Mr. Austin 2019 Fiber and Resin Reinforced Foam, Steel Skeleton, Acrylic
Red Rose 2020 Acrylic on canvas
Cry Baby 2021 Acrylic on canvas
On the Road 2021 Acrylic on canvas
"Blue Put Relax Loose Loose" 2020 Fiber and resin reinforced foam Steel skeleton, acrylic
"Austin Lee: Paradise on Earth" exhibition scene Photo / Niu Dongyue, Zhao Yihan ◎ Houshang
Exhibition: Austin Lee: Paradise on Earth
Duration: 2022.2.13-5.8
Venue: Mumu Art Museum
"Sometimes water droplets can spill out of our cheeks, and when this happens, it's usually related to our emotions at the time. What a strange thing. "There are many kinds of water droplets, and there are many kinds of emotions, but this is often not what we think. We would say, I was in tears, or I felt a cruel emotion. But we don't usually say that we walk into the emotion of a drop of water, we walk into a drop of water. But the second scenario is a better way to describe the situation at the time. Falling in love is not just a metaphor. That's what happens when you watch Austin Lee. We are watching, we are trapped in watching, our folds are smoothed out, and our simplicity allows us to come and go freely.
When the leftist little Y said to me when he was watching the exhibition, do you really not think these paintings are very pornographic? You look at these pinks, isn't it obviously? In fact, I did not feel pornography at all, and what attracted me was the symbolic expression and reduced expression of these paintings. It does not urge me to pay attention, nor does it refuse my closeness, which is different from the tension of ordinary art museum space. What I feel is relaxation, and what Little Y feels is pornography. What is the connection between relaxation and pornography? To answer this question, we need to withdraw from the art museum space and the urban space. What do museums and cities create in addition to time and tension? It also creates paradoxes, creates tolerance for paradoxes. At least as far as art is concerned, our feelings are boiling, falling or rising, and we are like playful children, with a sense of punishment and responsibility that has not yet been determined about opinions and differences.
We can say that it was Lee's paintings and installations that led to all this. Austin Lee was one of the earliest millennial artists and one of the earliest global Internet natives. We can call it artificial (intelligent) Lee. What are the characteristics of artificial plums? No thoughts, lack of awareness of love and responsibility, good at chain virtual survival. These statements are, of course, stereotypes, but stereotypes are not always wrong. For example, the lack of a sense of love and responsibility is not too revealing, too much trust in the tension of emotions? The reverse is also true. The upside-down wandering of love and hate, there is no need to choose its traces in love and hate, love is just the expression of the definition of emotional tension, once the system of defining emotional tension changes, love and hate naturally dissolve and derive. Specific to the artist Lee, his art has no classical clichés, and lacks modern programs, he only has animation, animation, animation.
Following in Alex Katz's footsteps, Lee prefers to call his art image-making rather than painting. Katz was the second generation of the New York School, and the most important quality of its art was the removal of the three-dimensional and the reinforcement of the surface. Frank O'Hara said in Personism: A Manifesto: "There is nothing metaphysical about it. And according to Katz, "Eternity exists in the minutes of absolute consciousness." Superficial, instantaneous, material, we can find almost the same thing in Lee's art, the difference being that Lee hides himself in contemporary landscapes rather than in art.
Austin Lee's images are almost computer-simulated art, replacing the spray gun with Adobe Photoshop and Oculus Rift's virtual reality program, where he usually draws on an iPad, exports it to Photoshop, prints out the simulation, and then draws it. The effect is what we see, minimalist images, soft silhouettes, highly saturated tones. For example, "The Fountain of Relaxation", which lies on weightless trees and artificial grass, and "Blue Relax loose loose loose loose" that stands in the paintings and anxieties, their limbs open in all directions and allow themselves to dissolve in almost monochromatic colors, and symbolized features, they are both immersed and so self-facing.
"Technology is part of the world, you can choose to embrace it or keep your distance from it, it's basically just a tool of the present era." Li once said, "If I just paint a picture, I may not be able to meet my expectations, but on the computer, I can draw endlessly." I can also do things in VR that I can't do with clay. In the VR world, if I had a lobster's hand, I would think my hand was the lobster's hand. Overall, Lee is not a tech fanatic, especially since several of his technical primers apparently came from his peers, but he doesn't exaggerate the possibilities of technology like avant-garde art. In lee's series of seconds to minutes of animation, we can find that he once again eliminated the distance between viewing and art, because the focus of the image is on the characters and the story. These figures are oblivious in the virtual world, or depressed to death, or reflectively painting, but they all absorb the technology, just as they themselves are very good at dissolving into their own interiors.
So through the correspondence between the slider and the color, Austin Lee completed the dialogue of surface and three-dimensional, and also completed the dialogue of intuition and feeling. Naturally, Lee didn't love Keith Harlem or David Hockney as much as he thought he would. Lee's focus is not on the image, but on the making. David Hockney doesn't return to the image again and again, he's the image itself, unlike Lee. And how do you illustrate an image that goes back to the image? This is a major issue that we face.
Perhaps Li's return to the image can be described as animator. Li's sketches are not about people and things, but about numbers, pixels, programs, and so on. He opened the light and folded the shadows. Lee's characters have obvious emotional characteristics, but they are not really crying and laughing, they are just draped in a single expression. But through these monolithic expressions, we can perceive relatively abstract emotions such as love, happiness, calmness, sadness, and temptation. In terms of color, blue represents melancholy and soul, red pink represents hyperactivity and life, and yellow-orange refers to both fear and openness. In more figurative terms, blue is associated with life and destiny, red pink is associated with family and personal narratives, and yellow-orange symbolizes divided hearts and sublimated sociality. In addition, Lee placed green and white in a relatively secondary position, which seems difficult to explain separately.
In fact, we can almost skip these emoticons, which, though too large, barely occupy the central place of the narrative and attitude, and they can be said to link the viewing and the philosophical possibility in a symbolic way. In this regard, we need to understand that the animated character is a product of modernization, and its materials, perspectives, and images are from before the modern era, but its relationship with us and its symbolism are heavily dependent on modern civilization. In this sense, these animated characters, by alienating and modularizing the characteristics of modern civilization, precisely outline a circuitous route.
What we can get from this is not just a temporary answer, but a complete imprint of the mind. The vague person Li found is probably us in the 2020s, and the ambiguity is actually distinct, full, and disappearing. The shifting and dilution of modern concepts, which are both reinforced in public propositions and weakened in private life, is precisely the case that high saturation colors can be transformed with pornography.
Finally, Hockney's possible doubts and deviations may be addressed at the end of "History of Drawings". "People like pictures. The picture does not disappear. Everyone thinks that movies kill drama, but drama will always exist because it is vivid. Drawing and painting will be there, like singing and dancing, because human beings need it. I'm pretty sure that painting will grow in the future. If the history of art and the history of the picture were to diverge, the power would be with the image. Art has not yet ended, the history of pictures has not ended, people will feel that everything has an end from time to time, but the picture will not end, it will continue like this, forever. ”
Image courtesy of Mumu Museum of Art