An Adventurer of Individual Narrative
作者:WangLin2011-10-11 15:06:19 来源:网络
Several stages of artistic experience
A middle-aged, self-educated man came to Beijing from Wuhu, Anhui province in 1985, and attended the Print-making Department of Central Academy of Fine Arts. He did not go to the big dormitory of advanced students majored in painting, but moved directly into the small room of art history department. The unexpected intruder was very unpopular, and five former roommates happened to reject him without prior consultation. The situation did not ease until the second semester.
That man was Ying Tianqi, my roommate and classmate twenty-five years ago. At that time, I did not know much about him. He was uncommunicative, and always went out in the early morning and got back till late at night. In addition, he was a withdrawn fellow. But it was an exception to see Robert Rauschenberg s exhibition next year, because everyone was excited; after Ying Tianqi attended Robert Rauschenberg s lecture alone at Central Institute of Arts and Crafts, he could not help reporting back enthusiastically to us. It was the most harmonious and exciting conversation in our dormitory during the year. I remembered that he spoke sonorously in high spirits, and his remarks sounded quite rational and logical. Until years later, he told me that he also attended my lecture held in Central Academy of Fine Arts, and remembered my statement that art was not only a kind of social ideology but a kind of tool for social communications. I delivered the lecture with the permission of Zhong Han, director of academic committee, though I had no idea why he allowed an advanced student to step on the platform of the academy. Anyway, the students all considered it a great glory, and then ran round and told everyone, so consequently many people came to support me. I thought that objectivity of art must be attributed to interconnections of the two parties during communication, i.e. the transmissibility and verifiability of mutual feelings . Ying Tianqi quite agreed with my view, and when he had a conversation with Liu Xiaochun in 2004, he said, Art anyhow is a kind of communicable thing, I suppose, and art itself needs transmitting; if we recognize it as something transmittable, we should study the recipients. This seems to be the theoretical basis for his involvement in social scenes and for his engagement in drama, performance, installation, and environmental art.
As said before, American artist Robert Rauschenberg s exhibition at the National Art Museum of China had a crucial impact on Ying Tianqi s artistic creation. It not only broadened his knowledge of off-easel art forms, such as installation, performance etc., but also made him realize the popular trend in Pop conception, and he was inspired and benefited a lot from Robert Rauschenberg s expression of the relation between art and humanity. Two statements were worth mentioning here. One was the prologue of Robert Rauschenberg s lecture, If only the world s soldiers don t fight, but carry paintings, transport paintings, and hold exhibitions for artists! (His paintings are so big that they have to be transported by the warplane when he held an itinerant exhibition across the world). The other was the concluding remarks of the introduction to the exhibition, Sharing everyone s unique characteristics will draw us much closer. Those words became his creed that kept encouraging him to proceed with his artistic exploration for years. His contact with Xu Bing was much the same. Xu Bing s emphasis on the interrelations among art, society and culture had great impact on Ying Tianqi early on. Xu Bing said to him, You should put yourself in a large cultural context, but your current approach is to go inside rather than go outside, you are going into the depth of your heart, so it will be dangerous to go on in this way. And Xu Bing s work Xi Shi Jian (also called A Sealed Book ) exhibited at the Modern Art Exhibition was deeply appreciated by Ying Tianqi. He wrote articles to refute my different perspectives towards Xu Bing s works. But even now, my criticism based on populist position against his academic tendency still works. Xu Bing brims with talents but with dual personality. He created masterpieces like New English Calligraphy , but produced such boring works as Phoenix at the same time. Here, I did not want to go into this issue. Xu Bing dealt with the unknown world with the unrecognizable A Sealed Book , which inspired Ying Tianqi s interest in mystery. Both Xu Bing and Ying Tianqi have been inspired by Robert Rauschenberg s exhibition. Rauschenberg said in his lecture, An artist s mission is to keep seeking mystery. Practice and learn to see. Only when you see more can you find mysteries. I m composing my own songs, and compose new songs after I find new mysteries. In the article concerning Xu Bing s art, I wrote, Mystery, created as a feeling, is indescribable and has an impenetrable sense of depth. The statement was actually quite appropriate for explaining Ying Tianqi s later print work of Xidi Village .
Ying Tianqi was born in Wuhu, Anhui province. Anhui s cultural lineage and Wuhu s spirit nurtured him. As far as I was concerned, Anhui people were self-confident and stubborn, but Ying Tianqi was no exception. He was talented in painting in his childhood, but had no family background, so he was unable to go to university. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution his father was sent into the cowshed , and his first personal exhibition was also held in the cowshed with oil paintings hung up on the wall. Long-term political repression resulted in his introversion and loneliness, and beneath his handsome and calm appearance there was always a nameless tinge of sadness. Before he went to Beijing for further study, he was already well-known in local artistic circles. In 1979, his watercolor print Fishing Tidings won first prize at the Anhui Youth Fine Arts Exhibition, while failing to attend the normal Academy of Fine Arts made his heart sore. After entering Central Academy of Fine Arts, different from the unwavering revolutionary attitude of other young people, he questioned tradition and admired academe at the same time. It is quite crucial to Ying Tianqi because his creation highlights both technicality and scholarization. I have no intention to commend or criticize here, but to point out his unique artistic feelings and distinctive mental disposition that cannot be ignored when we analyze an artist. Ying Tianqi s hometown Anhui has the most mature and accomplished traditional Chinese folk houses, and the original Ten-li Long Street in Wuhu is the most typical one. Its architectural methods and spatial structure have left huge impact on Ying Tianqi. Maybe he is unaware that his art always spontaneously interact with architecture, architectural environment, architectural history, and the people inside and outside the architecture. However, Chinese architecture is full of poetic quality of earth and mother, and its depth and massiveness nourish Ying Tianqi s inner artistic spirit, that is, the trinity of cultural traits, artistic intuition, and rational power in formal language.
Xidi Village, Hard to Say Goodbye
Let s come to Xidi Village once again.
Soon after Ying Tianqi came back home from Central Academy of Fine Arts, he met a girl from Huangmei Opera School at Tunxi, and the strange girl voluntarily invited him to Xidi Village. He described it like this, In the drizzling rain, with the umbrella the girl guided me to ascend the stone staircase of Xidi ancient folk houses step by step. When I stepped into the Xidi Village from modern life, I was startled by its primitive simplicity, elegance and calmness. The mottled crow gable, low slant wooden houses, stone carvings, decorative openwork windows, bucket arches and cornices were all in cold solemnity. It seemed that old cottages and structure units all recorded past stories and recounted the vicissitudes of history. From then on, I could not do without Xidi. Later, he wrote, However, after Xidi Village Series became famous, the girl with an umbrella who took me to Xidi had disappeared quietly. Until years later, Huangmei opera Huizhou Woman was born out of Xidi Village Series , and finally developed into the right and wrong of Huizhou Woman , she let me realize her perfect humanity with her conscience and justice once again. It felt like destiny, and Ying Tianqi was destined to walk into Dai Wangshu s Rain Lane to encounter the hallucinatory and lilac-like girl.
He worked in Xidi Village for eight years, and finished 32 prints. Wang Qi, former chairman of Chinese Print Association, considered that Ying Tianqi s works were unparalleled in Chinese watercolor print creation and indispensable in the Chinese history of burgeoning prints. Gu Yuan, former president of Central Academy of Fine Arts, acclaimed his works, They are cream of the crop among the excellent works . When famous artist Huang Yongyu heard that Ying Tianqi was an advanced student of the Print-making Department of Central Academy of Fine Arts in front of Ying s works, he could not help sighing like this, It is amazing, I dare say that no teacher including me in Central Academy of Fine Arts can make such weighty works . Such favorable comments from authorities of Chinese Artists Association and Central Academy of Fine Arts naturally granted him much honor from the official mainstream system and satisfied his need for recognition from academe as well. But 9on the other hand, these praises screened to some extent his historical contribution during the New Trend Art Movement, so his works had no access to new critical perspectives for a long time. Actually the division of camps had little to do with his individual creation just as Xu Bing rightly pointed out, Such profound and real works only belong to those who are sensitive to the culture of the era and have such consciousness rather than those artists who purposely implant the so-called modern idea . The value of one artist does not reside in what he declares, but in whether he initiates consciously or unconsciously some kind of possibility, while allowing oneself and others actually to access the artistic problem context and spiritual enlightenment.
There are many commentaries on Ying Tianqi s prints Xidi Village Series , but they are rarely be interpreted from the perspective of art history. Prints are of special significance in Chinese art history due to its function of saving the nation from subjugation, ensuring its survival and urging social revolution. The newly emerging prints once led artistic creation during the 1930s-1940s and were extraordinarily authoritative after the founding of the PRC. The solid fortress of socialist realistic creative methods was in the field of prints. The works of Xu Bing and Ying Tianqi were the most challenging thing during the New Trend Art Movement in 1985. By resorting to the plurality of prints and process of creation, and through exploring the fairly pure language of prints, Xu Bing s Xi Shi Jian aims at dissolving Chinese society s claim to rights of artistic meanings by means of meaningless absurdity in contradictions between interpretation of words and interruption of meanings, while deriving symbolic cultural meanings from creative methods of individual behavior and marking the end of revolutionary realistic prints. If Xu Bing s creation is from inside out, Ying Tianqi s Xidi Village Series is indeed from outside in, and he also attempts to use individualized language exploration in place of collective creative methods. Starting from the work Old House , Ying Tianqi is different from other artists such as He Datian who depicts the nostalgia of old building style, and he intentionally gets rid of romantic emotion aiming at watching quietly a kind of historical existence, and the idea of rational thinking runs through the whole process of creative thinking of Xidi Village Series all the time. That is the key reason why he gets rid of the elegant and delicate tradition of Jiangsu watercolor prints through the simultaneous application of concave-convex printing block in the working process of woodcut and watercolor prints, thus strengthening the expressiveness and adding abstract illusion. Different from works of those artists like Chen Qi who articulates oriental classical aesthetics with delicate realistic paintings and pure modeling, Ying Tianqi prefers to instill modern people s insights into traditional culture that is full of suspicion but hard to part with. With a definitive space processing mode, he interjects some large black rectangle plane into visual space, block associations with real space, and make the black block turn into immaterial emptiness existing for soul. The separation of scenes leads to contemplation over soul, solitude and absurdity. But the unknown absurdity and unspeakable sense of strangeness are just modern people s sentiments towards traditional culture. Both Ying Tianqi and Xu Bing happen to bring about introspection of the absurdity of traditional culture through disrupting realistic aesthetic habits. If compared with Ying Tianqi s subtle, delicate and creeping style, Xu Bing s overspreading and high-altitude bombing style is more apt to be accepted as template of cultural movement by the critics of New Trend Art. That is why critics in Beijing unanimously offer full and even excessive interpretations to Xu Bing s works. To be honest, when I am confronted with their works, I prefer Ying Tianqi s Xidi Village Series to Xu Bing s Xi Shi Jian , though the latter proves to be an indispensable masterpiece in contemporary Chinese art history.
Xu Bing s warning to Ying Tianqi is correct because Ying Tianqi s increasingly closed individuality would lead him to the schematic and mental dead end, if he moves on like that. Ying Tianqi s works present the unconscious power in imaginative life. (David Oman) Psychologically speaking, the unconsciousness presented in Xidi Village Series prints is very repressive, which has something to do with his cautious evasion of women all the time. This can be seen from the poem he wrote to a girl from Huangmei Opera School but kept for himself: You re a jade / I dare not look up / I m afraid that this snow-white jade / will turn into mist and smoke [ ] I do not know his experiences, but I have a strong sense of his transformation from life instinct to death instinct. His psychological shadow is intensely hidden in black block of Xidi prints, unfathomable and horrible. Spiritually and psychologically speaking, that is probably the reason why Ying Tianqi suffers from depression later, and why Han Zaifen concentrates on performance due to prints and destroys herself due to performance. An Italian oversea student called Sabinas once said rather sensitively to Ying Tianqi, Gu Cheng remarked in his poem, My heart is my kingdom, and I am the prince. People who enter the kingdom are not simple. Gu Cheng entered, but he did not get out, nor did Van Gogh. I see you entering, and I hope you can get out. Finally, Ying Tianqi struggled out in awareness, while the beautiful Huizhou Woman", I suppose, still stayed in that kingdom.
From Play to Installation Behavior
A good play began like this.
When the famous Huangmei opera actress Han Zaifen saw Ying Tianqi s prints Xidi Village , she burst out a whim to invite him to co-createHuangmei opera Huizhou Woman and to be in charge of stage design, playwriting and theater performance, etc. It coincided with Ying Tianqi sidea of walking out of Xidi. As early as Ying Tianqi held his ninth Xidi prints exhibition in his home city Wuhu in 1994, he filmed a TV feature show because he was not only confronted with the challenge of future risks, but also had to abdicate established recognition in a utilitarian sense. However, Ying moved on to break through without hesitation. He made installation works Door and Xidi Altar as well as performance art Selling Xidi Village Contract for the first time at the exhibition.
After 1994, Ying Tianqi got involved in society from two aspects: on one hand, he expanded his social influence with the success of Xidi Village prints, for instance, Ying Tianqi Xidi Village Art Gallery was completed; he was entitled honorary Villager of Xidi Village ; he issued works on first-day covers, postcards, IC phone cards, and sold works at a high price on auction through art galleries, etc. He went southwards to Guangdong, worked as art director in some presswork group company, managed the journal, and wrote articles. And then he transferred to Shenzhen University, and set up Ying Tianqi Watercolor Print Studio in Xi an Academy of Fine Arts. Later, he served as general advisor for reconstructing the ancient city Wuhu, and finished planning for protection of the ancient city. Though those activities were not directly linked to artistic creation, they were effective for his psychological recovery, and broadened his mind as well as his horizon for art. On the other hand, following the creative idea of installation and performance art, he utilized various kinds of open social scenes and finished a series of conceptual artistic works. He finished installation work Infusion during the Guangzhou Art Fair. He experienced from interior to exterior, from individual practice to public participation from 1990 to 2001, completed performance art Broken Black-Zero Hours at the toll of New Year s bell for three consecutive years, and created prints Broken Black series on that basis. He practiced posting behavior entitled Seeking around the old living quarter in Shanghai and Chengdu in 2002, and expanded the areas in 2004, practicing large-scale installation, environment, and performance art such as Big Paper-cut in different places in Shenzhen. Thereafter he fulfilled video and on-site performance artwork Traces-Vicissitudes . Those works were almost finished separately outside the circle of prints and modern art, and they not only helped him to achieve self-redemption, but also reflected social problems. With the prints Xidi Village , he could have got access to the mainstream system and sought after an official post, but instead he moved those installations and performance artworks into the National Art Museum of China, and placed them before the old gentlemen of Art Association. After participating in the national prints contest and representative assembly, he would never want to send his works for the National Fine Arts Exhibitions again. His refusal was aiming at the very authoritative Beijing narrative , and his artistic activities advocated individual freedom for creation and cultural right of civil society. Seen from the accomplished conceptual works, there are three striking aspects:
Firstly, the stage settings and theater installations designed by him in Huangmei opera Huizhou Woman . It was very successful and was the first of all in Chinese art world. His deep involvement in another realm shed some light on the integrating of modern art and drama. As Han Zaifen said, I cannot forget the painting installations displayed at the lobby by Ying Tianqi at premiere in Hefei, and they were used for extending the stage to the lobby. Those delicately engraved wooden doors and windows of the Qing dynasty displayed at lobby were familiar to me since I have gone to Huizhou to experience life for several times, and they are now being presented at the theater with the play in which I play the leading role. Ying Tianqi made an oil painting Huizhou Woman played by Han Zaifen displayed in the middle of the lobby. Tens of prints exhibited at the lobby are more familiar to me. I really felt the so-called scene by director Chen Xinyi when I performed on the stage, and in the last scene, as I stepped down the stairs and stood on the edge, I felt that I already walked into audience, into the lobby, and integrated into the solemn black and white prints. The experience of surpassing the stage to the space never occurred in previous performance. I am confident that the present audiences must have the same complete new experience, and thereby activate painting factors in their sub-consciousness.
Secondly, his performance of breaking the black glass. There are too many performance pieces or installation artworks made of glass, but Ying Tianqi s uniqueness resides with the symbolism of works and abstract prints subsequently finished. So long as you take a look at the false noisy scene for celebration all over China at the turn of the century, you would understand problem awareness and critical spirit presented in Ying Tianqi s destructive performance. If compared with installation-performance art Ink-Spot made by Wang Chun in Shenzhen in 1989, Broken Black finished in the same place by Ying Tianqi ten years later undoubtedly forms a historical echo. The densely depressing tragic atmosphere also discloses the historical, political and cultural background.
Thirdly, his video works finished in his home city Wuhu. It was in 2008 that Ying Tianqi heard that the old district would be demolished. He filmed the daily life of a family from morning to night with the camera, and it happened to be traditional Dragon Boat Day. On the same day of the year after, Ying Tianqi played the on-the-spot video on the scene of the demolished old district ruins. Many residents who were going to relocate surrounded to watch his work, and recognized the old woman who was alive a year ago but already passed away. His work was plain and simple, but full of grassroots humanist strength. China has no real civil society, and civil people lack autonomous and independent cultural rights. Bureaucratic centralization and its ideology insert all-round direct control over day-to-day life of ordinary people, which is common and long-standing, and no attention is paid to it. In the most realistic way of narration, the works reveal speechless silence of the low-class people, including helpless averments and silent protests.
Ying Tianqi is considered to be the discoverer of Xidi village. When Xidi village as world cultural heritage is developed well as tourist industry by the local government, what Ying Tianqi has in mind is his first visit to Xidi village. He is entirely different from government officials in terms of their idea of historical tradition: We are living in a terribly noisy world in the age of information explosion, and social conditions are changing like a kaleidoscope. While Xidi village as a cultural symbol once silently stood outside the world alone. I always feel that we are not supposed to bother her too much, and maybe she shall be taken as a living fossil , a referential and comparable coordinate for cultural development in different times. The changeable era makes us excessively stress the change itself, but ignore the initial meaning of pursuing changes . When we shack off rigidity and conservatism, desperately break a new ground, and taste the fresh and practical, we drift carelessly away from the foundation for everyone. Maybe that s the reason for the remoteness and disappearance of human spiritual home. That is the very reason why Ying Tianqi pursues humanistic demands and innermost yearnings all the time in the course of his creative practice concerning historical themes and resources, and why his works are full of pains, sorrows, and distress.
Objectively speaking, due to excessive adhesion with easel paintings or insufficient transformation of image resources, there are still certain limitations in some of Ying Tianqi s conceptual works. As Mr. Liu Xiaochun indicates, there exist contradictions between privacy and publicity, and clashes between the two poles certainly constitute discrepancies between Ying Tianqi s performance art and other people s, but how to popularize the private problems not only concerns the depth of problem awareness but the disparity of their artistic wisdom. Therefore, I agreed with Ying Tianqi, Avant-garde and modern are not merely two fashionable words or the laurel for boasting one s innovation, but embody artists painful process of thinking, bravery, and sacrifice. Any new creation cannot be perfect and mature, but mere imperfection means the need to be perfect, and only immatureness can breed vitality of life. Thanks to this, I expect that Ying Tianqi continues to create spectacular works in the field of play, performance, installation, and environment.
Ying Tianqi s Traces of Centuries
Ying Tianqi started to create oil paintings from 2006.
Ying Tianqi was unwilling to limit his painting creation in prints, especially in watercolor prints, which urges him to return to easel art. When he got involved in the performance of Huangmei opera Huizhou Woman , he took Han Zaifen as model and drew an oil painting Huizhou Heritage . The method adopted for his later performance artwork Seeking made in Chengdu and Shanghai, and for environmental installation work Big Paper-cut made in Shenzhen are actually emptied-out outlines on oil painting. The hollow human form is a symbol, which means that former Huizhou Woman is already gone; it also means people can invisibly exist in art. Yi Ying makes insightful analysis of Ying Tianqi s works, and she argues that an artist as a human being lays bare his individuality on levels of perspective and psychology, but the nonfigurative subjective presence is more apt to implant the meaning of the work into the formal language. This is the real individual narrative. This type of narrative is neither grand narrative nor petty narrative, or rather, is both grand narrative and petty narrative. Chinese critics are excessively averse to grand narrative, but this phenomenon is not serious analyzed. Artists follow the trend of petty narrative, and frequently take trivial individuality as a reason for subjective existence. Vulgar commonness is quite absurd. It reminds me of Hegel s discussion in Logics that dialectical thinking should be spoken of in terms of trichotomy as individuality, particularity, and universality, rather than be treated as individuality and universality. As individual nsubjects, men s real value lies in his particularity which contains universality and is presented in individuality instead of abstract universality and trivial daily individuality. We have to pay more attention to them when it comes to artistic phenomena.
Ying Tianqi s sensitivity to the turn of the century is already manifested in his performance art Zero Hours . The process of his print creation from Xidi Village , Dreams in Huizhou to Broken Black is one from figurative to semi-figurative then to abstract, also one from expansion of watercolor techniques to the duplication of ready-made works, especially one from pure art form to comprehensive means of expression. His oil painting Traces of Centuries is nothing but his new artistic exploration by means of synthesizing the said things in material works.
Ying Tianqi has been drawing oil painting series entitled Traces of Centuries for five years, and published almost 30 works. In reality, the concept of traces has been haunting him even longer. First and foremost, as a print-maker, he made a long-term study of and had intuitive sensitivity towards the effect of printing traces. Print series Broken Black actually turn into oil paintings Traces of Centuries registering performance art Zero Hours . As early as 1999, he entitled Han Zaifen s stage photo Huizhou Heritage , under the influence of Chen Yifei s Remaining Music of Xunyang , but his attention to historic relics was never interrupted. Secondly, he was quite helpless and disappointed when he participated in urban construction of historical villages, districts, and sites,and his naming of his video work Traces-Vicissitudes created in his hometown Wuhu is rather telling. Lastly and importantly, he poured feelings, insights and thoughts into the historical vicissitudes of human civilization. Ying Tianqi wrote, Before the pulpit in the ancient city Gaochang on which Xuanzang preached, I was surprised that the pulpit once packed with thousands of audience had been actually a handful of earth and a scene of devastated desolation. Time swallowed ruthlessly green trees, clear springs, maidens, fairs, music, dances, love and happiness. I experienced the same feelings in the ruins of the ancient city Pompeii in Italy. Today was only one step away from yesterday. When you were in front of Genesis and Last Judgment by Michelangelo in the chapel in Vatican, you would realize how negligible and great human beings could be.
As representations of human civilization, historical sites symbolize humans spiritual home. There are an immense number of paintings full of nostalgia and sighs. The question is whether Ying Tianqi s works can evoke our deep historical feelings, not so much as existent emotional recognition but as on-spot emotional eruption. Proceeding from the work Dream in Huizhou , the visual angle of the invisible subject is gradually subjected to changes at the hand of Ying Tianqi from overall observation in Xidi Village to partial observation, and even to close-up observation from almost zero distance in Traces of Centuries . As the distance becomes extremely short, the object is injected with a special feeling of physicality, a visual sense of touchability so to speak. The painters just seek history, discover history and touch history via such a feeling. It is the shifting of visual angles that allows us to see (rather than to have a look at) the vicissitudes of history and its dismalness and mournfulness. But bigger psychological temptations spring from cultural traits in Ying Tianqi s works. Peng De notes that Ying Tianqi s coloring is derived from symbolic colors of black and white in the Chinese color system of five elements, and Chang Ningsheng also lays stress on the linkage between the application of the color black, Chinese ethnicity, and Taoist metaphysics. History is indeed solitary, gloomy, silent and mysterious . If artistic creation is to let people really feel history, they must touch cultural consciousness and unconsciousness hidden in individuals and the collective. There are a large number of reviews on the effect of the color black in Ying Tianqi s paintings. But the relationship between black and white undergoes changes in Traces of Centuries in order to highlight and emphasize the warm color rather than the cold color. When the full thick color perfectly combines with delicate thin texture, it not only shows the different artistic charm of oil paintings vis- -vis prints but also makes Ying Tianqi really walk out of struggling self-enclosed schemata in such prints as Xidi Village , and enter into a wider and more free creative field.
In order to maintain a solemn feeling towards history and to express his awe and admiration for human civilization, Ying Tianqi employs a stable mode of composition in most of his pictures. This kind of organization of shapes and planes comes close to constructivist abstract schemata, but the difference is that the painter implants different rational intuition and intuitive reason into abstract composition. When Ying Tianqi began to learn drawing in his childhood, Wu Dongliang saw his sketches and said, This boy is sensitive to straight lines. Later, Ying Tianqi himself said, I will spent a whole day drawing a single straight line, and I can even judge deviation by the millimeter between a line and a straight line only by naked eyes. There is not a single curve in my prints, including my ongoing work Traces . Color lumps and textures are all divided by straight lines, and the straight lines at the junction of black lumps are straighter. The straight line embodies my character. The delicate treatment of straight lines is one of the most intriguing form compositions in Traces of Centuries , which is Ying Tianqi s specialization in creative practice. It is equally noteworthy that his works usually contain the mathematic relation of three , which is a kind of unconscious sense of form in Chinese cultural psychology. Many works in Traces of Centuries either naturally fall into three parts, or expand around the three-color base of black, white, and grey. Laozi observes in Tao Te Ching , The Way produces one; one produces two; two produces three; three produces all things. Three is a symbolic number to communicate with all things in Chinese historical tradition, and bears rich cultural connotations in Chinese aesthetic psychology. Inspired by the specific symbolism of three vis- -vis all things and rich contradictoriness between three and two , Ying Tianqi embeds the pure, complex, harmonious and tense sense of form into the work Traces and Centuries . If Ying Tianqi s keen intuition towards straight lines shows his introspection of individual unconsciousness, his unintentional application of trichotomy embodies the creativity activated in collective unconsciousness. By means of distinctive abstract composition, Ying Tianqi rediscovers traditional cultural connotations, and keeps the rational spirit of the New Trend Art Movement in 1985 in his expression of poeticized history and of historical poeticization. The point I want to make is how many artists are capable of rediscovering the historical value in their own works when the surging New Trend Art Movement in 1985 had already become a thing of the past?
Only through this kind of abstract composition of lines and planes, in the course of selecting subject matter and material, and treating brushwork and texture, can Ying Tianqi s creation of Traces of Centuries penetrate into national culture psychology and enable people to have a profound and intense on-spot spiritual experience. Needless to say, many art critics have already elaborated on this .
Ying Tianqi s material oil painting series Traces of Centuries are no less than Chinese abstraction created in the international context, the context of art history, and artists individual creative thinking. The Chinese is not the so-called Chinese characteristics and Chinese model propagated by official media but the Chinese historical tradition rediscovered by artists living among the people, the Chinese cultural wisdom constantly presented, and the Chineseness carried and activated by individual freedom. As for freedom, Ying Tianqi does not bother whether it is abstract, figurative or ready-made, nor minds whether it is expression, composition or imagery. With his gifts, literary talent, inspiration, and comprehension, he goes along his own way, actively reacting to life, getting involved in reality and seriously pondering over problems out of historical conscience and social responsibilities felt by a man or an artist, regardless of the mainstream, of social circles, even of the market power. As a pathfinder and adventurer of individual narrative, I suppose, Ying Tianqi is a noteworthy role model in Chinese modern art and contemporary art criticism.
|
-
More..
名人堂
-
-
More..
艺术展览
|
