No Further
Text/Yan Yi’neng
Recently, I was asked how preparations for the solo exhibition were progressing. My answer was: the next one is already prepared, but this one is not; next year’s has already begun to take shape, while this year’s is still unfinished.
More than a century ago, Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote in We: “Man can love only what cannot be conquered. In a transparent society, ‘We’ comes from God, while the ‘I’ from the Devil.” Today, the relationship between the self and the collective, the fragment and the whole, remains a fundamental motif of painting. The painter cultivates the pictorial surface, while outside the image there exists a frame and a discursive system. When someone insists that a painting is an abstract painting, what exactly are they articulating? Language is the vessel of consciousness, yet expression itself is also an impediment. Painting lays bare the contradictions of human existence. Judging a painting solely from its outcome, the gaze instinctively searches for order while evading chaos; the eye ignores the true difficulties embedded within the work, though those very difficulties are the real author of the painting—simultaneously its creator and the destroyer of the self. Must the labor of the fragment be validated by the whole in order to become meaningful? If the destination can only be reached by passing through an edifice woven from lies, how should the individual choose? Bodily response is more immediate than thought. If the pictorial surface may be likened to a body, and the person standing before the painting to a brain, then the body is always more honest than the mind. The painter is divided; a single painting is often accompanied by several conflicting personalities. Such a process is difficult to explain, difficult to comprehend, and even more difficult to paint clearly. Wrinkles emerge within the pigment, layers of color age and decay, like those mute, obsolete, and unmanifestable moments hidden in backlit spaces—far from the ellipses of explanatory texts. Painting has no route of return: intermittent self-hypnosis interrupted by sudden awakenings.
Rules
We live within experience, and irregularly shaped canvases are often regarded as anomalies. Yet in nature, surrounded by mountains and rivers, the standard rectangle itself appears strangely incongruous. All human rules are merely components of a larger natural ecology. If an artist dies in his forties, people say he died too young; if he lives well into his forties, people say he is no longer young. Ultimately, art prompts a particular attitude: should one declare, “I am proud to be human,” or “I am sorry to be human”? My paintings are neither square enough nor round enough. In the eyes of others, are these truly artworks? From a cat’s perspective, are they scratching boards or climbing structures? I do not know. But I do know that for cats, paintings are not meant to be viewed—they are meant for sharpening claws or scaling surfaces.
Prenatal Education
Although I go to the studio every day as usual, most of the time I am not truly working; I merely remain in the company of the materials of painting. Often, after squeezing out the paint, I already feel exhausted and lose interest in whatever follows. One day, I happened to discover that Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, which I frequently listen to while painting, is widely regarded as prenatal music, particularly suitable during the second trimester of pregnancy. Perhaps the artwork itself resembles that slow-moving pregnant body, while the artist’s spirit exists within a process akin to prenatal conditioning, not yet fully born into the world. Gradually, I became obsessed with the preliminary preparations of painting, increasingly self-important, as though I had become part of the painting apparatus itself, or had acquired some form of clerical vocation. Clergy must distinguish between divinity and sinfulness. Human beings are suspicious phototropic creatures, and like every other form of theocracy, the divinity of light is ultimately subjected to condemnation. Some say: “When a beam of light enters a room and reveals all its filth and ugliness, the light itself becomes guilty.” Others believe that ever since “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light,” certain forms of light have continually obscured others. Under the rule of intense illumination, fireflies and meteors seem never to have existed at all. Perhaps we sleep better when night descends; those endlessly disputed questions quietly withdraw from the stage. At times, art moves in opposition to enlightenment itself. The artwork remains connected to the darkest of places, and when the viewer scrutinizes the desperate corners within a painting, illumination emerges from behind them.
Tools
Impasto oil paint is opaque: it conceals light while simultaneously attempting to narrate its story. I am particularly drawn to the sentence written by Edvard Munch in an 1892 manuscript: “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them, and that is eternity.” The essential information of many artworks resides along their edges and beneath their surfaces. The painter always stands with his back to the viewer and his face toward the canvas, perpetually seized by the impulse to grasp something from behind the frame, even after repeatedly confirming that nothing exists there. Such is his fate: a tool awaiting use and transformation, rusted and worn. Occasionally, he pauses to think for a brief moment, but most of the time, the self as tool remains fixed in the same place. This is no different from the patient in a psychiatric hospital crouching in a corner because he believes himself to be a flowerpot.
No Further
Painting resembles someone who has missed most of his own era, moving slowly while observing a society that transforms at relentless speed. One day, a new painting is born, seemingly full of promise. Another day, that same work is excavated from the desolate tombs and ruins of history, its information obscured, uncannily resembling a true abstract painting. The work becomes imprisoned within a formal space governed by the very rules it has evolved for itself: a utopia constructed upon trial and error, stubbornly rigid on one side yet fragile and vulnerable on the other, like a Prince Rupert's Drop. In a future society of greater tolerance, obsolescence may become the newest aesthetic fashion, and cosmetic surgery may trend toward transforming young people into centenarians. The streets will then be filled with white-haired, weathered faces reveling in uninhibited celebration. An old man pauses by the roadside in contemplation before continuing on his journey. He has spent his entire life walking, yet in the end, he never succeeded in leaving the cave.
