RUINS: THE FACE OF CONTEMPORARY NORTHEAST CHINA

Tropic of Northeast China

By Curator, Feng Boyi

An area is a segmentation of a geographical space. Between areas there exist differences in cultural and spiritual temperaments.  The unique natural and cultural landscape of a geographical area is a source for the cultivation of an artist’s temperament.  In turn, an artist’s activities affect the cultural ecology of the area.  Penetrating the geographical environment of political activity leads to the formation of geopolitics and cultural geography through the long-term exchange between the land and its people.  This gradually becomes a factor for the emerging of an area’s cultural traditions. Yet, artists act as separate entities who cannot have the entire geographical space - they can only come from or be active in a particular area.  As a result, the geography within the geography of an artist must be implemented in specific geographical areas for it to have significance.  Only through this way can the special relationship between an artist and his/her geography be revealed.  

Categorizing the contemporary art of China by geographical location, one could make a few generalizations about artists from Northeast: vast landscapes yield large paintings; rough on the outside, yet witty on the inside; bold and generous without the loss of attention to detail.  Most artworks from this area are not expressions of emotions or sentiments.  Rather, they are narratives of individual life experiences.  Themes are often based on plot narration, while embodying a sense of “immanence.”  These two characteristics intertwine to produce images that echo two prominent personality traits that describe Northeast people.  The people featured within the paintings seem to have a strong association with the landscape.  When carefully observing these people, however, one finds that they do not fit into the logic of the overall narrative in regards to the setting.  Within the pretentious depiction of realistic landscapes, one cannot sense a realistic plot.  It can be said that the paintings embody a kind of suspenseful character that is hard to describe, a mysteriousness that is incomprehensible, and a sense of a surreal existence and familiar strangeness.  For this typical style of Northeast artists, the documentary, fictional and reconstructed nature of the relationship between the people and setting results in an alienation effect that allows a straightforward and unique perspective.  Reality is intertwined with mystery, revealing that people from a barren land created the works.  Through these artistic expressions, a back-and-forth line of questioning and dialogue that extends beyond reality occurs between the artist and viewers. Thus, the artists’ attempt to conceal their subjectivity is even more apparent as they avoid excessive symbolic close-ups that might constrain the perspective of viewers.

As one of the curators for this exhibition, I thought that the current state of contemporary art in Northeast could pretty much be described by the term, “Northeast Ruins.”  “northeast” marks a geographical location; “Ruins” refers to the reliance of local artworks on the artists’ reality of growing up in this vast and desolate land.  Inevitably, their works are infused with childhood memories and experiences.  Perhaps one can see a special reason for their love of the Northeast industrial region in their works for this exhibition.  Because “memory” is an attempt to store experiences, imaginations of resisting loss are conjured.  However, this type of imagination utilizes a reconstruction method to reproduce past visual memories.  Viewers no longer receive a reference to a clear description, but a hazy, indefinable sensation.  Amongst this haziness, a taste slowly extends throughout the heart.  Here, they are clearly not praising the format of beauty materialized by industrial buildings, nor are they endorsing modern aesthetic values.  Instead, they use a type of outline writing and emphasis on the language of painting to highlight the cold, monotonous, and lacking personality that surrounds their city structures.  And, the barren and desolate visualizations brought by modernization are akin to being in Shenyang, Changchun, and other neighborhoods or villages in Northeast.  Feelings of uncertain and drifting loneliness in the chaos, noise, and soul symbolize and extend the questioning and critical attitude over the inorganic quality of the modern lifestyle that we pursue.  In fact, when these images appear before our eyes, we are unable to sense the charm behind this type of selection.  This type of quiet selection precisely contains the holistic grasp that Northeast artists have of the form of reality.  From this perspective, their art is both the realistic imaging of their memories and a metaphysical, transcendent performance. These methods of expression can be traced back to the basic training at Shenyang’s Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, as well as the lineage of Chinese Realism art.

Each area or urban setting contains its own life, lineage, and memories that are inherently complex, overlapping, fragmented, chaotic, and even contradictory.  This is because such memories originate from the desires, actions, pursuits, and creations of many individuals.  When an area or city is uniformly reorganized through urban planning, then their memories are erased and all creativity is destroyed.  What remains in culture is a barren desert.  Therefore, this exhibition is not so much an attempt to exhibit realistic images of a “barren” but to enact a “pruning” of realistic representations.  Perhaps, the featured artworks present a kind of “reality” found in Northeast contemporary art, or just one aspect of “reality”.