Fabricator

By Huang Du, Exhibition Curator

The reason why the exhibition was named “Fabricator” was that “fabricator” could reflect the aesthetic change of Chinese modern art microcosmically. It is well-known, with the acceleration of globalization, the social and economic modernization in China has achieved robust development since 2000, boosting change and development in all fields, directly or indirectly. As an integral part of the development of the whole country, art has been influenced by this tide inevitably, and such influence is directly reflected on the change of production method of art. In this way, politics-oriented art has been replaced by the commercialized art naturally. However the dual seductions from commerce and politics keep influencing and confusing the creation intention of modern Chinese artists and make them flip-flop between both sides. All their behaviors and motives are out of the practicalism, an instinct from doubt and fear under a long “revolutionary” environment, or recognition on the politics and its correctness in order to obtain a haven. These facts are the destinies of Chinese artists in “post-revolution” phase. Political ideology is omnipresent, but artists will never take it as the core of the presence. However artists have to face a new topic--commercial ideology. When newly rising economy is paving the road for the commercialization of the art, the commercial power agglomerated by the art will inevitably dissolve discourse right and dominate new discourse right. Meanwhile, the commercialization of the art crushed “Utopian” dream of past pioneering artists. Almost all arts with single political ideology become the objects of commercial consumption and anything is in the name of art. Even fashion and party are linked with art. In this way, art has become a “stock market”, “Vanity Fair” and society. However the final influence of commerce on the art is reflected on the liberation of human being. It deconstructs not only relationship between pioneering arts and political ideology, but also the authoritative discourse right and art order within pioneering art.

So, what new did the art in “post-revolution” period bring? One the one hand, it is the change after the end of the ideology of “collective unconsciousness”, meaning the confrontation between the previous pioneering art and official ideology has been replaced by the alliance of modern art and commerce. Modern art seems lost in a mess, away from ideology and attitude with clear standpoints. Here the art has no direction, but respect for personality; no authority, but individuality; no center, but diversification; no whole, but local. On the other hand, modern art has been divided into three coexisting territories: main art represented by national fine arts system; commercial force composed by auctions, galleries and art exhibitions; and various artist communities formed at the edges of the city. The three territories are confronting each other, penetrating into each other and depending on each other. That is the special phenomenon of Chinese modern art formed by dialogues, communications and negotiations.

Therefore in the commerce-oriented “post-revolution” period, the production method of Chinese modern art began to follow new social revolution: in the aspect of abstract thinking, the art shifts from macro narration to micro description, from focus on political ideology to representation of daily personal experience; in terms of art production, the art turns from exclusive creation to mass production, from limited works to batch products. Therefore such thinking and production caused elimination of “aura” covering the art, which has been replaced by daily, popular, graphic art language. That seems like the logics and destiny of development of Chinese modern art. Art will be never mechanical materialist theory of reflection, or radical schizophreniform vanity. On the contrary, art has turned to the analysis on art itself and reading of daily experience and been abstracted as a visual philosophy and pleasure.

Just starting form such a cultural context, the exhibition planner understands and grasps the aesthetic dynamics of Chinese modern art in the name of “Fabricator”. So, what is “fabricator”? What doest it mean in modern art? “Fabrication” refers to the things subjectively dawned up or made up in Chinese. “Fabricator” has dual meanings: “coiner” or “assembler” and “maker”. If we trace back to the derivation of “Fabricator”, we’ll find “Fabricate” also means “make” and “produce”. So, borrowing the connotation and extended meanings of the word, the planner compares the artists to the “Fabricators”, which not only emphasizes on their subjective imagination and analysis ability, but also reflects their way of creation and production, even represents their new angle of view in art aesthetics.

No doubt, the argumentation on survival and death of painting art is furious in the world, but painting is never eliminated or dead. In China, just like a rolling tide to be replaced by the new generation soon; or virus encountering antibiotics to prove variation, the painting allows the new generation of artists to carry and transmit genetic codes. The new paintings and changing Chinese society add glories to each other, giving birth to unpredictable dynamics and charms. Different from the last generation of paintings, the new Chinese modern paintings will not depend on grand representation principle, it has become a visual philosophy - a way to reorganize the world, a super-realistic concept based on everyday life, reality, literatures and movies and an image not real, or virtual.   

Meanwhile Chinese modern sculpture and new materials arts also show features similar with painting, as the integral parts of Chinese modern arts. Therefore the planner selected the works of eight artists (Chen Wenbo, Chen Wenling, Feng Zhengjie, Jiang Zhi, Zhong Biao, Zhan Wang, Pan Jian and Gao Rong) as the representative cases of “Fabricator”. The works of these artists are the further interpretation and evidences of “Fabricator”.

The paintings of Chen Wenbo are the analysis on the angle of view of political economics more than the magnificent representation form. He skillfully treated the words, objects, forms and contents in the works into correlated prompt, supplementation, metaphor and irony. In particular with sensitive vision, he analyzed the desire for consumption behind the city culture packed with advertisings. The light of city is the center of this art, here light is omnipresent from street to indoor, from grand scene to micro landscape, and has become the necessary of visual and sensory organs of human beings. Besides” light” also means magnification, indication and guide. In Chen’s work “Illuminating Baroque”, the light is the focus to describe the magnificence from a hanging crystal lamp in a living room of a common people. With bright colors, spreading brushworks and satiated composition, the work reveals people’s desire for a luxurious life. Obviously the “Illuminating” in the work has dual meanings: the first is to “illuminate” the magnificent life superficially and the second is to satirize people’s unrealistic dream of luxurious life of transience, exaggeration and desire. So his works are not only a design of aesthetics, but also a reflection of aesthetics of society and life.

“Illuminating Baroque” and “Road of Gold” created by Chen Wenbo borrow a photographic image with urban poetics, or visual philosophic language. They can not only allow audiences to see the visual aesthetics injected by the artist and find the beauty, but also reflect a collective mindset of Chinese people towards popularity and luxury. Just like Gilles Deleuze believed, vision was actually hided behind objects, not in eyes or bright images. Simply speaking, image is a consciousness, brightness is consciousness too, but the object illuminating others is never an art.

Speaking of Cheng Wenling’s sculpture “Chinese Landscape No. 5”, we find Chen intentionally “messed up” his sculpture. A pig head is out of a declining traditional table like popping up form the table board. More amazingly, the mouth of the pig holds a branch with seemingly blooming plum blossoms on the top. Some abstract things like a pool or white milk flow down form the pig head. All these were the subjective recombination of artist after the twisting and crushing the images of the objects, reflecting a kind of mystery and humor with an unsteady absurd form. They not only refuse theme narration, but also reflect some unusual states of human being, and thus form a fantastic world. The lovely funny tiny red kid standing on the side of “Chinese Landscape” is the representation of ultimate self value of the artist more than the interpretation of a mental state of the kid in this world. The red here means conflicting inside experiences: loneliness and happiness, pain and blessedness.

We may say Chen Wenling’s “Chinese Landscape” is a mixture of sculpture and device in form and the combination of traditional folk culture and popular culture in concept. From form to content, from classicalism to modernism, this work is totally illogical. Through bold absurd treatment, reverse, apposition or mixture, the artist created a sculpture device work with unique concept.  

Portrait paintings are the main bodies of Feng Zhengjie’s works, but they are cored with bright colors, especially those features of female faces. The key of these works is that the artist intensified the visual expression of the portraits from image to color to the largest extent. In some works such bright colors were used to the extreme: non-personalized eyes, exaggerated red lips or green head with aura, sketching an irrational fashion. These remarkable portraits make audiences uncomfortable before them. These superficial and gorgeous images just reflect the mindset of people in this consumption society and poplar culture.

However different from past external painting language focusing on consumption society, Feng Zhengjie’s works not stress on the sexy fashionable images, instead, these works try to deliver the quietness and implication. “Fading Flowers” is an implied and almost purely green work. A beautiful girl’s portrait is hided in green leaves and flowers as the focus and description on flow away of the youth of the girl. As extension of Feng’s personalized style and language, the pleasant portrait is impressing. But its form language is changed: with simple structure and lasting appeal, the portrait is decorative with flowers and geometric with leaves. For the artist, the girl is the symbol of beauty, dynamics and vigor, and youth also means the time and memories easy to pass away. So the new works of the artist seem like the freeze-frame of the youth, representing his reluctance to leave the youth by implied symbolizing art language.

Different from other artists, Jian Zhi placed the building and picture in the center of the work in order to dig out and represent the pure form language and music rhythm after taking history and context out. He tried to find a new relation of painting and took “no object” as a possibility to break through painting itself. That is full reflected on his latest work series “No Title”. In the works the artist stressed the rhythm and cadence between color and form, exterior and interior, and whole and local. He deemed the visual effect creation of the painting as a subtraction and cut out unnecessary parts so that the work could be simplified to “zero” almost. His paintings allow audiences to clear see the visions they cannot see by eyes. So we may say these works reflect a filtration and sublimation of the artist for the visual forms in a way of pure metaphysics, spirituality and conceptualization.    

Zhong Biao’s “Confusing Quiet Fragrance” and “Foresee” should be deemed as the intentionally misinterpretation of training of modernization. He centralized his personal image into the modification of painting form, which is mainly reflected on his absorption and integration of elements of comic strip, science fiction, city, dream, sports, time and space, display of different phenomena in the world and exploration of omnipresent chanciness behind things and historic trend beyond the chanciness with unique concept of space time, and representation of the new image memories of this time with brand-new painting language. Different from his previous works, Zhong Biao didn’t focus on the correlation between character and context. On the contrary, he gave prominence to the meaning of the picture itself among weakened narration –people are living in an uncertain state and always confused by desires and faiths. He deemed pictures as the spiritual token which can fix the change of human and things in a moment. We should notice the change of the painting method of the artist. He first sketched the characters and the objects with elaborate lines, and then “destroyed” the stability and completion of the composition with abstract impressionist brushworks so as to realize antinomy and unity between realism and impressionism, exterior and interior, and implication and representation and tell a truth –modern people is no more than living in an absurd word -with metaphor.

“Rockwork” is the most influential work among Zhan Wang’s sculptures and the artist found his core art concept in this traditional concept. Actually “Rockwork” was an interesting name in Chinese ancient culture. The rockworks are made of real rocks, but ancient people called it “rockwork” (“rockwork” also means “fake rock” for Chinese) no matter in Suzhou’s gardens, or in the Forbidden City’s royal gardens. Ancient people never knew about conceptual art poplar today, but such thinking method may inspire today’s artists. In fact Zhan Wang obtained new experience from it. In the eyes of the artist, maybe such thinking reflects that ancient people shifted their feelings to the rocks, or maybe real rock was named “rockwork” only after it was moved to the new context. So with correlation between the nomination and context, Zhan Wang made the name “Rockwork” conforming to modern concept by creating “rockwork” with reinforced plastic or other artificial materials. What Zhan Wang was really interested was innovation and creation of historic concepts and resumption of concept with copy. So in the way of copy, his “Rockwork” creates a new art form conceptually, or a new art space –not realist, or super-realist.

As a young artist, Pan Jian developed the whole picture of his oil painting “Flying in Dark Night”-an extension of his unique style- into a poetic vision between freeze-frame of movie scene and popular novel. The cold, dark color tones subjectively romanced or created by the artist make audiences sad, anxious, lonely, uncomfortable and even breathless. Obviously, Pan Jian tried to look for the possibility of painting in an amphibolous atmosphere he “fabricated”. The audiences cannot identify the time and the event of his stories: Does the story happen at dawn, or at dusk? What happened? The story has happened or is to happen? So the charm of the Pan Jian’s works is that, with faint and ambiguous feeling, it can arouse the desire of the audience for the exact details.

Gao Rong is a recently highlighted young female artist who has created so many vivid impressing works. In “Mail” created with traditional embroidery works, she never wanted to represent the noble aesthetics reflected on traditional artworks-flowers, birds, fishes and insects - popular in south China. On the contrary she turned such traditional artworks to a kind of modern art closer to life. She found the charms of the environment she was living and familiar. Like mail box, door, anti-theft door, switch, water pipe and spring festival scrolls on previous work “A Unit in a Building in Huajiadibeili”, Gao Rong found there was only a mail inserted in the intake of the increasingly ignored mail box in a common residential building and then copied the daily communication space of common people in the proportion 1:1. We know there are always some differences between the art and the life even if the artist intentionally copies the life. But in Gao Rong’s work, the details and tracks of the life are so nature so that audiences almost think they’re real. In fact they are the results of intervention, abstraction and sublimation of artist for modern art by traditional production method. With complicated traditional craftwork, the artist presented an art production method beyond family life, physical work and female idiosyncrasy. When audiences see her works in a new context, they almost cannot identify the attribute of her works –sculpture, devices, photograph or painting. They will be moved by the natural daily feeling delivered by the works, confused and shocked by the super-realist craftwork, and even feel they are touching them.

Just like we see from this art phenomenon, Chinese modern art is changing. “Fabricator” is to provide the analysis and outlook on this change and the trend of the art. The works of the artists are not to redefine the oil painting or sculpture. They’re to prove what happened on the new oil paintings or sculpture in China. This exhibition is just a reflection of Chinese modern art, instead of the panorama. The vivid works of these artists just provide the basis of theory of Chinese modern art ontology, but they jointly compose the features of freedom and heterogeneity of Chinese modern painting and sculpture. In other words, they give prominence to the correlation between art and social and language context, but they weaken the relationship between art and status. No matter in absorbing traditional essence, or in interpreting modern life, Chinese modern art is moving towards the neutrality of language, just reflecting the shift of Chinese art history from the mode centered by Europe and US. Every artist found a distinctive way to show aesthetic features. Some of them object all traditional forms and some exclude the theme of exoticism. All their creativities come from no more than the uniqueness. In other words, the artist follows the tracks of personalization and exclusivity.

We may say “Fabricator” is an extensive colorful exhibition. Of course the works on this exhibition may cause some unsolvable questions, but these artists with distinctive styles just prove there are the main bodies of the fabricator. Through exploration for the change of the different painting and sculpture languages, the artists are to present the value of Chinese modern art.

 In Wang Jing, Beijing

On March 26, 2011