Art is the unintended meaning
Lu Dai
There are always many accidents in life, and so is art, when I saw the "Reprint of the Mustard Garden Painting Spectrum" sent by Liao Lei, I suddenly felt a little surprised.
"Mustard Garden Pictorial Notation" was born in the Qing Dynasty and has been around for more than 300 years. The authors are Shen Xinyou, Wang Shuo, Wang Wei, and Wang Wei, and there is a later one, which is an addendum to the late Qing Dynasty Minchu Chaoxun Linyi. "Mustard Garden Painting Notation" was once popular in the world, and many people learned ancient pen and ink techniques and layout rules according to their painting examples, and also learned ancient meanings. There is no doubt that the Mustard Garden Notation can be called a classic enlightenment sample.
"Reprint of mustard garden paintings" is a text art work conceived and created by Liao Lei and He Wanmin. The so-called "reprint" is not a reprint of the original picture, but a re-creation based on the "Mustard Garden Painting Notation". The core of it is to organize children to recreate their own ideas and preferences on the pages of ancient paintings – of course, even doodling works – and then carefully selected children's text and pictures are printed on the "Reprinted Mustard Garden Notation", thus forming a text and picture book with new relational significance. This is surprising and even a little surprising. What does it mean?
First, let the artistic "big names" of three hundred years ago meet with the current Mengtong in different airs in the "Reprint of mustard garden paintings", which is very different. The artist's "boldness" is full of creative imagination and possibility, especially the children's unrestrained and free creation, which may lead to some thinking, including questioning, of the educational concepts, methods and paths of classic paradigm depiction and free graffiti.
Second, we say that art is an accident, which mainly refers to the "accident" that breaks through and transcends traditional artistic concepts, artistic methods and artistic materials. These include the works of the Eight Mountain People, the world of contempt and the world of sorrow, and of course, the strong "funny" works of Marcel Duchamp. When art comes down from the traditional shelf painting, people who are still stuck in the traditional aesthetic are becoming more and more uncomfortable, and they can only "breathe" or throw their hands away in the face of jaw-dropping works. But modern art continues to create "accidents"—juxtaposition, misplacing, covering, appropriation, transformation, inversion, magic, grotesqueness, paradox, and the all-out use of performance art, the use of garbage materials in poor art, and the presentation of new spatial structures by artificial intelligence and related video works, all of which show the alternative face of human beings and human beings on thinking and imagination and the excavation of human nature. It is also an artistic expression of the ambiguity and complexity of the human spirit and psyche. In the "Reprint of the Mustard Garden Drawing", we also see methods and meanings such as pulling, juxtaposition, misplacing, and covering.
Liao Lei and He Wanmin were classmates of the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts more than thirty years ago, Liao Lei has been engaged in artistic work, and He Wanmin is the deputy editor-in-chief of Liangshan Daily, writing a lot of texts about Liangshan, which has a great influence. Their joint exploration this time is also an accident. It is believed that their works will receive attention in the exhibition "Bishan Youshu" that opens on December 17, 2021.
(Left: Famous art theorist Mou Qun, right: Famous artist Liao Lei)