Specular Reflection 2 by Austin Lee 2021
Red Rose, Austin Lee 2020
"Austin Lee: Paradise on Earth" exhibition scene Photo / Niu Dongyue Zhao Yihan ◎ Yu Muyun
I have to admit that sometimes it is really important to take a breath, and after being swept by the overwhelming information stream, do you feel stuffy in your chest and stutter your breathing: Will the world be better? When this kind of thought appears, the brain reminds you that it is time to relax, not to be too nervous, and sometimes to look at our emotions and moods from a different perspective, to paint them out with shapes and colors, and there may be pictures that we ourselves do not expect. Artist Austin Lee from the United States painted the delicate and subtle small emotions of modern people's anxiety, surprise and boredom, etc., took a nap, and went to the "paradise on earth" of the Mumu Art Museum on the weekend to give yourself a relaxing spiritual massage.
Unlike those artists who seriously want to distance art from life, Austin Lee is a casual and playful artist, and the paintings and installations born from his hands will evoke the memories of our childhood watching Clayman animation on the children's channel. Linked to the artist's birth in the 1980s, it's easy to associate the toy-like texture of his work with the popular handmade shows on television at the time, a generational happy time: children with free time following the host to knead small animals and human figures out of clay, plant stems and pink petals made of plasticine, and the experience of dealing with soft materials such as non-woven fabrics and cotton. These are the real-sense experiences that 21st-century children born in the virtual world and the real world do not have, and they are also an important quality of Austin Lee's work - the touch. Austin Lee's work, whether in painting or installation, presents a comfortable sense of smoothness and softness reminiscent of childhood, and it is this visual but tactile experience that brings people into the immersive world of the senses.
Among the works exhibited on the first floor of the exhibition hall, the most eye-catching is "Human Nature", which occupies a huge space, which is also an important part of the artist's work "Relaxing Fountain". The huge pink figure, a giant creature that can only be seen in dreams, leans on the cake-like base in a very leisurely and soft posture. From its raised head grows a tentacle-like flower, and from the flower it spews water. The work is like a clay figure made by a child, full of childish fun, but the smooth touch of the whole body makes us realize that it is not a creature that exists in this world.
Surrounded by dozens of LCD screens, like more than a dozen television screens, the huge humanoid figure repeatedly broadcasts animations about flying, deforming, zooming in and out, which should be everyone's childhood fantasy. I believe that most people have dreamed about flying and falling, and even if these whimsical fantasies leave us in adulthood, they are reproduced in the works of artist Austin Lee this time. In his works, the characters have only a brief facial features to express their feelings, and the rest of the limbs become a fluffy marshmallow, sometimes like a large pile of chewing gum piled together, and even the benches seem to be just rubbed out of noodle-like clay, like a "toy" in paradise.
Why does Austin Lee's work present such a unique effect? Everyone who sees his work for the first time will doubt his eyes, when you think that you stand too far away to see the outline of the picture, you will find that you are still not clear when you get closer, and the blurry effect specially painted by the artist can arouse people's feelings more, and this hazy and dreamy effect is not exactly the online world that everyone has experienced? Austin Lee once said that he got a lot of inspiration from the digital world, and many sketches of his works were first drawn in Adobe Photoshop, debugged with digital painting software, and then painted on canvas, so he also preferred to use spray guns, which are soft edges and have no hard boundaries when drawing physical works.
The rendering function and color grading function in the digital painting tool can quickly complete the effect that traditional painting does not have, and the blurry feeling that needs to be covered and reconciled many times on the canvas only takes a few seconds in the painting software, for the painting software, the painting seems to have become a product that can be easily adjusted at any time, and the conversion of different tones is only in one thought. Why, then, would an artist choose this "troublesome practice" of painting on digital painting and then moving to the surface of the canvas?
For everyone living today, the online world has changed from the seasoning of life to an irreplaceable necessity, grabbed by streaming media information, trained by the inertial response of seductive color matching, and everything on the Internet seems to be born for addiction. This seductive style, which does not have a deep connotation and is characterized by smooth surfaces and soft touches and bright colors, will remind us of some apps that use images and images as the dominant communication medium, such as Instagram and Little Red Book; some people's daily habits have also developed their own color matching systems and UI systems to strengthen people's impression and goodwill. In the electronic world, color matching and interface shape are important condiments to grab the appetite of the eye, and Austin Lee, who perfectly copied this theory into artistic creation, created a work that blurred the boundary between virtual and reality.
In addition to liking, Austin Lee added enough happy emotions to his work. His work is not only a discussion of technological change and a sense of boundaries, but also responds to the creations of previous masters. It was surprising that he chose fantastic artists such as Matisse and Chagall as his foreshadowing.
"Human Nature" reminds us of matisse's "Dance" in which the human body is composed of powerful and stretched limbs in a circular composition. Another work also directly references the joyful artists in Chagall's paintings—in Chagall's paintings, the figures change their forms at will according to the change of mood, sometimes their heads and bodies are reversed, and sometimes they fly in the sky. Both Matisse and Chagall's works are full of romantic to endless emotions, just as the cosy leisure in Matisse's paintings and the naïve childishness in Chagall's works have influenced Austin Lee, and although his works explore the contemporary online world and the real world, they are joyful and fairytale, and as the artist himself puts it, he is more concerned with human feelings: "Most of my paintings are about people, more precisely, they are about human emotions. Most people experience emotions, but it's hard to understand them. A good painting can make you feel something. ”
Standing in front of these works that almost melt into the picture, we may not be as far away from the virtual world as we think, and we don't even need to wear VR glasses, but only need a situation that can mobilize sensory interaction to immerse ourselves in it, Austin picks up all the experiences we have in common: dreaming of flying in the sky, longing for a garden to rest, scratching the mood on the traffic jam, some flowers we have seen in childhood, and cats that make us feel warm. Even if it is a blurry image, are these feelings false? Obviously not, the reason why the online world moves people is because it evokes our memories, some emotions that have been experienced but rarely experienced again, some fleeting feelings, which make everything easy to reach, seemingly unlimited possession. In the face of such a purely subjective warm world, the real world is inevitably too cruel, you can easily pull the virtual world into reality, but it is difficult to transplant the real world into the virtual world, Austin Lee with emotions and common childhood memories let us have a moment of peace of mind, but also let us continue to think about the boundary between virtual and reality in this era.
At a time when the concept of metacosmology is all the rage, perhaps one day humanity has built a world that can fully simulate reality and perfectly simulate human sensory feelings, and after that day we will still need to live in reality? This question is not far away from us, and when the time comes, everyone will need to think about it once.
Courtesy photo/Mumu Art Museum