新畫廊:【Alternative Pictures of Life- Zhou Jinhuaand New Contemporary Painting with Chinese Characteristics】
2013-03-01|撰文者:Pedro Tseng Ph.D.
Zhou Jinhuawas born in 1978 and graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2002. His works often depictscenes from a birds-eye perspective and the people in his paintings are invariablytiny and immersed in strange situationspositioned somewhere betweenreality and imagination. In this sense, Zhou’s pieces are infused with a certain surrealist feel and create atentative senseofillusion which stands in stark contrasttothe “reality”they portray. Hislatest works go even further in showcasingthe artist’s reflections on his own fate and the modern living environment.
1. A New Generation of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute Artist Focusedon Life Scenes
Zhou Jinhuawas educated at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institutein Western China,an area subject to fewerrestrictions than other places which makes it a perfect locationto nurture artists.Chinese folk painting first became popularin the early 1980s and for a whilewasthe central focus of the Sichuan paintingschool. Although the school did not limit itself to folk painting that genre served as an important foundationbecause the folk awareness it represented facilitatedthe expansionof the changing art of the Sichuan painting school. A new generation of painters no longer offerssimple poeticdepictions of rural life or re-presentation of rural reality. Indeed, morerecently, artists have sought to infuse their pieceswith their own ideas and a morein depth exploration of the nature and meaning of spirit, soul, life and culture.
In this context, work by Zhou Jinhuaand other new artists from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, not only focuseson reality,but is also allegorical and inspirational. At this juncture, the reappearance of locallife has already become an indication of respect for more original forms of livingandhumanistic concerns, bothintegral elements of the progress made by moderncivilization. Alternatively, sucha focus provides an opportunity to reconsider issues relating to rapidmodernization.
Modern art in Europe and the US tends to focusonsuch fundamental issues aslife values, the cost of progressandcoexisting with the environment, whereas third world artists have shown more interestin cultural identity and exoticsubjects, highlightingthe distance between the “second modernity”of the former and the “alternative modernity”of the latter. The development of modern Chinese painting reflects the diversity of the transformation of contemporaryChinese culture. Thiswas particularly evident after the 1980s when such diversity contributed to breakthroughs in the traditional realist methodology and styleofChinese oil paintingand had awide ranging impact on conceptual methodology, being closely connectedto the variousrealities ofChinese culture, historyand society. The cultural self awareness of Chinese artists in the current period has not only helped to enrich and develop their own paintings, it has also introduced fresh blood and new ideasto the field of painting.
Today’sliving environment is both the shared backdrop to human life and the differential construct of individual experience. It is a material arena with clear andtransparent limits, butalso an interpersonal space replete with negotiation and competition. Born in the late 1970s,Zhou Jinhua has experienced thechange in his living environment first handand it is the sense of crisis generatedby this that prompted him to create his ownvision of self understandingthrough the medium of art.In 2005, Zhou began to experiment with certain changes. Even though his studio remains in a corner of alma mater Sichuan Fine Arts Instituteand he currently has no blueprint for the future, Zhou is now ready, three years after the event, to say goodbye to his time as an undergraduate.
In 2005, Zhou simultaneouslyexhibited three series of works –“Us”, “Beautiful Pollutants”and “People”–as part of his “Declaration of Growth”. Of particular note was the interconnectedness of the pieces, especiallythe way in which beautiful exteriors were frequently used toconcealhidden danger. Indeed, Zhou commented on this theme himself: “Seriously, this is a beauty that leads to nothing but despair.”
2. A Combination of Top-Down and AngularPerspectives
In the view of poets and painters,city dwellerslive in boxespiledone on top of another from street level to the highest rooftop, creating afragmented skyline that surrounds the living environment. In other words, homes in the big citiesare no longerbuilt in a natural environment and the relationship between space and family homes has been transformed into somethingartificial, forcingthe retreat of private home life.Henri Bergson calledthe driving force in human life“life vitality,”in which context the essence of life is not existence,but rather a sense of participation and progress. As soon as we grasp the prototypical nature of our mind’s eye,life becomesfullerandwe discover completely new trendsand energy in thecosmos thatresound with existence. In this sense,poetry is an echo of the human soul.
Western phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard was particular interested inthe “material imaginationof spatial prototypes”anddivided imagination into “formal imagination”and “material imagination.”In his theory formal imagination createsunimaginable new images,the appeal of which lie in their pictorial nature, with a wide range of types and the ability to occur in unimagined scenarios. In the material imagination images penetrate the depths of life and are infused with material characteristics which enable them to generate the same feelingsas material itself.
In the spatial poetics of Zhou Jinhua, the materialimagination of prototypical spacefocuses on rural or urban areas, with cities a clear testament to modern life. Most of Zhou’s works incorporatea certain degree of direct realism as background, several of which could even be references to incidents reported on the news, including fires, floods, explosions, traffic accidents, deforestation, the smuggling of cultural artifacts, urban demolition, animal conservation, not to mention social excessesandfailure to stand up for justice. The artist spares no effort in emphasizingsuch issues, consistentlyusing them to showcaseabsurd scenes that are impervious to reason. Indeed, it is through such picturesthat Zhou Jinhua reveals much about“reality and absurdity” and the “combination of good and bad”in life. This also explains why the soul of the artist’s modern city is uniquely imbuedwith neo-surrealism.
By2006,Zhou Jinhuahad started to transformhis approach of “using top-down and angularperspectives”from a key element inpainting structure into a moremeaningfulform of expression. In reference to this change Zhou said: “Initially looking down on things from an elevated vantage point was merely a different viewpoint.When I graduated from college I started to paint works from a birds-eye perspectiveand later began to use it more as a way of reflecting on the relationship between individualsand the group. In contrast, more recent worksuse this approach as a focused expression of the meaning of distance.”However, the sense of distance highlightedby Zhou Jinhua through his top-down approachis more than just a reference to spatial or psychological distanceand isdisassociated from discussions of space and psychology. Distance obfuscates and confuses reality and absurdity, butif viewedfrom a certain height then reality itself can also become absurd.
An“angularperspective”not only creates a clearer sense of angle than that offered by an elevated or flat viewpoint, it also provides a stronger sense of engagement orobservation andproducesimageswith unusual angles and distorted structuresthat areimbued with what are clearly illusory characteristics. Moreover,the way in which Zhou Jinhua organically combines “top-down”and “angular perspectives”makes theabsurd even more incredible. AlthoughZhou’s “angular livingenvironment”is critical of real lifeit also seeks to transcend all livingexperience to the presentpoint in time.
3. Surrealism without a Subconscious
In terms of expressive form, one of the most important characteristics ofZhou Jinhua’s painting is the way in whichhe observesthe details of life from a birds-eye or angular view and uses this tocreate“human landscape paintings.”In these landscapespeople are depicted as indifferent, helpless, ignorantand even ecstatic and anxious.Zhou refers to this perspective,which is rooted in photography and used to provide a broader vision and continuous picture, as “a method of observation that does not stick to the normal rules.”He elaboratesthus: “When one’s viewpoint goesbeyond the five meters that can normally be seen from the groundonebecomesdetached. Onlyemptinessis leftbehind andthe forms and colors beneath become absurd.”Because of the birds-eye view the people in Zhou’s picturesarenobodies, while the angular perspective presents heaven and earth as vast and floatingin a space stripped of coordinates.The artistutilizes the technique of plain paintingas the optimal way of highlighting the vastnessand disassociation inherent inhis work, wherein distanceobfuscatesthe dividing linebetween reality and absurdity.
Although the broad view presented from a top-down perspective is one form, it also creates apsychological sense of disassociation and connection with people. The social landscapedepicted by Zhou Jinhuatakes as its background the events ofthe moment, highlighted through the juxtaposition of history and reality. This expresses how such sweeping social trends have influencedpublicspace, how rural or urban residents exist in such space and how social political elements and reform and opening permeate people’s daily lives.A number of social contradictions can be found in the daily lifeculture of street material space or natural landscape elements. At the same time as constructing this work, the artist also gradually unloads fragments of thepast, which means that those immersed in the culture of daily lifelose an old world without gaining a new one.
In the works of such new generationChinese artists there is an identifiablespatial transformationthatcan be used to distinguishbetween modern and post modernart. This differentiation exists in two forms of the relationship between time and space and not in two indistinguishable categories. Moreover, this special transformation refers to the “substitution of time”and the “spatialization oftime,”whereby anyinitialexploration often involves recording the novelty of a work through a sense of loss.Seen from the perspective of earlier modernismand its timeliness, it is “memories of deep rooted memories”that are being mournedhere and “nostalgia forthe sake ofnostalgia”that is established.As such, it is imperative that we circumnavigate modernism in order tobetter understand the historical creativity of post modernism and its theory of space.
However, any concrete explanation of new spatial aesthetics andthe world in which they exist requires a number of intermediarysteps or what dialectics refers to as mediation. Because “Post modern spatialization”is taking place through the relationships ofspatial media and coexisting heterogeneousforces, it is clear that the termrefers to the process by which traditional refinedart is mediatized. In other words, these fields of traditional art have themselves cometo the realizationthat they are types of media in a larger media system and itis their role to create symbolic messageswithin that system. Aspainting, carving, writing and even architecturestrive to have thedesired impactnot as a form of media in their own right but from their positionin a system of media relationships it is perhaps more accuratetodescribe this as a “reflex”and not the moretraditional mixing of media.
Perhaps Zhou Jinhua’s new style of painting can be best described as“surrealism without asubconscious.”With this approach the most uncontrolledelement are themetaphorical images which appear to have noapparentdepth. These are not illusions,but more closely resemblea form of non individualized collective free association, stripped of the burden and projection of individual or collective consciousness.In this way,Zhou Jinhua’s “Non schizophrenic schizophrenic”art is surrealism minus the declarative intentand avant-garde elements.