看：每樣東西都泛溢出它的邊界、輪廓、範疇，泛溢出它的名稱。
-----John Berger

過去，藝術家們醉心於「光」的建構與追尋；現在，孟陽陽也以其對於色彩的敏銳感知，試圖抓取在時間、歷史，與自身生命進程中逃逸的情感。對「光」的把玩，印象派先覺們總是應該被記上一筆，在他們為所畫之物與觀者之間開闢、搭建了觀看（我是指，真正的看與被看，關乎「可見性」的問題）的空間之後，後人們相踵闖入了光的追尋，從自然界之光的索討，到暗室中之光的背離，寫下了我們所熟悉的西方現代藝術史。除了「光」此一關鍵命題，與光共生相繫的影像「再現」之議題，也隨同藝術史學的建構而翻騰於畫面的空間。
談孟陽陽，自然也應該被放在這個譜系中去談，於是我們追問：在光的時間與空間感度幾乎快被窮盡之際，藝術家想追尋的是什麼？

當代影像所失去的

繪畫，總是關乎時間的。這句話的意思，不僅表明了「繪畫是其自身被注視的預言」之宿命本質（注一），也再次地證明了（狹義的）藝術史學內含的時間向度——其中所貫穿者即為「光」。不過這也是老掉牙了。「光」為我們演示的還不夠多嗎？即便是部分以數字0與1之演算為基礎的新媒體藝術，最終還是仰賴光的明滅而再現了藝術前端場域中，主客體置換的舊遊戲。因而我總是以為，早在近30年前，亞瑟‧丹托（Arthur C. Danto）所謂「藝術終結之後」（after the end of art），或藝術史學者貝爾丁（Hans Belting）所宣稱之「藝術史的終結」（the end of history of art），至今仍是當代平面繪畫根本上所必須正視的議題。這危機式的質問應該是：「在舊有圖像思維的城邦已經徹底崩壞之後，那些擁有相似外貌的『（另）圖像』（alter picture），應該如何再去形構新的觀看方式？」

很遺憾地，這提問的應答，不會來自於藝術家。孟陽陽同樣無法提出解答，但她或許意識到當代繪畫所失去的是什麼：既非可能常被用以解釋其象徵性內容的諸如「表現主義」、「精神分析」等典籍，亦非藝術史中哪位大師的後裔，而是於圖像夾層中由光的「再現」所牽引出的觀看方法。進一步言之，所謂圖像層次中遊走的光，指的是來自圖像自身的內在光源。這並非宣稱，此內在光源來自畫家主動的建造，在畫面空間中創造一個再現的光。相反地，它（光）來自於圖像中目光的連結、交錯、辯證、衝突，甚至相互消解等，與真實光源所相互參照、被透視光學所暗示的「光自身」。它無法被定義，但可以被參照，並且我們可以在影像所「陳述（address）其自身」的語言中，竭力抓取、逼近它（注二）。

作為一種預言╱寓言，它無關乎品質優劣，而是關於繪畫自身的本質性存在；有點像是洪席耶（Jacques Ranciere）於其《影像的宿命》（Le Destin des images）中所談的（指向它者的）影像與其自身之間的辯證關係：「從今而後不再存在事實，而僅剩下影像，或是相反地，從不存在影像，唯有不斷向其自身自顯的事實。」（注三）其中，所謂「向其自身自顯的事實」，就是我們應該在當代影像裡不斷逼近的事物。

溢出於光的

著名的觀看之道之作者約翰‧伯格（John Berger），因其創作出身的背景，而對於繪畫、影像等討論具有獨到的見解，他曾說過：「繪畫基本上是辯證的」（注四），而我相信這同時也即宣稱了：「繪畫是目光的辯證性構成」。以辯證性本質為基礎，於是繪畫顯露出無止盡的掏空、遮掩、接受，與追尋等焦慮；我們所追尋者，總是所失去的。

在孟陽陽的作品裡，我看見（理解）了「光」。

她的畫作裡，光總是「虛構」的，筆刷與畫布的來回之間，並不企圖製造可含納任何光線的空間，而是單純地保留了塗繪本身所佔據的位置。另一方面，傳統的動態時間也無用武之地，無論藝術家在技法上如何使用飛白，在觀念上如何信服意識流，甚至引入數位影像之淡進淡出的特效思維，我們都已明白，繪畫裡任何時間意識都是徒勞的；這不是意味著繪畫相反地就可以捕捉到時間的凝止，而是，繪畫所欲再現的總是不在畫面之中，包括「時間」。

以〈追光〉一作而言，不僅人物幾乎可以成為一種光源，強光背景也幾乎搶掉了整個畫面的焦點，幾乎可以對應題目與藝術家論述裡所言之「只有代表生命的水與光還生生不息，發出永恆耀眼的光芒」。然而，畫中人物身旁強烈明確的身影，以及可讓我們聯想到影像光譜的粉紅、黃相間的光柵背景，皆表明這是一齣關於生命勵志的舞台戲，難道不是再次提醒了觀者，那光是多麼地虛假與人為？以及，我們可以輕易地看出那清晰的光面是如何地被強加在畫面中，似乎就是硬生生地將顏色塗抹上去。

這反映出的不是關於繪畫真實性擁戴之評價，而是它切實地讓我們知道，繪畫對於真實性是無能為力的；它並無法抓取光。不過，繪畫可以，也理當如此，讓觀者透過目光的交錯與回返，得以感受且察覺到光的散逸。散逸，指向了一種滿溢狀態，它並不具體地回應到繪畫本身所擁有的事物，而是它所失去的；繪畫記錄的總是「不在場」（absence）（注五）。但這種缺席，我認為是探求繪畫本質必要的思考，伯格的說法是：「建立在形貌之上的視覺影像，談論的永遠是失去形貌（disappearance）」（注六）。意即，如果繪畫的本質是光，那它將永遠追尋著那失落，但又總是滿溢的「光」，如同孟陽陽所致力者。

逼近目光的自畫像

孟陽陽除了對光有特別的敏銳度與感思之外，可以清楚看到她也對於自我的認識深感興趣，而且很大程度地與鏡像觀看有關係。但我們也可以無需引入拉岡的鏡像理論，從視覺觀看的角度來討論藝術家在面對自身生命時，如何透過眼睛、視覺的辯證而展開自我反觀與對話。
光所見證者，不僅是關於繪畫史的進程問題，它也保證了我們對於「可見世界」的理解與想像。孟陽陽有一隻眼睛有著視網膜混濁的困擾，根據一篇訪談，雖然對其創作沒有多大影響，但我相信總是對她觀看世界的角度產生了一些變化。追尋光，或許也反應了其對光的索討漸趨強烈。我們知道，畫家在畫自畫像時，多數都是使用鏡子，透過鏡面觀察自己，但往往並不見得會在畫面中透露出鏡子的痕跡。孟陽陽不僅在題稱與自述中宣稱，圓形的畫布，與畫中人的視線角度及姿態，也都表明這是一個關於鏡像的自我觀看。

於是，第一層的攬鏡自照，與第二層畫家對鏡中像的凝視，混雜後與畫中像對上觀畫者的眼神交換，不僅形塑了觀看的網絡，引導了觀者對藝術家的認識，也開啟了更為後設的圖像場域。正因為如此，上述關於藝術史學的討論，以及各種關於觀看、（目）光的想法，才可能進到「影像向其自身顯現」的進程裡，且終不必然僅能放在現代藝術的脈絡下被討論。就畫面表現而言，我相信孟陽陽確實擅於描繪眼神，圖中各層次的目光對視，起點始於畫中人的眼睛，但最後，我們終將被那眼神所虜獲，墜入那混濁如幽暗池水，卻又光耀同全知之神一般的雙眼。孟陽陽對於視╱世界的模糊觀看，只是讓她更接近眼睛的真實，至少，她比我們更少可能被雙眼的幻覺所矇騙。

而自我觀看，總是關於「本體論」的；關於藝術家主體的老故事。

沿著前文關於「不在場」的思考脈絡，我們更能理解為什麼藝術家總是渴望注視到那些不可見的事物，其中包括她╱他自身。伯格向我們提示了一種說法（多數視覺藝術理論家也都不間斷地提出並修正），可見世界中「可被看見」之人事物，對觀看（世界）者並不造成困擾，但對於那些不可見者，則被認為它們反過來否定了觀看者的存在——其中，觀看者總是看不見自身（注七）。因此，渴望看見，即不僅是關於認識他人的動機，也幾乎是對世界持有高度熱情與敏感的藝術家探詢自身主體的寓言。

談到這裡，或許有人認為我甚至還沒有真正談論到孟陽陽作品（當然，我不這樣想），但我仍必須再次強調，當代繪畫如果未能從過往現代藝術史以降的觀看方式逃離，不僅可能因為對史觀的嚴重滯後（即便吾人對於歷史的感知總是如此）而產生格格不入的歷史無意識，它還可能因此忽視或錯看繪畫於影像當代中的意義與價值。

What Painting Has Lost –On the Meng Yangyang Exhibition “Searching Light”

“To look: at everything which overflows the outline, the contour, the category, the name of what is." – John Berger

In the past, artists were obsessed with creating and pursuing light; now, Meng Yangyang, with her trenchant perception of colors, is also attempting to grasp its fleeting sensation in time, history and in the process of her own life. When it comes to toying with light, one must always make note of the clairvoyants of the impressionist school: After they broke ground and built the space for seeing (I mean, truly seeing and being seen, as concerns the question of “visibility”) in the objects they painted, those that followed rushed one after the other into the pursuit of light. From the exploration of light in the natural world to the departure from light in the darkroom, they wrote down the history of Western modern art familiar to us all. In addition to the crucial question of light, the issue of image reproduction, which coexists symbiotically with light, has turned up in the spaces of paintings throughout the history of art.

A discussion of Meng Yangyang should naturally be placed within the context of this genealogy. Thus, we follow up with the question: At this juncture when sensitivity to light in time and space has been impoverished to the point of extinguishment, what is it that the artist wishes to pursue?

What Contemporary Images Have Lost

Painting is always connected with time. The meaning of this sentence not only expresses the fundamental nature of fate: “Painting a picture is the process of constructing the future moments when it will be looked at.” (Note 1) It also reaffirms (in a narrow sense) the implicit temporal dimension of art history – that the constant which runs through all art is light. But this is old hat. Has not light revealed enough to us? Even new media art, based as it is on the calculation of the digits 0 and 1, ultimately must still rely upon the kindling and extinguishment of light in order to reproduce the art at the front-end venue. It is the old game of displacement of subject and object. This is why, for nearly three decades, I have always considered Arthur C. Danto’s “after the end of art,” or what art historian Hans Belting termed “the end of the history of art,” to be the issue in contemporary painting that still fundamentally needs to be addressed today. This critical question should be: Now that the walls of the city-state of conventional thinking on graphic images have collapsed, which similarly appearing “alter pictures” should we use, and how should we use them to form a new mode of viewing?

Regrettably, the answer to this question will not come from the artists. Meng Yangyang is likewise unable to furnish an answer, but perhaps she is conscious of what contemporary painting has lost: not the classic theories, such as expressionism or psychoanalysis, which may often be used to explain its symbolic meaning, nor the descendants of a certain master from art history, but rather the manner of viewing facilitated by the “reproduction” of light within the interlayering of images. Considered more fully, the light present at what might be termed the image level is an internal light source that comes from the image itself. This is no mere supposition. This internal light source is derived from the painter’s creation on her own initiative, engendering a reproduced light within the picture space. Conversely, it (light) comes from the connections, interconnections, dialectics, conflicts, even mutual dissipation that take place in the eyes that gaze upon the image – the “light in itself,” which is mutually referential vis-a-vis the actual light source, the “light in itself” suggested by perspective optics. It eludes definition, but it can be referenced. Moreover, within the language with which an image addresses itself, we may strive to grasp it, to approach it (Note 2).

As a prophecy/parable, it is unconcerned with quality, but is related to the fundamental existence of the painting itself. It is a little like the dialectical relationship between image and self, to which Jacques Rancière alluded (in reference to “the other”) in Le Destin des images, that “there is no longer any reality, but only images...” or conversely, “there are no more images but only a reality incessantly representing itself to itself” (Note 3). This “reality representing itself to itself” is what we ought to be constantly drawing near in contemporary images.

Overflowing Light

Because of his background as a painter, John Berger, who famously wrote on the ways of seeing, has a unique interpretation of painting and images. He contends that painting is fundamentally dialectical (Note 4). I am confident that in so stating he also implies that “painting is the dialectical composition of vision.” Based on its fundamentally dialectical nature, painting reveals limitless anxieties regarding emptiness, concealment, acceptance, searching... That which we pursue, we always lose.

In Meng Yangyang’s works I saw (understood) the light.

In her paintings, light is always “fabricated.” Through the give-and-take between brushstroke and canvas, she does not attempt to create any spaces able to contain beams of light, but simply retains the place occupied by the act of painting itself. At a different level, conventional dynamic time leaves scant room for exploration. Whether it be technically – the artist’s use of unfilled blank spaces (liubai) – or conceptually – how she has embraced stream of consciousness, or even how she introduces the idea of fade-in/fade-out effects from digital imagery – we all realize that in painting, any consciousness of time is futile. This is not to suggest that painting can make time stop, but rather that what painting desires to reproduce always lies outside the picture, including time.

In the work Searching Light, not only are the human figures nearly sources of light in themselves, but the background of powerful light also nearly steals away the focal point of the entire painting. It almost echoes the title, as well as what the artist noted in her statement: “Only water and light that represent life can thrive without ceasing, and emit a never-ending, dazzling radiance.” Nevertheless, the powerful, clear-cut shadows next to the people in the painting, and the raster background ranging from pink to yellow that evokes associations with a chromatic spectrum, proclaim this to be a life-inspiring stage play. Do they not remind the viewer that this light is counterfeit and artificial? Furthermore, we can easily see how that limpid light surface has been reinforced in the painting; the pigments seem to have been daubed on with firmness.

What this reflects is not an appraisal of the genuineness conveyed by the painting, but that it genuinely allows us to appertain that paintings are incapable of genuineness, that they cannot clutch light. Nonetheless, paintings are able, and rightly so, to make the viewer feel and be aware of the dissipation of light, as vision interlaces and doubles back. Dissipation signifies a state of fullness. It does not concretely respond to the things the painting holds, but what it has lost. What a painting records is always “absence” (Note 5). But this absence, in my view, is a necessary rumination in search of the basic nature of painting. As Berger put it, to establish the form of visual images, we are forever considering their “disappearance” (Note 6). The meaning of this is that if the basic nature of painting is light, then it is eternally pursuing the light that is lost, but is always overflowing. And this is the quest of Meng Yangyang.

The Self-portrait as an Avenue to Vision

In addition to a special incisiveness and feeling for light, we may also clearly observe in Meng Yangyang a deep interest in self-recognition, and this is largely related to gazing at mirror images. But we have no need to cite the mirror theory of Jacques Lacan. From the perspective of visual sight, we may consider how the artist, when confronting her own life, develops a gaze upon and a dialogue with herself through the dialectic between the eyes and vision.

Light not only bears witness to how the history of painting has progressed, but also ensures that we understand and imagine the visible world. Meng Yangyang struggles with an occluded retina in one eye. According to one interview, this has had little impact on her art. Nonetheless, I am sure it has changed the way she sees the world. Perhaps her search for light reflects a gradual crescendo in her own personal pursuit of illumination. We know that when the artist paints self-portraits, most are done with mirrors. She observes herself in a mirror, but rarely does she reveal any traces of the mirror in her paintings. Meng Yangyang makes it clear, not only in her titles and statements, but also through the use of round canvasses as well as the angles of view and the postures of the people in her paintings, that this is an act of self-gazing related to her image in the mirror.

Thus, after the first level – performing a self-portrait in a mirror – and the second level – the artist’s gazing into the mirror image – have intermingled with an exchanging of glances between the subject of the painting and the viewer, this not only forms a network of gazing, leading the viewer to recognize the artist, but also brings into being a meta-space of images. And precisely because of this, the aforementioned discussion of art history and various thoughts regarding gazing, vision and light can only take place within a process of “the image revealing itself to itself” and ultimately cannot be exclusively confined to the context of modern art. When it comes to execution of the painting, I believe that Meng Yangyang is genuinely adept at portraying the expressions in people’s eyes. At various levels in the painting, vision begins with the eyes of the people in the paintings, but in the end we are ultimately captured by the expressions in those eyes, falling into those eyes that are as turbid as dark pools of water yet shimmering as an omniscient deity. Meng’s ambiguous gaze at seeing/the world only causes her to draw near to the true state of the eyes. At least, she is less likely than we to be deceived by the eyes’ illusions.

Self-gazing is ultimately related to ontology. It is concerned with the old story of the artist’s sense of self.
Following the line of logic in the above passage regarding “absence,” we can more fully realize why artists always long to behold those things that are invisible, including themselves. Berger reminds us of a saying (which most visual art theorists have perennially cited and revised): The people and things that “can be seen” in the visible world do not disturb the viewer of the world, but those things that cannot be seen are conversely believed to negate the existence of the viewer – among which is the viewer’s perpetual inability to see himself (Note 7). Consequently, the desire to see is not merely the drive to know others, but almost an allegory for the quest of the artist, feeling great passion and sensitivity toward the world, to find her own self.

At this juncture, some might perhaps aver that I have not actually discussed the works of Meng Yangyang (of course, I would not concur). Yet I feel compelled to emphasize again that if contemporary painting cannot unshackle itself from the mode of viewing we have inherited from the modern art of the past, it may suffer an out-of-kilter lack of historical awareness, resulting from a severe hysteresis in historical perspective (as indeed I have long felt), and may even neglect or misconstrue the meaning and value of painting in the contemporary realm of images.

注釋
一、約翰‧伯格，〈繪畫與時間〉（Painting and time），收錄在《觀看的視界》（台北：麥田，2010）文集，287-294，1979。
二、同上注。
三、請參照黃建宏，《影像的宿命》研讀報告，轉引自http://english.fju.edu.tw/lctd/list/theoristsWork_Guide.asp?T_ID=92&TW_ID=107。
四、 約翰‧伯格，〈繪畫的居所〉（The place of painting），收錄在《觀看的視界》（台北：麥田，2010）文集，295-302，1982。
五、同上注。
六、同前注一。
七、同前注四。
*文前引言出自 約翰‧伯格，〈論可見性〉（On visibility），收錄在《觀看的視界》（台北：麥田，2010）文集，303，1977。

Notes:
1. John Berger, “Painting and Time,” The Sense of Sight (Vintage, 1993), p. 206.
2. Ibid.
3. Jacques Rancière, tr. Gregory Elliott, The Future of the Image (Verson, 2007), p. 1.
4. John Berger, “The Place of Painting,” The Sense of Sight (Vintage, 1993), p. 212-218.
5. Ibid.
6. Op. cit., Note 1.
7. Op. cit., Note 4.
*Introductory quote: John Berger, “On Visibility,” The Sense of Sight (Vintage, 1993), p. 219-224.