◎ Post-business
Exhibition: Coherence and Diversity: New Forms of Contemporary Painting Art
Duration: April 6-16, 2024
Venue: National Art Museum of China
A few years ago, criticism of contemporary art as being too market-oriented was rampant. Such criticism is hard to find today. It is difficult to say whether the criticism of the time had a positive effect and avoided the vulgar trend of contemporary art, but it is also possible that it cut off the communication between contemporary art and the public. Looking back on the past history, we will find that the market has profoundly changed people's "modern life", and people have changed their skin, blood, and tone.
Auctions, "Basel", museums, collectors, the market is dominant. In a period of absent ideas, the scales of art tilted in favor of the physical object. The market supports contemporary art, removing barriers and showing the way out. Of course, the market is not a miracle, but it is not a demon either. This sounds like a joke, but after the market came, it once again "transformed" the reality of society and transformed the grammar of art: "good selling style", "international style", "camouflage flavor", ......
The "Time Gallery" of Contemporary Art
When the market has not yet penetrated every detail of art work, those post-60s generations always give people the appearance of working hard, desperately, and hard. Some of them lived like homeless people in the Old Summer Palace and East Village (near the northwest corner of present-day Chaoyang Park), living in houses without property rights, playing innocuous games, and then drawing. Until they were old and moved to Songzhuang. In today's terms, they are always "chickens" themselves, and the will to "involute" is engraved in their bones, and they carry out orders from unknown gods with their momentum.
As a result, their stories are always straightforward and explicit, and not "petty" or stereotyped. Taken separately, they are very much like the "sketches" on "Story Club", which are playful and melancholy, and when taken together, this big story looks like the model houses that can be seen everywhere today, with the same size terrace, the same partition of three bedrooms and two living rooms, and the same pirated Eiffel Tower. This is a big story that first frolicks, then full of energy, and finally retreats into the background.
And the post-90s generation, who have also grown up hard, have lived in a completely different society - a society that has become more "involuted" through their "involution". In such a society, there seems to be no one who does not "roll", and there seems to be no one who does not desire to "lie down". As a result, the passion and love of the post-60s generation have become dopamine and endorphins of the post-90s, and the art and ideals of the post-60s generation have become the work and strategy of the post-90s.
Compare Wang Xingwei's "cartoons" with Sun Yitian's "cartoons": the former turns "cartoons" into bubbles in the sense of narrative, while the latter turns "cartoons" into decorations in landscape metaphors. If their "cartoons" were all gifts, Wang Xingwei's gifts were stored in the drawer, and Sun Yitian's gifts were placed on the table - the gifts collected in the drawers put a lock on the audience's minds, and the gifts placed on the table added a color to the audience's smiles.
Through the market, the laws of art itself are presented. This is the time gallery from Wang Xingwei to Xuan Shanqin and Zhang Zipiao, and it is also the time gallery from Sun Wenbo to Persimmon and Cheng Yuqi - except that the former is taken care of by collectors, and the latter is in trouble. This time gallery is the result of the secret development of art in its own dimension after the "89 Modern Art Exhibition" and the "Post-Hazy Wave", and it is rhetoric and techniques (they are derogatory to tools) that build this time gallery, not "big culture".
The post-70s generation basically did not experience the 85 New Wave and the "89 Modern Art Exhibition", but most of them experienced the market economy in the 90s of the last century. In a sense, they are the first generation of the current modern society, but they are also on the road to becoming artists or writers, they have also been explored and tried for a long time, but they have to follow the wave as soon as they gain a firm foothold. Most of their original intentions are "proud", but many of them turn out to be "flattering". "Pride" and "flattery" are hard work, but also helplessness.
The harmony between man and the world used to be one of the ideals pursued by the artist. Jia Aili's people run independently in the chaotic subconscious world, Song Kun's people try their best to concentrate on the lonely and melancholy world, Ouyang Chun's people are sad and sound in the glorious world, and Wang Mai's people raise their eyes to explore the world where memory has just come. Man and the world are fighting naked and direct like this, and he can't tell whether this is the old world or the new world, but he just meditates in his heart.
Cui Jie's painting "Lanxi Youth Park", completed in 2023, takes us back to the origin of that change with the statue of a female textile worker in Caoyang Workers' New Village, which was completed in 1985. Two semi-rings frame the statue of the female worker and press it into the depths of the picture. Subsequently, the flowers and fruits are highlighted from above the plane under the support of the white short line. Look at the leafless tree on the right, it occupies a lot of blank space, its lines and colors are more dynamic, more mimetic, and more soulful. What matters is no longer the tension of storytelling, but the tension of "empathy".
So you see, Chen Zuo's snowman is the one who is loved, trusted, and created. It was covered in color, and with just a finger movement, the two people standing next to it changed their spirits. Cai Zebin pushed open the door, and at the moment he was feeling, thinking, pondering, creating, he didn't know what step he was doing, and so many mirrors and frames on the wall still convinced him of what life was all about. And Xue Ruozhe walked into the curtain, which was the fold of the forest, the fold of memory, and the fold of art.
The reality of the hyper-contemporary constant changes
It seems that no one has ever mentioned the changed mode of perception. When more and more young people walk into the antique neighborhood, drinking similar milk tea, showing off the same makeup and meat, people's perception patterns change. In general, this kind of "homogenization" is considered to be standardized, patterned, but in fact they are just "painted skins". Having the same or similar "painted skin" does not prevent differences in personality, temperament, and experience. And the imposition of such a homogeneous "paint" on top of people who are so different means that a new foundation is being formed? It is in charge of people's "differences" and also in charge of people's "sameness".
This new foundation, sometimes it is called modern, sometimes it is called contemporary or ultra-contemporary, sometimes it is named whatever. But those nouns are no longer just flat concepts as we once knew. They permeate the fabric of the world and shape our daily lives.
The biggest change is about a different understanding of reality. In the beginning, truth was defined as this and that. It has a strong qualification, and we might as well think of it as a ring. Then, the real evolves into a dialectical, intertextual one, and the ring rolls into a sphere. Now, there is neither the other nor the other, and where I am is the real—the sphere that shrinks to particles or magnified to infinity at the mercy of our hearts or wills.
Here, we consider only the latter two realities – the dialectical intertextuality of each other and neither the other. In Liu Xiaohui or Duan Jianyu's paintings, the human landscape is reduced to a series of diagrams that prompt the viewer to approach those environments so appropriately, and to use them to simulate the human spirit they expect. In this case, reality acts as an intermediary between us and the world. This is the reality of the ball.
In the paintings of the younger generation, the real object becomes elusive: sometimes here, sometimes there, sometimes this, sometimes that. This forces the artist and the viewer to perceive all of this with a more discrete vision. In the face of noise and chaos, there is nowhere to escape the truth. It burst, and every fragment recorded a portion of the truth. This is the reality of composition, that is, the reality of the variable sphere.
Since Wang Guangle, more and more artists have engaged in abstract art. Compared with previous generations of artists, they relied more on the volume of color, the "atonality", and structuralism. They may simply avoid the previous examples, or they may simply conform to the general requirements of the times, and eventually they collectively leave the "image" as the center and choose to "color" as the center, which is also expressed in some previous generations of artists.
Those who appeared in the "confused" paintings of almost all artists in the late 80s and early 90s of the last century are once again born today. It is true that history may be a quagmire, and the future may be false. People are still those people, art is still those arts. Time is not equally distributed in people's lives: in the 60s of the last century, people washed clothes along the river in front of their homes, in the 80s, people watched movies and listened to the radio in the square, neighbors' houses, and villages, and in the 21st century, people met more and more netizens. That moment is accelerating.
What makes it art
After an hour of pacing in the exhibition hall, peace and happiness flowed out of my heart. I wondered, where did they come from? What was the part about art, but what was the part about me? It took me a long time to find the answer—it was the paintings, the partitions between the blocks, that gave them to me. These intervals, with a texture and speed that is difficult for human beings to perceive, connect those incoherent things into content that can be absorbed and synthesized. We named it Groove, Synaesthesia. These more than 30 works, jumping from one to the other, some people will take pictures with pleasure, some will meditate in their hearts, and some people will think about it at another time.
When the night shakes the branches, the leaves dance and create one "light" after another, the moon and the street lamps hit them all over the walls and countertops, and the "light" individuals dissolve into a blank space, returning to a shadowy picture. When I saw this image, I was reminded again and again of the paintings I had seen in the exhibition space—they spoke of the order of art, in which ideas related to people became the basis of people as never before. The parts of this world that are not usually visible are re-reflected in the depths of our hearts with the help of these art and shadows. And every day, we wake up, work, think, miss, there are always things that envelop us in our incompleteness, shame, and sin, and we just name them art.
Out of the National Art Museum of China, there are stalls waiting for the oncoming audience. Squatting down, there are all kinds of small pieces of old tweed cloth, pearl bracelets, medallions, commemorative coins—each of them is in a clump and in a dense pattern. Densely patterned things like this have become quite common, and too many homogeneous and identical objects have been produced and placed in the same place, constituting a kind of style in this era. At first, it was hated and disliked, but now it is universally accepted, like a long shot in a literary film. And once these new changes are accepted, they give us a lot of difference.
Shopping malls, short videos, dating apps, once scattered in every place and context, today they are combined into one. There is no reason for people to return to his "little world", the traces he left on the web page, the words and glances he gave to others, the sounds of his dreams yesterday, whether through big data or with the help of human perception, are so deeply connected today. More media, newer societies, and more complex lives are working on everyone again and again today, as they once did. People don't have time to react before they realize that the world has changed. And the things around me are still stuck in the past, and I have to look for a better methodology for it: how to practice, how to reflect.
This is not the age of the Big Bang, as some critics have claimed; Once upon a time, people could feel the precious beauty when they sat in their own yards, such as "hanging dredging trees in the absence of the moon" (not to say that classical beauty is the whole meaning). But now to get that feeling, people have to rely on so many things: the atmosphere, the environment, the partner, the background sound, and most importantly, their own realm. With fewer images, people have fewer memories of images, and finally fewer possibilities for people to think about images and their memories. This is the dilemma facing humanity. Art, on the other hand, is an answer, a prop for us to approach the image.
Bless us for going further.
Photo courtesy of National Art Museum of China
(Beijing Youth Daily)