On August 21, artist Liu Xun's solo exhibition "Fragments of Floating Statues" opened at Lico Gallery, and the new series "Cave of Images - Fragments of Avant-garde Silent Films" was publicly exhibited for the first time.
This is his seventh solo exhibition, and it has been 4 years since the last solo exhibition at the Qianjin Art Museum, "Locking the Light and Presenting".
In the past four years, as a college teacher, Liu Xun, in addition to daily teaching, honored the invitation to give lectures in North America, and successfully published the "Art Notes" with years of art notes, speech records, curatorial texts, commentaries and interview dialogues, and also completed the first part of the series "Cave of Images - Avant-garde Silent Film Fragments".
Group photo of guests at the opening ceremony
Artist Liu Xun at the opening ceremony
The title of the exhibition written by artist Ma Bing
The audience is at the exhibition site
Exhibition site
Improvisational installation Godard in Changsha. Liu Xun collected a lot of Godard's discs, and many years later they grew speckled. Time changes the imagery.
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Figure Cave
Tu Grotto, related to Liu Xun's studio.
This small studio has been in the family building of the old campus of Changsha University of Science and Technology for many years.
"I remember, Francis Bacon said his studio was a cave of paint. I want my cramped studio to turn into a cave of images. In my daily life, I encounter many digital images, and more and more flat, unnatural images occupy my visual space. These images fill my hard drive, including: everyday, historical, cinematic, artistic... This is the reality we all face today. ”
Especially in recent years, Liu Xun's hard disk has been crammed with images from teaching, travel, activities, exhibitions... Digital photos are becoming more and more accessible and cheaper. Even so, Liu Xun found that in the era of flooding of pictures, there were still pictures that he found interesting.
"Why would I be interested in them? Because these images are basically related to my life and experiences. Some can sink my childhood memories, some reflect my youth, and some experience people and things. After selection, they became concrete materials that I could work on. Hitchcock, Antonioni, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Boyce, Nationalist soldiers, etc., all appear in Liu Xun's pen.
Silent films
A 60% accurate shallow sketch, then layer by layer with acrylic color to spread out the base color tone. Under the color base of the base color, the sketch is corrected again, and after the complete shaping, the color intervenes again. Color is not done at once, each application will retain a lot of accidentality, countless accidents superimposed, and finally, become oil paint on the image of wanton destruction, borrowed images or hidden or raw.
Chapter 1
"Every stage of painting has to take a photo, freeze the process of each painting, and fill in the material for future animation video works." Every production process is my dialogue with the original image. ”
Smudge over and over again, frame by frame. It could be 10 times, and it could be 15 times. Compressed into an animated image, presenting the process from scratch to nothing, and then to nothing, through the means of time, so that the audience can see the growth and annihilation of the picture.
Chapter II
This way of creating can be traced back to 2017.
In the exhibition "Locking the Light and Presenting together", the "Time Rubbing" series on display is to use the painting method to dialogue with the classic master film, and the image behind the painting is the "film ready-made product", with simple painting traces, capturing or failing to capture the issue of time and light and shadow.
Long ago, the complex relationship between painting and photography became an important topic for Liu Xun's contemporary art creation.
In early 2000, Liu Xun went abroad for the first time to participate in the European Short Film Festival, and found that foreign artists had begun to play DV and cut films with computers, while most of the artists in China were still painting landscapes and still lifes.
Under the strong contrast, Liu Xun began to turn to video creation and became the earliest practitioner of video art in Hunan.
Liu Xun's early paintings
Synchronously, Liu Xun has not interrupted the painting. Almost at the same time, Liu Xun began to borrow photos in the series "Standard Shots at the End of the Century of Painting", which continued to be several sets of series such as "Phantom Scene" in the future.
"Today, anyone who works in painting has a problem: how do you face a photograph. Before photography, the artist used the naked eye to observe nature; after photography, the impact of photographs on the painter was particularly large. ”
Liu Xun said that he borrowed photos not to highlight the realistic reproduction ability or the texture of the photos, but to use the photos as a carrier to re-highlight the sense of painting painted by hand.
"These works are partially paintings, but the end result combines the painting process into images. For the viewer, this is part of the information that presents the photo, and it is also the information that changes the photo. Images are shaping and growing, while images are being destroyed and overlaid. ”
Fragments
In Liu Xun's eyes, the temporal process of this smearing is also very similar to the temporal deduction in historical development.
"In the Dunhuang murals of the past, the latecomers erased the image traces of the previous generations, and then covered the new era layer by layer. History is the superposition of layers of time, and many things in ancient and modern times are in this process of covering and rebirth. ”
Yang Shen's "Linjiang Immortal" of the Ming Dynasty became the opening prologue to the video work "Cave of Images - Fragment A of Pioneer Silent Films".
"When I was very young, I read the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and at that time I probably couldn't recognize all the words, and I was deeply impressed by the opening song 'Rolling Yangtze River East Passing Water, Waves Exhaust heroes'. For a long time, I thought it was written by Luo Guanzhong, and later I learned that it was Yang Shen's "Linjiang Immortal" in the Ming Dynasty, and then collaged at the beginning of the Three Kingdoms story through posterity. ”
Cave of Images – Avant-Garde Silent Fragment (A) Roll Screenshot
There have been brave and hard-working young people, but also experienced the ups and downs of life. Liu Xun, an artist who is more than half a hundred years old, re-reads this poem and realizes that it has become completely different.
"How many things in ancient and modern times are in the midst of laughter. In addition to Confucianism, there is also The Detachment and Open-mindedness of Taoism. The past right and wrong and the characters, in the end, may all disappear, leaving only the memories or feelings of posterity, which is a very oriental philosophy. So, I started by borrowing this word again, in the order of it, which is the core part of my image reconstruction series. ”
The series is directly named after the "fragments", on the one hand, derived from Liu Xun's perception of the tone of life and culture, on the other hand, it also constitutes the main line of the continuous growth of this series of works.
Liu Xun watches Picasso's "Avignon Girl" at MOMA
"The essence of life is not perfect, and the intersection of sorrow and joy that Master Koichi said is a generalization." The incompleteness and imperfection of this shape and words can also make people have a lot of associative space. For example: Venus with a broken arm unearthed by Milo, various mutilated Buddha statues of the Southern and Northern Dynasties, those broken and mottled ancient murals, including the ancient book "Dream of the Red Chamber"... Because they are incomplete, a few fragments, a mess, will bring a very unique aesthetic and thinking experience. So, I hope that my work will always be in an unfinished state, and through the accumulation of time, the work will continue to grow. ”
Caves
Due to the new epidemic and various coincidences, the exhibition project of German artist Horst and the solo exhibition of artist Liu Xun opened almost at the same time last weekend.
In the mid-1990s, the artist Horst brought Western video art to Changsha, Hunan, and the young Liu Xun became the earliest beneficiary and disseminator of video art, and in the following years, a wave of contemporary art practice in Hunan was brought about. For a long time, Liu Xun occupied a place in the field of contemporary art practice in Hunan with the image of experimental and pioneering youth.
The two exhibitions, which span four years, were curated by independent curator Yuan Tingxuan. Compared with his previous state, Yuan Tingxuan said that Liu Xun now continues to experiment in a state of "harvest".
This is related to Liu Xun's reliving of tradition in recent years.
Curator Yuan Tingxuan (right) records artist Ma Bing writing the title of the exhibition
"Since the 1980s, I have been obsessed with Western modern and contemporary art, and I have little interest in tradition and do not study deeply. It wasn't until I was 40 that I started to pay attention to my cultural identity, who I was. It is true that the so-called tradition is difficult to inherit, although the vein of the spiritual core can be continued, but as an artist and an independent thinker of cultural issues, the basis of response and creation is still the present. ”
Liu Said he is still looking for possibilities for experimentation. For example, this batch of works is between the language of oil painting and the drawing technique, which not only has the texture of oil painting, but also draws on the ink level and classical sketching brushwork.
"A good work of art needs to emphasize the spirituality of the work and the critical nature of the problem. From this point of view, I haven't changed much from me many years ago. But when you are young, you will always be young and vigorous, and when you have an idea, you will express it directly, and when you look back, it is very vigorous and energetic. Now, I will care about the design and grasp of the whole, specific to painting, I will pay more attention to the grasp of "degree", emphasizing control, down to the thickness of the pigment and the density and ethereal gap. ”
This exhibition is a phased display of the Tugu Statue Series, which is still in the first stage of creation. In Liu Xun's plan, this project will last for a long time:
"I want the cycle of the work to be a little longer, and the time span to be longer. A work that a person completes in a year and a project that takes ten years to complete with it naturally has a different sense of power. He used the statue of a thousand Buddhas as a metaphor, "Each small Buddha is connected to the next, there are subtle differences in the individual body, and the composition of the whole will form a huge visual tension and shock force, this similar spiritual ancient and modern art has a potential impact on my artistic thinking and practice." ”
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