Familiar strangeness
On August 25, 2021, Song Wanjin's solo exhibition "Familiar Stranger" opened at The Landing Art Museum in Chengdu. Here's a review of The Phoenix Art that brings you the artist Yu Ji.
As a young artist in Chengdu, Song Wanjin exhibited more than 50 paintings in one sitting, and the image space of these works with a slightly "surreal" feeling was acquired— whether it was scene narratives, theater rituals, fairy tale symbols, magic symbols, or the atmosphere of loneliness and loneliness, and it was difficult to see how the author's female psychological map fit into these scenes. Although "the sky is high and clear", as the title suggests, it is familiar but strange and thoughtless - it provides us with a different mechanism for painting and viewing: how does she draw a painting; how to provide a way to see?!
Before the launch, I asked her on WeChat: What does the balloons, kites, clothes with hands, branches, or ball-like colored blocks in your paintings have to do with you or your life? She replied eloquently, as follows:
"It is the strangeness of reality, the subjectivity is greater than the reality of viewing, but still want to present a state of reality." The earliest category of clothes is to directly describe the strangeness of the characters, and many of the fashion elements in it are related to the sense of the times I knew at that time. The appearance of the balloon is from the alienation of things and people to the alienation of scenery and people, the elements come from a very old French movie "Red Balloon", in which the interaction between the balloon and the child is a "living" state, I think the balloon also has some emotional expression, and later continued to the kite is also such a state. As for the color block similar to a balloon, it is both a continuation of the balloon and a feeling of life, and the belly of the woman who conceives life is like a round balloon. ”
This is the only thing I know about Song Wanjin's creative ideas.
First, Albert Lamorisse's 1956 quasi-New Wave film The Red Balloon tells the fantasy story of an anonymous boy who inadvertently gets a magical red balloon from an adult perspective and a child's psychological level. The film through the little boy's pride and happiness in having this red balloon that does not abandon him, to the grievances, loss and distress caused by the intervention of others in the red balloon and the loss of the red balloon several times, and the continuous occurrence of the rude intervention of the children in the red balloon, although the red balloon is given a certain "personality", but in the end, the red balloon is invincible to the violence of the little human being, it is robbed and punctured, the leak is dried up and loses its magic, the little boy is sad and helpless... The interpretation of these plots fully shows Albert Ramolis's alternative observation of the children's world, delicately exposing the innocence of human naivety/ naughtiness for the timid resistance of the adult world / the complex psychology of yearning, as well as the loneliness of children, presenting a kind of reaction instinct of people to the future and the unknown: longing and imagination. The film is a game of sorrow, but it is not sad, in fact, this movie is wonderful and simple.
A brief description of the movie "Red Balloon" is only a prefix for my review of Song Wanjin's work. Song Wanjin's works also make extensive use of the element of "red balloons" into the picture, allowing me to discuss it later.
We know that the cinematic approach is a reaction to drama and a fragmentary combination of theatrical content/rituals. Images are produced as semblances, which are reassembled after the elements inside each "time image" or the image itself are filtered, cropped, deordered, blended, stirred, and so on. Jacques Rancière believed that cinema could be seen as a continuation of literary modernism, a rewrite of literature. Therefore, the film is precisely today as a written sentence, that is, the image writes the history and daily life of mankind, and the past and the future are present in the eyes of the present at the same time, and the image becomes an experience that also reshapes the gaze, a poetics of the gaze. Thus, not only on this basis, the film or image is both aesthetic and political, it is a huge installation. In the definition of non-media, that is, in the cognition of the general artistic meaning, painting is also an installation. Therefore, when Song Wanjin takes "Red Balloon" as the base of her painting, that is, her self-consciousness of painting in terms of imagery, it is logical to set up a structure and tone: the film-installation/external freeze frame of the image; the image/coldness-silence in time.
First of all, when Song Wanjin arranges more than 50 paintings on the exhibition wall, you are just holding the attitude of "looking at the wall", and you will also be infected by the old-fashioned slide-like temperament of the transparency of these paintings, and you will be wrapped up in a state of gaze: if you have experienced enough years, you may remember the old days when you played glass slides as a child; if you are a reticulate generation, you will be immersed in the wonders of the mysterious garden and green grass of "Follow the white rabbit". Or maybe you still remember it, and there are fairy tale cartoon picture books that have not been filled out of color and still lie in the storage box. In short, Song Wanjin's painting allows you to have the "process" of "entering the movie", facing the image exhibition surface (Studium) composed of each frame, following the exhibition line Move, Song Wanjin's painting is a grid of image flow, flowing you into a painting-related "person or thing" → "moving people and things", that is, you are yourself watching Movie you, you are even seeing your own movie. This is not awkward, the image is a kind of generation, not as you imagine and watch to this point, and so far, the "other nature" of the image is not to remove or suspend Song Wanjin's painting original, it is always a painting, a physical object. Here it is only a "deviation" that transforms the form of transmission, allowing us to understand the openness of the image and return to the essence of Song Wanjin's paintings, which the artist and the viewer instinctively or inadvertently substitute for. Painting writes the sentences or sentences of image writing, and the exchange of information in the middle is isomorphic the homogeneous completion of Song Wanjin's painting and Song Wanjin's painting image, and the audience is also the non-medium experimental subject of this process, which together changes the viewing form or medium perception of the painting - this is a kind of deployment: that is to say, Song Wanjin's painting is film, or a random collection of "image frames" / freeze frame, and her predecessor is the same: in production operations, "freeze frame" is painting, and manual results are painting. At the same time, that is, it is originally painted, just like the old slide, it is both a painting object that can be retrieved for close-up and an enlarged image that can be projected in one place. This is the intergenerational relationship between painting (which has been connotatived) and the image (pure epitaxiality), just like the quantum state of "Zhou Di Dream": this is a way of viewing into Song Wanjin's painting, that is, into the image/painting - painting/image. In short, Song Wanjin captures one of the time images/freeze frames, installs his painting, and the viewer intervenes in the "cinema" of the exhibition, bringing in a sense of external presence. Watching Song Wanjin's paintings is not just a simple viewing, but to find an invisible cognitive space in the perceptual system.
Song Wanjin's paintings, like "Red Balloon" as the author's film use a lot of subjective shots, the realistic landscape is subjectively modified. Psychologically, on the screen, cold tones run through everything, but only the red balloon is bright and dazzling in the cold and dark background, like the brilliance in the dim. The "red balloon", a symbol, in Song Wanjin's paintings is a collection of images, including floating objects such as balloons and kites of other colors. Not only that, if Song Wanjin's paintings are placed in the framework of art history, we will see many similar or similar "red balloons", as a circular diagram, there are many metaphorical representations, and even the composition elements of the mysterious lyricism or tension and abruptness of the picture, which is also the important content and form of the picture composition itself. The "red balloon" in Song Wanjin's paintings must also be examined like a work in art history, and it must be viewed graphically, that is, like a pull-out point facing a key frame of a continuous image, a kind of fracture. It can even be regarded as a punctum in the image, that is to say, in the real world and the illusory world where the load of the picture is connected, it is the destruction of the daily state in the expression, the node and crack on a component of the text, it also strengthens the projection concentration of this component, making it very graphic in the text, and repeatedly appears as the key object of the picture. It is true that although the original author pre-made this image and is a single language, it enables us to find gaps when reading the picture, so that we can intervene in the text and obtain new interpretive meaning.
At first glance at Song Wanjin's paintings, it is obvious that its appearance has a certain "surreal" feeling. The staggered perspective arrangement of people and things, the overall generalization of the background, are all between normal and deliberate. Déjà vu, we often see photography of this combination on the covers of rock vinyl records, that is, they actually share the secret of the same image between them. The "red balloon" that soars and levitates in the picture, whether it is understood as a plane or a three-dimensional, it is a circle, and it can even be regarded as a "dot". In this way, it is convenient to find examples of what is associated with it in art history. The creation of the famous contemporary conceptual artist John Baldessari, the method of dealing with painting/text/image, etc., is: appropriation of images, juxtaposition of concepts, de-contextualization and other techniques, mainly with solid color dots covered on the face of the character, so that it loses recognition, so that the original image produces deconstructive meaning. A brief mention of Baldesari is simply a reminder that the way the "dot" intervenes in the picture (image) has a variety of possibilities. Song Wanjin, on the other hand, is apparently influenced by the surrealist painter Ren é Magritte. Although they are completely different in nature, in terms of style, orientation and appeal, there are similarities in the disposal of certain things, especially the suspension of the "circular body" in the picture. Magritte's "round body (apple, bird, etc.)" is often in the center of the picture, or even fills the entire picture, typically resting high in front of the expression part of the subject, just obscuring the expression part and replacing the expression. Magritte's space is almost flat, with images without depth of field, and the picture has a kind of humor that reverses a certain concept. The "round body" and other people/objects in Song Wanjin's paintings are mostly arranged on different focal sections of perspective, with the normal logic of real perception. Her spatial picture is realistic and reasonable, a clear image of a small aperture, presenting a ritual of youth narrative.
Rather than saying that Song Wanjin has the shadow of Magritte, it is better to say that the cocoon can also be found from Magritte's direct "father" Giorgio de Chirico, the basic way for Song Wanjin to establish some of the inner perspective composition of the isolated and minimalist expression. First of all, I would like to state that from the ideological point of view, from the type, whether it is the appearance of the content, the concept of form and the degree of imagination, Song Wanjin's works and Cherico's works are fundamentally different. It's just that their works are similar in that they share a kind of lonely world, although they are expressed, but they are like a kind of inner landscape painting in meditation. In fact, in terms of the composition and expression of the field, some of the contents of Song Wanjin's paintings are closer to David Alexander Colville. It's just that Coleville's work depicts the reality of the real world in the case of "what happened" in the world of consciousness, and most of them are showing the "something happens", a kind of escape from the moment in the real world. The composition of the picture mostly involves perspective and geometric principles, and the defamiliarization of the content is more subjective and deliberate, so that it is abnormal. It even has an inner symbolism that goes beyond the intuition of appearance, as well as some notable "surreal" features, but it is only Canadian Maritime Realism.
Similarly, it should be emphasized that although the previous is also compared to Magritte, Song Wanjin's painting is not surreal, it is not a reproduction of dreams, nor is it a narrative of dreams. It still describes and presents Song Wanjin's own living conditions and the surrounding realistic scenes, which belongs to a kind of figurative painting in the category of current popular realism: Song Wanjin's works provide a melancholy lyrical plain space, the perspective of the standard lens, without exaggeration, but deliberately compressing the background slightly, giving people a sense of depth of field flat. The background content is the wet hills, meadows and fitness sports roads in Chengdu Sansheng Township. The picture quality is the smoothness and softness of the plastic feeling, and the atmosphere is the quietness of the free state. The picture is a fairy tale-like memory full of traces of a virginity performance, and a reproduction of a glimpse of the alienated state of playfulness. Moreover, in addition to the condensation distribution of people and objects on the perspective focal section of Song Wanjin's paintings, the concept of "red balloons" as a "thorn point" is light and wandering, but its floating-hovering, hovering-floating, hovering-floating, appropriately pulling out the entrance for entering the text interpretation space of Song Wanjin's paintings/images, as mentioned above, the presentation of Song Wanjin's works in the display makes people experience the possibility of "cinema"-style image understanding. Still from the perspective of images, Song Wanjin's paintings: perspective-space/focal points on the focal length are another set of analysis points that the author has annotated on her work, and can also be regarded as her method of producing/processing pictures, and it is also a set of shortcut keys for viewing her works.
Discussing the "adhesion" or "connection" of Song Wanjin's paintings in the classical art genealogy can make us more effective in understanding Song Wanjin's works, and can also show Song Wanjin's self-consciousness about the knowledge/method of art history, and even self-consistency.
It is true that Song Wanjin's "red balloon" appears in the picture many times as a magical symbol acting on herself, as well as an image of herself, but this does not constitute a "self-referential" in the essential sense of painting. Her visual system of painting recognition is more directed towards an emotion creation and situation depiction. Although the characteristics of Song Wanjin's work "image in time/cold-silence" are discussed earlier, as far as its picture content is concerned, these appearances that constitute "cold-silent" are specific and at the same time sampled by the artist. Therefore, what we see is a series of conceptual drama scenes - inherent color psychological landscapes, that is to say, the concept that most of Song Wanjin's works are not hidden in the concept of directly stylizing themselves with a limited field language - the cloudy sky with dark blue and gray tones, and the small slopes, trees, and oily green grass, planning a plane situation of roughly upper and lower composition of the skyline/horizon to arrange different visual positions for different characters and props (perspective - space / thorns on different focal points), people / Objects of different sizes, combining simple front and back layers, forming a plot synopsis, thus building a kind of theater narrative: "thin and idyllic, idle picking grass and trees" The opposite of the general drama, several sets of one-act performances, will continue to occur in this limited plane stage.
The playful description of Song Wanjin's paintings is the basic content seen in her many pictures: a game that is ostensibly self-amusing, a kind of lonely play. Although there are other people/things next to or near the players, it is not possible to see what kind of information they are related to and communicate with each other. The painter shows the conceptual movements of the players who seem to be personal pastimes, and the relationship between people and people and things presents a strange relationship. Therefore, in terms of shaping technology, she homogenizes the environment and people/things: the sky, grass, including the branches are condensed, and there is no natural external light entry, which feels like the lighting effect of the field, that is, the background is painted as a stage set. The same is true of the depiction of the characters, whether it is the running and jumping action of pulling a balloon or kite, or the leisurely posture of sitting, reclining or lying flat, it is a record of the puppet-like movements and frozen expressions. The elements of the picture content composed of the above are all in one corner, as if they have nothing to do with each other, but these are unified by Song Wanjin in her subjective depiction based on the general perceptual experience of the basic form and inherent color of people/things. The artist has a fully judged visual cognition, and when processing the image material into the organic structure of the frame, the main object is clearly laid out, so that it is always highlighted at the visual center of gravity under the arch of each character and prop. However, this order is diluted and withered, and only in the distance is there a shadow, a kind of "passer-by" type of care. This, on the contrary, sets off the isolation of this position, and diudes a sense of loneliness, and the unspeakable emotions linger.
However, the initial feeling that Song Wanjin's work brings to us is the opposite of it - the image and color of the picture are like the corner of the park under the night light of Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow Up", the suspenseful mystery. There were no details of the woods and grass, a dark green, but it was so shiny and bright. And any form of play is laissez-faire, and it is a game of the body, and the plot is fascinating, whether you are involved in the practice of the game or watch the painting (image) depicting the game, it will be heartwarming and pleasant. Song Wanjin's paintings are such a strange beauty, as if there is a kind of "dark incense" in the shadow that will fill your eyes, and your eyes will also fade to the "dark incense" - this is not the montage of Song Wanjin's paintings, and it is not incompatible with the previous discussion. Rather, it is a prologue or synopsis, which is the "dark incense" that the painter subtly projects the emotions and psychology of the depicted object, which is "Follow the white rabbit", which is the guiding symbol that picks you up into the "alienation" experience of Song Wanjin's painting. This is just the beginning, step by step, deeper..., you will return to the beginning of this article, the "cinema" of Song Wanjin's paintings; or you will go to the art museum again, and Song Wanjin's paintings are on display...
In today's special period (since the end of 2019, the new crown virus epidemic has ravaged the world), as a female artist, Song Wanjin cannot get rid of the current time and space, so she is not a lonely person. Her works are her visual depictions of loneliness with her soul—it is her elegant and pictorial representation of the elegant fairy tale aspects of the modern social alienation through painting, and at the same time, in her expression of the pastoral, she visualizes her own perception. Her paintings depict seemingly "unconnected" real spaces, not disease-free groans, but the essence of the atmosphere is elegant relaxation, in which she quietly passes through "alienation" to try to "get close to the things of the heart". The "red balloon" is the fixed point of the images in her life and art, giving her the continuity of "closeness" to life and art. Thus, in each of these ephemeral images, the author embodies "her presence in her work" and makes himself an absolute narrator, performing a naïve narrative of youth, immersing himself in the performance ceremony, and self-directing and performing her paintings.
Song Wanjin's work is a practice at the level of the painting medium, and some parts of this article discuss it from the conceptual category of general art, but some formulations are not fully discussed, and some statements may not be precise. Obviously here, I give Song Wanjin's paintings an overly "given" evaluation. Finally, a passage from a poet (Yu Xiuhua's "The Wind Has Been Blowing for Decades, Still Blowing"), as the conclusion of this article:
The grass in the morning and the arrival of dusk will change into a creeping direction
People will thrive if they are gathered
We spent our whole lives separating from the crowd
But it will take more time
Get into it
(Phoenix Art Exclusive Report Author/Yu Ji Editor/dbk)
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