當你掙脫命運與歷史的枷鎖一段時間後，你學會以全然不同的方式感知世界，並探索與梳理溝通的千姿百態。我想我能辨識出這種似曾相識卻自成一格的藝術創作思維。它與既定、假設或刻意的事物截然不同，因其意涵曖昧不明，既富趣味又可塑性強，故能遊走於生命的本質與世人所認為的真相之間。

這種未知並未如人所想般模糊藝術家（或藝術作家）的視線，反而滲入他們的意識，激發出高度的察覺力，使一切變得格外清晰。這股沉鈍且痛楚的力量，如當頭棒喝般，將戲劇家布萊希特（Brecht）提出的「間離效果」從藝術延展至日常生活，不僅為前者開闢更廣的思考領域，也將生活融入創作之中。

建立這種生活與藝術實踐，需要懷抱一定的企圖心，在全心全意探索生活與工作意義的同時，善用想像力。即使前路漫漫，也需帶著憧憬與熱忱堅定前行。柏丹把展覽命名《半影》，反映他似乎接受這種介於明暗、清晰與模糊之間的狀態。



▶影片欣賞 藝術家工作室直擊｜《半影 — 柏丹個展 Penumbra - Daniel PULMAN》


在準備對談會時，我回顧了他過去幾年在台灣面對疫情措施與政治影響而進退失據的情況下展出的兩組作品。第一組是一系列平淡的冬季城市風景畫，也可以理解為以疏離視角描繪的人物肖像。畫面展現了中國北方小城市的氛圍，其中都出現一兩個全身裹得嚴實、戴著口罩或帽T的人物行走在街道上。



▶影片欣賞 Daniel PULMAN "Night Paintings" - The Artist at Work ｜柏丹《夜之畫》創作實錄


這些畫作在視覺語言上有兩個主要特徵：雪和天空。雪的元素使藝術家得以盡情探索白色的細節與質感，透過堆疊與刮除的手法，呈現厚實的雪堆和車輪壓出的痕跡；而夜空則隱約散發出冷紫色、靛藍與紫羅蘭色的光暈。

第二組作品的場景從城市轉移到鄉村，聚焦也從個體切換到集體，描繪了一群全身刺青的男性在天然溫泉中沐浴的情景。厚厚的顏料堆砌形成宛如突出畫面的石崖，水面映出周遭景物的倒影，為藝術家提供了實驗色彩運用的空間。



▶影片欣賞 Daniel PULMAN - Bathers of Guguan | 柏丹 創作紀錄片《谷關系列》


一般而言，我認為在探討畫作的具象或抽象性，或追問其主題與靈感來源前，應先理清其創作方式及媒介如何形成圖像的過程。我們往往太容易被畫面中內容情節給綁架，忽略了對作畫機制的探究才是了解藝術家如何選擇構圖與意象的關鍵。

令我意外的是，柏丹2024年的新作皆以光影的互動為基礎。畫中那覆滿白雪的街道與陡峭的岩壁展現出沉穩有力的存在感，彷彿擁有引力般牽引著藝術家的筆觸，以它們為核心描繪出外圍朦朧輕盈的人與物。

畫中的光線落在玻璃窗和樹枝上，隨後折射、散開，重新構建了空間秩序。此時，光仿若比空氣與土壤還要厚實，景深變得飄渺不定；金色的日光與陰影中的藍光交相碰撞， 浸透甚至吞沒了眼前的景象。光帶著質感真實地存在著，成為藝術家能自由揮灑的媒材。

黃昏的光影在動物園中流轉，老虎身上的條紋、圍欄的鐵柱與頭頂的樹枝，共同構築了絕佳的場景。光在玻璃中反射，穿過鐵條間滑動，又於樹葉間漫射，或徘徊於陰影之中。這些畫作之所以引人入勝，是因為它們刻意避開既定的「形式」與「類型」框架，定位於灰色地帶，重新詮釋虛實的界限。

對畫作思考了幾週之後，我與柏丹進行了交談。當時我剛從巴黎歸來，參觀了龐畢度中心的「超現實主義百年」展覽，是本季少數未讓我失望的大型展覽之一。但唯一令我怦然心動的是畫家蒂姆・布魯爾（Tim Breuer）在洞穴般的破舊店面裡舉辦的快閃展覽，作品深邃的墨黑畫面、破舊質感，以及人物神秘的眼神，無不讓人著迷。我要說的是，我已準備好面對這個戴著老虎頭、被囚禁在後工業時代荒原中的男人展現的倦怠。

柏丹提到他一月深冬時分造訪了中國東北一個處於露天煤礦場邊上的小鎮。每當為新作尋找靈感時，他都會選擇到類似的地點。中國東北的「鐵鏽地帶」在某種意義上成為了亞熱帶台灣生活的反襯，而這兩地都是二戰前日本帝國的重地。

東北遍布為佔領時期暴行受害者而建的博物館和紀念碑；台灣各地則充滿經過修復與活化的歷史建築。柏丹之所以對東北情有獨鍾，或許是那裡的後工業地景讓他聯想到年輕時成長的北英格蘭。他流浪時習慣朝北走，讓我想起《千禧曼波》（Millennium Mambo）中那些愛惹事的夜店青年在北海道雪地中的短暫嬉戲，又或是《在車上》（Drive My Car）中北方積雪承載的希望最終只剩下空虛。

儘管北海道和東北的冬天同樣陰鬱，它們的風光卻展現出截然不同的特質。影視文化裡的東北總是一片荒涼，中國公路電影講述的往往不是好友們駕車馳騁的冒險，而是一群朋友、同事或家庭在鐵路上往返徘徊，試圖逃離集體生活的局限，跑到大城市追尋個人夢想的縮影。導演王兵拍攝於遼寧省瀋陽郊區、長達九小時的紀錄片《鐵西區》（2002）是其中的佼佼者；而以黑龍江煤礦小鎮上因情勢所迫的犯罪為主題的刁亦男導演作品《白日焰火》（2014）也堪稱此類電影的代表作。

過去二十五年間，中國製作了許多類似以希望與失落為題材的電影：王小帥的《地久天長》（2019）以內蒙古的一個工業城鎮為背景，而顧長衛的《孔雀》（2005）則將故事設在更南方的河南。我提到《孔雀》是因為這部電影以一隻孔雀在寒冷的動物園中熱切展翅為隱喻，表達了人們對浪漫能拯救生命的盲目信念，而這恰巧將我們引回柏丹的東北動物園和西伯利亞虎。

於柏丹而言，世界只有工作室和旅途兩個地方，並以兩種不同的形式存在。地點和脈絡並不重要。他以中立的眼光觀察中國，擺脫歷史的既定成見，在各個正在急速發展、個性鮮明的城市尋找意想不到的靈感與創作素材。他某天某地拍下的照片和收集的材料，也許將來會被轉化為畫中的內容。他近期制定了一套創作原則，堅持以自己的照片為基礎作畫，確保自己與作品主題始終保持緊密聯繫。

他畫作那種若隱若現的氛圍，也許源於他對自我建構意義的執著，以及試圖為世界建立秩序之間的矛盾。這種既屬於社會又超然於社會的生活方式，可以被詮釋為一場不斷探索生存意義的演出。柏丹若無其事地走在東北小鎮郊外荒廢的動物園裡，卻更鮮明地暴露了人性殘酷的一面和人際關係中的微妙異常。

我正在讀薇莉‧魯尼（Sally Rooney）的最新小說《間奏棋》（Intermezzo）。她將一貫典型的對話結構改為意識流風格，藉此強調兩人之間根本無法真正溝通。所謂的理解，不過是一場鬧劇。她以西洋棋為例，提出遊戲可以通過腳本與規則來構建溝通的結構，將交流限定於棋局內，不受意識干擾。

繪畫與意識本質上都是一種湧現現象。繪畫是一個過程，然而觀眾與讀者的視角相對受限，只能看到獨立成品，難以窺見全貌。在被解讀之前、在進入藝術市場之前、在成為學術研究對象之前，繪畫本身是純潔無瑕的。在沾上論述的原罪前，繪畫是清白的。所謂溝通，其實就是誤解。

畫家誠實，但觀眾卻充滿謊言。在刻畫老虎斑紋光影時，柏丹借鑒了洞穴壁畫中描繪野獸與狩獵的早期人類藝術所蘊含的原始力量。各種猛獸，如老虎、獅子和狼等掠食者引發了對於意識與存在本質的思考。據說，狗的意識位於恰到好處的狀態，能充分體驗當下深刻的快樂，卻不用承受高層次意識所帶來的不安焦慮，也無需面對人類藝術中潛在的批判與質疑。

柏丹的每幅新作都將空間分割為兩個部分，繪畫則起到兩者之間的橋樑作用：圍欄內是老虎的潛伏地，圍欄外是觀眾抽煙觀看的區域。畫作並不會像玻璃般真實映現現實，歷史上沒有任何畫作能完美清晰地呈現主題。

多幅畫作中，光影與圍欄表面交織，為作品營造出細膩的視覺質感。最終，當藝術家或觀者的身影投射在圍欄的玻璃上時，他們與老虎的身影合成一體。換句話說，繪畫既是分隔兩者的屏障，也是連結它們的媒介。通過繪畫，藝術家得以象徵性地成為了老虎。然而，兩者的界限實際上依然分明，所謂的交融只是一種幻象。

安妮‧卡森（Anne Carson）指出，慾望的本質在於驅使我們滿足缺失，無論是來自真實的需求還是想像中的不足。畫作連結了圍欄內外，同時凝聚了欲求者與被欲求之物、觸碰者與被觸碰的事物。

卡森將米達斯（Midas）的命運與蟬相對比：米達斯因渴求而毀滅，蟬則將慾望昇華成對音樂藝術的追求。「不同於米達斯，蟬滿足於將生命視為死亡；然而，蟬終究只是蟬。」將繪畫作為生命的實踐，讓作品連接自我與世界，代表柏丹接受了生命本質中的純真、當下感和迷茫。然而，柏丹終究只是一隻老虎。



▶影片欣賞 Daniel PULMAN: The Artist at Work 柏丹｜創作實錄

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Penumbra | Daniel PULMAN
Text/ Robin Peckham, Taipei Dangdai Art Fair Co-Director

When you spend a significant portion of your life far from whatever roots the lottery of fate and history saw fit to bury you with, you learn to sample the climate a bit differently, working through volatile networks of communication. I think I am able to recognize this mentality of artistic production, one that is familiar across times and places but always unique to itself because that is what it sets out to be—set apart from anything that is given, assumed, intended. This mentality comes with the distinct pleasure of living in a constant fog of meaning, a soft and malleable and often porous boundary between the work of living and the reality of the world as it is seemingly understood by others sharing the same social space.

It is a peculiar kind of fog that sets into the consciousness of the artist (or the art writer) because it is not, as one might expect, a dulling force that clouds the vision but rather something that seeps into the crevices and cultivates a heightened awareness in which the rules of the game become hyper-clear. A dull and aching clarity; a Brechtian move that brings the ostranenie across the threshold from the practice into ordinary life, appropriates additional headspace for the practice, and in doing so turns life into the practice.

Building such a life and practice requires a measure of intentionality, a commitment to thinking through what it means to live and work, as well as a degree of imagination: one must project and commit this life, even and especially when its prospects are ill-defined. In titling his exhibition project “Penumbra,” in reference to the zone of shadow in which only a portion of a source of illumination is directly visible, Daniel Pulman seems to accept the terms of this condition.

To prepare for our conversation, I looked back at the two earlier bodies of work that he has shown in Taiwan over the past few years—years that, it must be said, have been characterized by the flows and blockages of movement that accompanied the many various policy and politic responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. The first is a suite of paintings that might be prosaically described as wintry urban landscapes, or portraits from a cold and distant vantage point. The setting of each is a city street, winter, nighttime. Each contains one or two figures, bundled up, masked or hooded. The texture of the cityscape is northern China, perhaps a smaller city.

Formally, there are two defining aspects to these paintings. Most obvious is the snow, which gives the artist an opportunity to relish the detail and texture of this nominally monochrome color field, building up and scraping away great impasto snow banks and tire ruts. Then there is the sky, which takes on an obscure luminosity though it is clearly night: a cold chromatic key of purple, indigo, and violet.

The second body of work moves from the city to the country, and from the individual to the collective. Here we see groups of heavily tattooed men bathing in natural hot springs. Rocky cliff faces take on the fetishistic textural aspect of the work, physically growing outwards from the paintings in thick impasto constructions, while water surfaces—reflecting the planes and volumes around them—become a playful space for experiments in color.

Generally speaking, I believe it is important to think through what a painting is doing—how it is made, how its materiality turns it into a picture—before getting caught up in whether it is representational or abstract, what it might be depicting, or what kind of content it might refer to. The mechanics of a painting can tell us a lot about why an artist might be interested in a certain composition or image, while it is all too easy to be kidnapped by plot and forget we are looking at a painting at all.

Turning to Daniel’s new paintings, all dated 2024, I am surprised to see that, on a formal level, they seem to be defined primarily by the interplay of light and shadow. This comes as a surprise because snowy streets and rocky cliffs are such substantial, architectonic things; they are heavy, creating their own gravity, centering the foggier stuff of human life around them in their orbits as they draw the artist’s brush in lighter concentric movements along the periphery.

Light is different. Light is everywhere. In these paintings, light breaks and scatters across glass panes and through tree branches, remaking the space of the world. Here light is thicker than air, thicker even than earth. Depth of field is illusive. In its place, the golden light of day and the blue light of shadow meet in harsh collisions, bathing, even submerging, everything in their respective zones. Light becomes texture, providing the artist with somewhere to indulge the crunchiness of his material.

Now we might understand why these images are so compelling: the artist has chosen to paint tigers in a zoo at dusk. Stripes on tigers, bars on enclosures, tree branches overhead; these environments are tailor-made playgrounds for light and shadow. Reflecting off of glass, slipping between bars, scattering through leaves, stepping in and out of shadow. There are forms and typologies of legibility, and these paintings are intent on inserting themselves in between the lines and mapping out their own idea of what is or isn’t real.

When Daniel and I speak, some weeks after I have begun thinking through these paintings, I have just returned from Paris, where the centenary of surrealism was feted by the Centre Pompidou in one of the few major exhibitions of the season that didn’t feel like a disappointment. The only thing that genuinely got my heart pounding was a pop-up show of inky depths, scratched surfaces, and enigmatic eyes by the painter Tim Breuer in a cavernous, bombed out storefront. All of which is to say, I am now primed for the ennui of a man with a tiger’s head caged in a post-industrial wasteland.

Daniel talks about a trip to northeastern China in January, in the depths of winter, to a town perched on the edge of an open pit coal mine, the kind of place he prefers to frequent during the research phases of his practice. I think of how China’s northeast rust belt, known as Dongbei, seems to be something of a foil for life in subtropical Taiwan. Both were important territories to the Japanese imperial enterprise leading up to and throughout World War II.

Across Dongbei one finds museums and memorials for the victims of the atrocities of occupation; across Taiwan one finds revitalized heritage architecture. Part of me wonders what Daniel finds so compelling about this particular region. He is drawn to the familiarity of a post-industrial landscape, perhaps not so unlike the northern England of his youth. He says that in his wanderings he tends towards the north, which for me calls to mind Millennium Mambo, in which the club kids who can’t stay out of trouble in Taipei turn to wholesome snow play in Hokkaido before returning all too quickly to their old ways, or Drive My Car, in which the answers promised by the snows of the north turn out to offer nothing but false hope.

But there is a difference between the landscapes of Hokkaido and Dongbei, even if they share the same bleak winters. There is a whole cinematic culture of the desolate northeast in China. Its road movies are not stories of buddies driving down highways but rather train films in which groups of friends, coworkers, or families move back and forth between constrained lives in the collectives and presumed or fantasized individual dreams in the cities beyond. The masterpieces of the milieu are unquestionably Wang Bing’s nine-hour-long documentary West of the Tracks (2002), shot on the outskirts of Shenyang, capital of Liaoning province, and Diao Yinan’s Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014), which dramatizes crimes of necessity in coal-mining towns across Heilongjiang province.

Films like these sit comfortably alongside a broader geography of hope and disillusionment in Chinese cinema of the past quarter century: Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son (2019) is set in a factory town in Inner Mongolia, while Gu Changwei’s Peacock (2005) is further south in Henan. I mention this last film for how its plot relies on the titular animal incongruously displaying its plumage in a frigid zoo in the middle of winter (part of an extended metaphor for the folly of believing too deeply in romance as salvation), which brings us right back to Daniel Pulman’s Dongbei zoo and his Siberian tigers.

For Daniel there are only two places in the world, and two ways of being in the world: in the studio, or on the road. The details of location and context are irrelevant. While recognizing that we live at a certain moment in history, he approaches China with a neutral stance: with so many different kinds of cities, each of them changing at a rapid speed, it functions as something of a randomization engine for him as an artist. He can get himself somewhere, start taking photographs, and collect material that might, one day, make its way into his paintings. He only paints from his own photographs, insisting on a direct relationship to his subject matter, a restriction or convention that he brought to his practice relatively recently.

I believe that it is tied to the same fog of clarity that I see in his work: an insistence on constructing meaning for one’s self, and a structure for meaning that one might impose on the world in which we live. This way of living, both of and beyond society, might best be understood as an ongoing performance of what it means to live. In wandering this barren zoo on the outskirts of a Dongbei town, Daniel performs normality. In doing so, he effects the defamiliarization of the sense of normality underlying everything, from human cruelty to the bonds that tie us as people together.

I have been reading Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo, which turns from her typical use of dialogue as structuring formal device toward a stream of consciousness that emphasizes the impossibility of true communication between any two people. Understanding is a farce. She proposes chess as an example of how games can structure these attempts at communication, setting scripts and rules such that whatever happens on the board is all that happens. Dialogue without an underlying narrative in consciousness to subvert it.

Painting is an emergent property, like consciousness itself. Pulman engages in painting as a process, while we as viewers—readers—of his paintings must come from a rather more impoverished position in which we can only encounter them as finished objects, often one at a time. Before our readings are imposed on it, before it is absorbed into the economy of the art market, before it becomes an object of scholarship—and only before—painting is innocent. There is an innocence to painting prior to the original sin that is discourse. Communication is miscommunication.

The painter is honest, but the audience is full of liars. In working through the light and shadow of the tiger’s stripes, Pulman aligns himself with the immediacy of the earliest forms of human art, like cave paintings of beasts and hunts. In the great beasts, in the great predators, the tigers and lions and wolves, we encounter the mystery of consciousness. It is often said that dogs inhabit the sweet spot of consciousness, open to experiences of profound joy in the moment but incapable of the existential angst that accompanies higher orders of consciousness. Incapable, too, of the implicit skepticism of human art.

Every one of Daniel Pulman’s new paintings involves a demarcation into two spaces: inside the enclosure, where the tiger stalks, and outside of the enclosure, where the spectator smokes and observes. Painting itself is what intervenes between the two. Painting is not glass; there is no painting in history that presents any kind of subject matter with perfect clarity.

In many paintings effects of light and shadow play off the surface of the enclosure, constituting the visual texture of the painting. Ultimately, the tiger-man emerges through the reflection of the artist or the observer in the glass of the enclosure, which is to say: it is through the technology of the painting, this thing that divides one world from the other, that these two ways of being can be merged into one another. It is through painting that the artist becomes the tiger despite the fact that these two worlds remain separated, cleanly divided, by the porous membrane that is the painting. A hallucination of unity.

Anne Carson describes the fundamental nature of desire in terms like these: we are driven, always, in pursuit of fulfilling some lack, real or perceived. The painting, bridging the world of the enclosure and the world beyond, binds together the thing that desires and the thing that is desired; the things that would touch and the thing that would be touched.

Carson contrasts the fate of Midas, who died of his wants, with the cicada, who sublimates his erotic longing into the arts—into music. “Unlike Midas, the cicadas are happy in their choice of life-as-death. Yet, they are cicadas.” In choosing painting as the practice of life, as the structuring device that stands between and constitutes the boundary between self and world, Pulman accepts the terms of this life in its innocence, its immediacy, its fog of meaning. Yet, he is tiger.