zhang chooses to examine its courses rather than its participants. One plays this non-oppositional, self-reflective game with the landscaped setting as one’s constant companion and chief competitor.

     This undertaking requires a reasonable level of fitness, but not exceptional strength or endurance. Though most players peak in their late 20s to mid-30s, they can (like Zhang himself) continue to sharpen particular abilities—drive control, short-iron accuracy, putting—into retirement and even their senior years. It is one of the few sports in which contestants never hurry. Free from bursts of manic activity, a round of golf requires deliberation personified, patience acted out. The only bloodlust on a course is directed toward a series of holes, not at a living opponent.

     It is precisely these qualities—the structured challenge, the contemplative rhythm, and the ceremonial landscape—that have drawn Zhang to the golf course as a subject. In a golf match, others try to beat you not by foiling your advances but by simply outperforming you. No one blocks your shots or throws you to the ground before you can swing your club; no one scoops up your ball as it rolls along the fairway. In this non-oppositional contest, you confront the regulations, the daily conditions, and the limits of your own skill; but you wrangle with no cagey antagonists, except perhaps the demons in your own head.

     Just as a round of golf involves strategic pacing and mindfulness, Zhang’s painting process unfolds as a careful navigation of light, volumes, and perspectives across the course. He transfers a veteran caddie’s expertise in shot placement to the act of laying brushstrokes on canvas. His compositional responses to land forms, vegetation, and colors are as calibrated as a pro golfer’s swing.

     But ultimately, the game is about hierarchy. Whatever the immediate pleasures and frustrations of a day’s outing, one is always striving for a lower handicap and a higher standing among fellow players. Golfers are not unlike nobles maneuvering for preferment at court or executives jockeying for corporate advancement. At every level, one can aspire to yet higher status. No victory, even a champion’s, is ever entirely satisfying or permanent.

     The parallels between playing golf and working as an artist (which entails attaining a rank in the worldwide market of reputation and sales) are myriad. Or perhaps we should say the sport emulates life in general.

     The physical course evokes subliminally the course of a career, or the unfolding of a civilization. Rousseau’s noble savage myth is rejected, so that civility may prevail: one must avoid going wild—erring into the rough—and thus delaying the march of progress. As in most projects in life, one starts out far from the goal and makes the biggest advances first, followed by ever more refined and precisely targeted maneuvers. The bunkers are like pitfalls clearly foreseen in one’s advance toward a desired end. The fairways are the tao, the Way. The rough, the bunkers, and water hazards represent all that can go wrong in the course—or on the course—of a virtuous quest.

     Like Odysseus, one makes a journey outward and a journey back. The clubhouse, the entire area near the first tee and the last green, is “home”: it launches and completes the adventurous journey, serving as one’s symbolic Ithaca. One returns changed, filled with memories, chastened by experience.

     Little wonder, then, that Zhang has spent years on the epic task of portraying golf courses, always with an emphasis on how one moves, all senses alert, through that symbolically fraught terrain—a land of personal challenges, pervaded by legends and heroes, living and dead.

Contemporary Landscape Art

It is above all to Zhang’s two major influences—the Chinese literati painters in the East and the Impressionists in the West—that we owe our ability to readily visualize outdoor leisure. Apart from these two strains, landscape painting has been a relatively static and dutiful endeavor, often more akin to topography, or to moralization and worship, than to sensory enjoyment.

     In China, landscape painting developed as early as the fourth century. It was then—and remains today—a visual admonition to align one’s self with nature, particularly its timeless balance of enduring and transient elements, symbolized respectively by mountains and water, geological masses and blossoms. In the West, landscape long remained essentially a backdrop, a natural stage-set against which Classical, Gothic, Renaissance, and Post-Renaissance figures acted out their social and religious dramas. Not until the 16th-century, in Holland, did painters begin to treat the natural world as a worthy subject in and of itself.

     Soon, however, partly out of conviction, partly through a desire to raise the aesthetic status of the lowly genre, artists began to idealize natural scenes—some, such as Nicolas Poussin, in order to evoke the high principles of the vanished Classical past; some, notably the Luminists in America, in order to sermonize that the earth is infused with God’s presence. In the 18th-century, Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke complicated these artistic responses with the notion of the Sublime, a commingling of awe and terror in the face of huge terrestrial formations (mountains, caverns, oceans) and overwhelming natural forces (floods, storms, conflagrations). Sampling the earth’s “terribleness” became a guilty pleasure.

     Modernism, of course, brought secularization, realism, and eventually avant-garde deconstruction. Cézanne’s faceted studies of Mont Sainte-Victoire imply neither ubiquitous divinity, nor scientific exactitude, nor moral elevation; they are instead experiments in optical perception and the interaction of brushstrokes on canvas. Thus over time, the hushed stability of Claude Lorrain, Jacob van Ruisdael, and John Constable and gave way in the late 19th century to the atmospherics of Whistler, the gestural expressiveness of van Gogh, the analytic pointillism of Seurat, etc., together opening the way for the 20th-century parade of artistic -isms (Fauvism, Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism, Minimalism, and more).

     Today, landscape painting is as diverse as the surface of the earth itself. Walk into any gallery and you might encounter the dreamlike scenes of Peter Doig, the optimistic brightness of David Hockney, the chromatic coyness of Wayne Thiebaud, the ambivalent grandeur of April Gornik, the mythopoeic power of Anselm Kiefer, the pop stylization of Alex Katz, the enigmas of Neo Rauch, or the chromatic lushness of Shara Hughes.

     To understand Zhang’s place in this panoply, we must grasp that his work, like his subject, blends two elemental systems of thought. All landscape painting addresses a fundamental question: What is humanity’s role in relation to nature? One response, historically associated with the East, is that we should reconcile ourselves, body and soul, to the ways of the natural world. The counter position, associated with the West, is that we should control and manipulate nature to our own benefit. (The biblical God gives humankind “dominion” over the earth, and expects good “stewardship” in return.) In European landscaping, this dialectic played out in the contrast between the English Garden, conjuring wilderness within confines, and the French Garden, subjected throughout to geometric precision.

     The traditional Chinese Garden, combining these impulses, assembles winding pathways, rocks, vegetation, and pavilions with clockwork intricacy, calculating every possible viewpoint, in order, paradoxically, to venerate the untended cycles of natural life—positing that landscape design echoes an inherent terrestrial order, self-evident for those who have eyes to see. Western viewers might think of this approach as Spinoza’s pantheism (Deus sive Natura, God or Nature) modelled inside a walled compound. Contemplating such an environment, with such a conviction, invites quietude, calling to mind the Zen mantra popularized by the 20th-century American guru Ram Dass: “Be . . . here . . . now.”

     This conceptual duality—along with the experiential state it induces—clearly parallels Zhang’s aesthetic conception of golf courses. Both when roamed on foot and when portrayed on paper or canvas, these domains are cultivated yet natural, structured yet unpredictable, thoughtfully designed but always subject to nature’s uncontrollable forces.

     Being at once wild and manicured, golf courses also meld contrasting worldviews—compliance versus stewardship, acquiescence versus conquest—in the dialectic between its roughs and fairways, its hazards and greens. Zhang embraces both in his artistic vision. Although he sometimes sketches or takes photographs on the golf course, he makes his compositions, his painted meditations, afterwards in the studio—through a combination of documentation, memory, and invention. His task, challenging but pleasurable, consists of aesthetic re-creation.

     Zhang’s bicultural technique might be dubbed Literati Impressionism. For his practice clearly echoes literati values, offering a deep poetic response to intuited spiritual essences, while also embracing Western painterly traditions—above all the optics of light, color, and atmospheric effects.

     In his essays, golf diary, and interviews, Zhang often speaks of the escape, the release from mundane cares, he finds on golf courses. This utopianism resonates with both with the Judeo-Christian myth of the Garden of Eden and with Chinese poet Tao Yuanming’s 4th-century fable “The Peach Blossom Spring,” which portrays an isolated realm of harmony and bliss—the antecedent of Shangri-La in James Hilton's 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Yet just as frequently, Zhang recounts the many frustrations and small triumphs of golf, the need to repetitively hone one’s craft, the solitude as well as the camaraderie of play.

     Zhang’s paintings presents golf courses as psychic preserves, places to reaffirm sanity despite the personal and sociopolitical stresses of day-to-day life in an interconnected, lightning-quick world. Because the compositions are nearly devoid of people, free of intrusive signs of commerce, untouched by war, they suggest refuge, hovering before us like dreams. Their forms and colors evoke a nature-centered past that may be our best hope for tomorrow.

     In the evolution of art, as we have seen, moving landscape from the background to the forefront had theological implications, reminding humankind of its relatively minor role in the cosmic scheme. But in Zhang’s day, and ours, that foregrounding may also bespeak an ecological consciousness, a latent awareness that getting the balance right between adaptation and control is tantamount to determining the biological future of the planet and our fate as a species—to say nothing of our state of being in the meantime.

     Clearly, for Hudson Shaoxia Zhang, a global contemporary artist with an historically informed manner and a signature theme, much—perhaps everything—depends on the heightening of consciousness and the plumbing of subconsciousness, both on the golf course and in the painting studio. His profound recreation, his restoration of body and soul, lies not in winning or losing, but in being there.

Richard Vine is the former managing editor of Art in America and author of hundreds of critical articles, interviews, and reviews. His eight books include New China, New Art (2008) and Odd Nerdrum: Paintings, Sketches, and Drawings (2001), as well as the artworld crime novel SoHo Sins (2016). He has taught and lectured around the world, and curated exhibitions in Beijing, New Delhi, Hangzhou, and New York.