PREFACE
Non-proxy Lyric
Article: Wang Yanjun
In the warm and dry air-conditioned room in winter, our eyes are prone to soreness and discomfort when we are tired of watching the screen. Let us slightly separate from the full-time agency service of digital media and be aroused by pain of the body when our eyelids (perhaps tucked in tears) droop. In an era of accelerated overflowed of digital images, it goes without saying that electronic screens play a dominant role in constructing human visual experience. Why do artists continue to use painting, an ancient medium based on material materials and hand-making?
This exhibition starts from this, by observing how six young artists who grew up with the Internet in China: Chen Ruofan, Gao Yingpu, Wu Yuezhi, Yang Yifan, Zheng Tianming, and Zhu Yingying draw next to the inevitable screen. Different from simple electronic-assisted applications such as Internet search, projector drawing, photoshop edited photos, AI problem solving,etc., they try to develop new materials and technologies for painting from their understanding of Cyber life itself, so as to detect, analyze, reflection or healing, and then squeeze out those emotional nodules that are difficult to be reduced by labels and emoticons from the pixels.
The image network that is allowed to browse, search, download, and update not only rapidly expands the artist's material library, but also creates a habit of displaying images with different backgrounds, functions, technologies, and material carriers equally and randomly in the computer interface. It’s also followed by fatigue of information overload and worries about the under table dealing of the system. Based on the social observation of urban consumerism, Gao Yingpu collected the shining elements of youth life from the complex entertainment scenes, advertising images, promotional texts, social networks, and pop culture symbols, and then used his vivid brushwork to build the picture of a nightlife theater with a mix of irony, carnival and loss. Yang Yifan started from his family memory of sewing, and combined more tactile fabric materials in his oil paintings. He combines nostalgic images carrying different memories into surreal spiritual scenes, and then fills the graphics with fabrics of different patterns, textures and memories. And he injects soft and thick emotional strength into the works with concave-convex, touch, and temperature changes above the plane.
In addition to the stimulation of a huge amount of image materials, the unique visual style and technical logic of digital image production also create a new physical and mental experience. Zheng Tianming, who also pays attention to consumerism and pop culture, uses sampling and collage methods to reconstruct network images and daily objects absurdly. Hatsune Miku, Ayanami Rei and other charming anime faces are disassembled, misconnected, superimposed, and mixed. The images are similar to the grotesque aesthetics generated by artificial intelligence programs. Indescribable danger and melancholy are revealed from the cuteness. Living in a throbbing and worrying era, Wu Yuezhi uses dazzling and flashy pop visual styles to activate the lament for the ephemeral material and eternal spirit in classical still life painting. Fluorescent green light breaks free from the gaps of pure black wings and carvings, like the appearance of historical ghosts, or the black background with green light lines that "hardcore" gaming devices are keen on. The monochromatic partial depiction that fills the picture like a luxury advertisement brings the eternal sense of the overall object portrayed by classical still life painting to consumerist obsession with high-level details and textures. It is also reminiscent of his spreading painting work on the surface of 3D printed relief frames. Compared with the reproduction of the material, this is closer to the texture function of attaching the entire picture to the surface of the model in the modeling software.
Artists who span a variety of creative media tend to be more inclined to reflective perspectives based on media comparison, using the characteristics of different media to pry each other's gaps, presenting a balance of mutual penetration and complementarity. Zhu Yingying, who works between the three mediums of painting, photography, and moving images, introduces references to photographic images in her paintings. In the latest series exhibited this time, she analyzed the relationship between repetitive forms and human emotions from the vegetable forms in old photos, and transformed them into paintings that delicately flow between figuration and abstraction, image representation and morphological entities. Chen Ruofan, a cross-media artist involved in painting, sculpture, installation, digital media and other media, uses painting to reflect on contemporary people's over-reliance on digital media and high-tech. She first uses 3D software to model, and then sketches the images shaped on the screen from a human perspective, including those faults, distortions, and cracks caused by technical limitations, and deforms them appropriately. She hopes to portray the fragility and "imperfection" of technology to arouse the human sensibility in the audience that cannot be replaced by machines.
Compared with the accelerated development of many digital tools, painting is obviously not a more convenient, efficient and stable way of visual production and communication. But perhaps the more we rely on agents outside the body to recognize and transform the world, the more this material manual labor plays the role of self-reflection and humanity. On the basis of frankly accepting cybersurvival as the reality of the times, the six young artists either use and absorb it positively, or examine and supplement it from the negative side. While advancing painting, they also explore the boundaries of digital media's role in human sensibility. Interestingly, Zheng Tianming, Wu Yuezhi, and Chen Ruofan all linked their working methods to the tradition of Dutch still life painting. After all, under the gaze that has relied on data vision for too long, we have indeed shed tears of material that is fleeting but connected with thousands of years ago.