230 volt series, oil on canvas, 2012
The sign is in the image, and the spirit is harmonious
——The beauty of the imagery of Li Bingfeng's oil painting language
Text/Yang Yajian, Liu Xiaoping
As anyone in the art world knows, Chinese painting emphasizes the beauty of lines and images, while oil paintings highlight the beauty of color and abstraction. However, as a painter who integrates Chinese and Western art techniques, his works can often express a specific way of thinking, and can harmoniously express the characteristics of Chinese and Western art, and Li Bingfeng's oil paintings have this characteristic. Liu Xian, in the Southern Dynasty, created the concept of "image" in "Wenxin Carving Dragon": "The craftsman who shines alone, peeps at the image and transports the catty, this cover is the first technique of the text, and the big end of the plot." This is only for Chinese painting, and the theory of "imagery" embodied in the creation of oil painting can be manifested as a specific way of thinking, and it is also a technique for creating the atmosphere and situation of the picture. Artist Li Bingfeng's oil painting creation is to seek an image-building mechanism with countless rich meanings between his own rationality and sensibility, and in this sense, I think his oil painting creation can be regarded as a kind of construction of the imagery field. In a word, in his unique field of imagery, the object and the mind constitute a kind of origin relationship, and the function of the image is to realize the visualization of this relationship as the existence of some kind of clear thing. The essence of his oil painting expression lies in color, but he has mastered the skillful use of Chinese and Western art.
230 volt series, oil on canvas, 2012
Li Bingfeng was born in Zhangjiajie, a beautiful city in Xiangxi with the reputation of "3,000 strange peaks and 800 beautiful waters". Here to the peak is strange, to the valley to show the secluded, to the forest to see the show, the painter Wu Guanzhong once wrote that it is "like a lost pearl in the mountains", especially to see his joy and love for this place. As tenacious as its name "Bingfeng", growing up in this magnificent and magnificent fertile soil of peaks and forests, Li Bingfeng is naturally wrapped in an innate poetic spirit and tenacity like a mountain peak, just like his long-term diligence in artistic creation. He is approachable, amiable, and full of sincerity, and he is a very principled person in society, with edges and corners, and his pursuit of art is full of perseverance and resilience, and he has a determination and perseverance that will not die until he reaches his goal.
From the late 80s to the late 90s of the 20th century, he studied at Huaihua Normal College and Hunan Normal University, majoring in oil painting. If the rich study experience in Huxiang in his early years made him deeply nourished by the culture and art of his hometown, then his extensive knowledge in Songzhuang became a new trigger for Li Bingfeng's artistic creation. In 2010, he went to Songzhuang, Beijing, where he stayed to study oil painting to improve his artistic quality. It seems that he is ready to go, with the multiple blessings of the good artistic creation atmosphere of Huxiang and the collision of creative concepts in the north, when he continues to wander and observe the objective material scene, in fact, he has already been shocked by an undercurrent of inner artistic vitality, or a kind of intellectual curiosity, prompting him to continue to explore the language construction of the image field. Although he is committed to the study and creation of oil painting, in the process of his study and creation, he has always paid attention to the creation and conception of the artistic conception of Chinese painting, thinking about the role of the creation of the artistic conception of Chinese painting in the soul of a painting.
230 volt series, oil on canvas, 2012
In 2012, Li Bingfeng created the "230 Volt Voltage" series, which is a group of oil paintings he created in Songzhuang in his earlier period. Throughout, this series of works is magnificent, and has begun to have a distinctive artistic language style, with a unified style, and a highly personalized sense of composition and rhythm in the arrangement of dots, lines, surfaces and color language. The poetic agitation is my most intuitive experience of this series of works. In the painting, the original image of the "light bulb" is transformed into a magnificent mental image that shuttles through the vast ocean of time and space, and when you taste it, it sometimes sings wildly like the theme of the work, and sometimes spreads out like a shallow whisper, so that the viewer can wander in the world of reality and fantasy, and it seems that he can also carve out the lyrical secret words and mood monologues that he meant. But the name he named the painting "230 volts" has another meaning. It is reported that choosing to capture the moment when the light bulb exploded to depict it is a metaphor for some of the depression, anger and helplessness he is suffering in his current life. Normally, the maximum voltage that a light bulb can withstand is 220 volts, and once it exceeds this threshold, it will explode immediately, and creating this phenomenon in the form of imagery art construction seems to be more appropriate and vivid to express his irrepressible inner feelings at the moment.
Perhaps it is through the continuous exploration and exploration of imagery thinking, Li Bingfeng gradually understands how to learn to induct, integrate, refine and make trade-offs in artistic creation, and tries to present picture effects and emotions in the purest artistic language, which is also an aesthetic creation experience of imagery field formed in his early artistic exploration. For example, in 2016, he created a large number of landscape image oil paintings, such as "Blurry Peak Forest", "On the Road", "Quiet Inn", etc., all of which reflect his thinking and construction of the language of image oil painting. Just as he named the mountains and forests he saw as "On the Road", "Misty Peak Forest" and "Quiet Inn", he has a different kind of emotional expression of concrete situations such as "woods", "paths", "houses" and "landscapes", which seem to be transformed into symbols of the ideal world and things in his heart, full of artistic vitality of aesthetic imagery.
After creating a large number of oil paintings, in order to seek a deeper modernity in his own artistic development, he turned his attention to the theme of "people", hoping that by focusing on the diverse faces of contemporary Chinese, the linguistic expression and spiritual connotation of his works can be more widely expanded. In 2017, Li Bingfeng created a series of oil paintings called "Portraits". First of all, from the point of view of form, different from the past, the "blur" processing technique is the most obvious change feature of the picture, compared with the concrete, clear portrait portrayal processing, "blur" seems to be easier to express a certain internal mood and psychological state of the character; It is not difficult to find that he has been influenced by a variety of Western modernist art schools, but for him, oil painting creation is not only to hone his painting techniques with other mountains and stones, but more importantly, he is constantly seeking the convergence between abstract and figurative language, and at the same time, he is thinking about how to fully integrate these nutrients into the imagery of Chinese expression, and finally realize the best structural form of the nationalization of imagery oil painting.
Secondly, from the perspective of the behavior of the subject of the painting, the "gaze" of the characters in the painting seems to have a deeper interpretability. In my opinion, this is also a response and practice of Li Bingfeng in the face of today's diverse and complex art and cultural phenomena. In the process of creation, he obviously produces an alternative subjectivity in the heterogeneous artistic and cultural expression, which he absorbs and resists, integrates and transcends, and "gaze" is a kind of catharsis and challenge to the discourse of Western artistic power. He puts the identity of the Chinese character into the painting, although the characters in the painting seem to be in a state of "being gazed", in fact, they are active "gazers", which contains his quiet replacement of the semantic relationship between "gazing and being gazed", re-endowing the power relationship between the subject figure and the gazer, so as to sublimate into a new form of imagery and allegory for the national expression of Chinese oil painting.
It is not difficult to find that how to place the images and materials of daily life in a textual context of imagery and human culture, so as to regain new artistic power, is the transformation of Li Bingfeng's thinking in artistic creation in recent years. Since 2018, he has created a series of oil paintings under the title "Memories of Youth". Because of its unique artistic language expression, the work "Memory of Youth NO1" has also been selected for the 13th National Art Exhibition. If his early imagery oil painting established his understanding and grasp of aesthetic imagery, then when the element of narrative re-entered his painting creation, coupled with the empirical reversal of the field-based imagery, it naturally evolved into his lyrical painting of his own mental image theater. From the series of works "Memories of Youth", it can be seen that he obviously benefited from a set of lyrical coding accumulated in his early imagery oil paintings, and fixed the specific fragments of the classical and the present, the past and the present in his mind into an aesthetic temporal pictorial space, and reconciled them into a narrative imagery and integration.
And the name "Memories of Youth" is precisely his commentary on the inner nature of life. In the face of this lofty proposition that no one can avoid, he does not simply express the objects of life, but thinks more deeply about how to poetically tell a series of words organically related to life: time, history and memory through the characters in the painting. In other words, in the specific process of creation, he involves daily time and space into the painting, making it constitute a new "time and space body", so that in the painting, whether it is a lively neighborhood or a quiet personal corner, they actually serve as a "time place".
If the momentary flow of people and scenes captured in the picture symbolizes a kind of eternity and infinity, then the grid-style "fragmentation" is Li Bingfeng's deliberate finite delimitation of "life" and "time", coupled with the artistic treatment of blurring and blurring, so that the monologue meaning of the picture is more deeply delayed, and the theme expression is sublimated to a higher historical scale, thus achieving a new breakthrough in the lyrical coding form of established imagery. This makes people inevitably taste it: we seem to be standing outside the fragments with the meaning of time, quietly allowing ourselves to be lost in the imagery of the picture, from the realization of the present reality to the melancholy of the passing of time and space in the past, and the sense of history and memory arises spontaneously.
In addition, in my opinion, as the so-called "poetics of any kind is always concerned with the construction of meaning", in addition to the reflection on the passage of life and time, this series of works is also a concentrated self-presentation of Li Bingfeng's social poetics, which shows a typical theatrical language characteristics, and the meaning he focuses on is the feeling and inquiry of modern life. In the cognitive system of "psycho-theater", the theatricalization of social space originates from the symbolic impulse of human subconscious cognition of the world, and for artists, it is not only a transformation of symbols and reality, a symbolic treatment of real life, but also a hint of the penetration of energy, implying the correspondence between art and the mind. Therefore, in this series of works, artistic creation is intertwined with daily life, and through theatrical artistic expression, he embeds the true feelings of life experience into the picture in the form of theater, realizing the possibility of revealing various aesthetic and ethical meanings of social space.
Different from the traditional thematic art creation, Li Bingfeng is not only concerned with the ever-changing picture of urban life, but most importantly, he is able to compose modern social civilization while cutting into the specific micro perspective more sharply, especially to diagnose and excavate the emotional and psychological crisis of the current social civilization. For example, in the series of works "Memories of Youth", the blurred scenes are multiple metaphors that imply the mood of the characters, and he wants to explore the life plots of people from different walks of life to express a series of feelings that exist in reality: the anxiety of time, the inherent loneliness of life, the drunken dream and death of nothingness, and the opposition between excitement and coldness...... It is precisely these existential moments that give him the metaphysical meaning of the theatrical picture of life. The theatricalization of this kind of painting is like a solidified stage scene modeling, and its spatial tension makes it transition from a simple artistic creation to a social text, thus leading to a kind of viewing and cultural meaning. For example, the picture depicted in the work "Memories of Youth NO9" not only imitates people's behavioral archetypes and external forms, but also outlines a symbolic existence of soul and spiritual meaning.
It can be seen from this that Li Bingfeng's creation is becoming more and more a social humanistic expression, he is a metaphorical and reflective schematic record of all things in the world, and he is so vividly immersed in people's perceptual life, truly and internally placing them in the flow of his own life, so as to see through the existence of people, set up the creation of the image of the human living environment, and let the reader's thinking not just stay on the abstract picture language. In this sense, he not only shows us how to resonate the variations of artistic language on a very common and mediocre theme of life, but also realizes the true and eternal thoughts on artistic creation and even the poetics of life from his time reconstruction, so that his works are not only rich in the expression of color language, but also rich in the beauty of imagery, so that the paintings have not only the idea of picture language, but also the poetic afterglow of the images contained in the pictures, which makes people have endless evocative!
Liu Xiaoping is a member of the Chinese Writers Association, a director of the Chinese Poetry Society, the chairman of the Chinese Literature Tourism Poetry Committee, the honorary vice president of the Hunan Prose Literature Association, the honorary vice president of the Hunan Poetry Society, the chairman of the Zhangjiajie International Tourism Poetry Association, and the founder of the Zhangjiajie International Tourism Poetry Festival. At present, there are 15 literary works, and his prose works have been selected into the third lesson of the second volume of China's new full-time middle school Chinese textbook, and his poems have been called "fables of the city and the countryside" by Han Zuorong, the former president of the Chinese Poetry Society and the former editor-in-chief of "People's Literature". His works have won more than 20 national literary awards, and he was named "National Top Ten Powerful Poets" in 2018, the "Second National Tujia Literature Award" in 2019, the first prize of Bauhinia Poetry in 2020, the Aksu Poetry Award in 2021, the Golden Pigeon Poetry Award and the Ji Xianlin Ecological Prose Award in 2022, and the "International Poetry and Wine Culture Award" sponsored by the Poetry Magazine in 2023.