不像画

展览开幕:2018年12月28日晚8点
展览时间:2018年12月28日——2019年1月7日(周日闭馆)
地点:TCG诺地卡文化中心,昆明西坝路101号创库艺术社区
联合主办:TCG诺地卡文化中心、云南艺术学院美术学院油画系

策展人:罗菲
参展艺术家:
弗雷德里克·费慕林 Fredrik Fermelin(瑞典) 和丽斌
刘辉 杨鼎 饶建雄 李思雨 王成龙 张龙 蒋才 何汝婷 蒋启建 董春文 刀继成
刘再明 杨振琦 段宇航 邵琳鉴 王胜凯 李振宇 刘俊妤 张俊鹏 焦勇 刘梦云 梁紫瑞 黄梓恒 李红梅 魏陆婕 刘宇 李涛 陶昱希 晋锐娜 白再阳 汤邵元 和玉菊 张磊 马隽哲 徐国鑫 卞文俊 马煜程 杨琪 周子晋 张晨阳 闻宽 安炤宇 杨杰 李华 傅尔加周
现场音乐:Eilev Stoveland Dekko(挪威),Fredrik Fermelin(瑞典)

《不像画》前言:

文: 罗菲

绘画可能是今天艺术领域最具亲和力也最令人头疼的事情之一,它总是能提供有关自身的故事,那些故事又为后来的画家们设定了诸多无法绕开的路标。它时而预示着某种终结,时而预示着某种回归,更多时候,它只是让人感到尚可继续下去的古老的游戏。对很多画家来说,画画只是属于自己的事情,那种眼界与手艺的持续成长让人着迷,仅此而已。

只是今天的绘画已不再是艺术家们的拓荒之地,今天的艺术家面对的不只是绘画,而是整个艺术世界。人们从绘画的方法、观看和绘画这个行动本身去寻找突破口,去尝试“重新”画“一张画”的可能,去尝试画“画画”这件事情。这不只是让“画画”变得更加复杂,也让“看画”变得更加复杂,它们都变得不再直观。绘画的任务不再是再现或者表现,而是提供“画画”和“看画”的某种可能。这也正是我们今天这个展览的出发点。

2015年从瑞典皇家美院毕业的艺术家弗雷德里克今年9月来到昆明TCG诺地卡驻留,整整三个月他完全专注于绘画,在此之前,他主要从事表演艺术、声音艺术等现场艺术形式。弗雷德里克的绘画观念与gif格式的图像生成有关,两张看上去相似的图像并置在一起,由观众自己去联想它们之间的关联,类似电影蒙太奇的方法。但他只是让两张绘画在空间上并置,而不是时间上关联。在画面的最表层,是一种表现主义倾向的风格,尽管他极力否认自己的绘画与表现主义风格有关,因为那不是他要追求的,他关注的是画面和画面之间潜在的建构关系。

和丽斌近些年的绘画实践融合了行为艺术的方式——盲画,在户外或室内,在深夜里,他在大尺幅的画布上画他对一个场景的印象和感受。在他的盲画实践中,绘画这一拥有悠久历史的艺术实践被逼入临界状态:可知与不可知之间,可见与不可见之间,可画与不可画之间。唯一能确定并不断被确定的,就是在广袤自然环境中的艺术家自身的存在和自我的增长,这种确认在漫长黑暗中通过对话和较量来完成。这让绘画成为摄影一样,在暗中显影,在日光之下观看。

和丽斌的绘画与弗雷德里克的绘画在风格层面十分相似,他们都用表现主义手法去画风景,但又都提供了一种非常规的“看画”经验。和丽斌刻意让自己看不见的时候画自己的看见,画面的最终显现依赖时间。弗雷德里克通过不同画面空间上的并置,让画面和看画产生不确定性和异样感。他们都用最直观的方式去画,但又都制造出多层次的观看逻辑。

这次展览还有四十余位参加和丽斌短期表现性绘画课程的云艺的同学们,他们的画作结合了行动绘画的练习方法,同样探讨的是画面以外的有关绘画如何可能的问题。弗雷德里克、和丽斌还有诸位同学们,为我们呈现这样一个有关“绘画背后的绘画”的交流展,我姑且把它命名为“不像画”。

Outrageous, like a painting.

Outrageous, like a painting.
text: Luo Fei
editor in English: Sanne Raabjerg

Painting is probably one of the most intimate and vexing things in the art world today. It always provides stories about itself. These stories set a lot of road signs for later painters. Sometimes, it heralds some sort of end, and sometimes it heralds a return. More frequently, it is just an ancient game that makes people feel like they can continue on their paths. For many painters, painting is just a matter of their own interest, and the continuing growth of their vision and craftsmanship is fascinating, and nothing more.

But painting today is no longer the wild land of artists. Today’s artists are not only facing painting itself, but also the entire art world. People go from looking for breakthroughs, in the methods of painting, in the way of seeing images and in the performative part of painting, to painting the possibility of “painting a painting” and to painting the matter of “painting”. This does not only make “painting” more complicated, but it also makes “seeing paintings” more complicated, since they are no longer as intuitive. The task of painting is no longer just to represent or express something, but to provide different possibilities in “painting” and “seeing”. Correspondingly, this is the starting point of our exhibition today.

Fredrik Fermelin, an artist who graduated from the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Sweden in 2015, came to TCG Nordica in September as an artist in residence. Here, he spent three full months focusing on painting. Before that, he mainly engaged in performance, installation, video and digital media, etc. Fermelin’s concept of painting is related to image generation in gif format. Two seemingly similar images are juxtaposed, and the audience themselves associate their correlation, similar to the method of making film montage. However, he just makes two paintings juxtaposed in space, not in time. Although he strongly denies that his paintings are related to the expressionist style, on the surface level they might seem to comprise expressionist tendencies, but that is not what he wants to pursue. He is more concerned with the potential constructional relationship between the pictures.

He Libin’s painting practice in recent years combines the way of performance art with blind painting. In the middle of the night, he paints his impressions and feelings on a large-scale canvas, both indoors and outdoors. In his practice of blind painting, painting, an art form with a long history, is forced into a critical state: Between visible and invisible, between known and unknown, between painting and non-painting. The only thing that can be identified and continually confirmed is the artist’s own existence and self-growth in the vast natural environment. This confirmation is accomplished through inner dialogue and contests in the long-lasting darkness. This turns the painting process into photography development: Developing it in the dark, watching it in the daylight.

He Libin’s and Fermelin’s paintings are very similar in style. They both use expressionism to paint landscapes, and they both provide an unconventional “seeing” experience. He Libin deliberately paints what he has seen when he cannot see; therefore, only time will show the final appearance of the painting. Fermelin’s juxtaposition in space of different paintings, creates uncertainty and dissimilarity in the paintings themselves and in the seeing of the paintings. They both paint in the most intuitive way, but at the same time they create paintings that can be seen on multiple levels.

For this exhibition, more than forty students from Yunnan Arts University participated in He Libin’s short-term expressive painting course. They combine their paintings with the practice methods of action painting, in order to discuss how paintings can be. Fredrik Fermelin, He Libin and the students present us with such a communicative exhibition about “Paintings Behind Paintings”. Here, I have just named it “Outrageous, like a painting”.

Curator: Luo Fei
Artists: Fredrik Fermelin, He Libin and his students from the Yunnan Arts University
Live Music on the opening: Eilev Stoveland Dekko, Fredrik Fermelin

Opening: 8pm, Dec 28th, 2018
Exhibition Time: Dec 28th 2018 to Jan 7th 2019 (Sundays Close)
TCG Nordica Culture Center, Chuangku, Xibalu 101, Kunming
Organized by TCG Nordica and Oilpainting Department of Yunnan Arts University

Multiple Adaptations: from Poem to Poem, from Poem to Visual Art

multiple-adaptions-poster400

Multiple Adaptations: from Poem to Poem, from Poem to Visual Art

The Amsterdams Grafisch Atelier and TCG Nordica, an art center in Kunming (China) joined forces in a transnational project that, focuses on the interrelation between text and image, specifically between Dutch and Chinese poetry in translation and art works inspired by them.
Six Chinese participants based their paintings and drawings on poems by H.H. ter Balkt , Hans Faverey, Chr.J. van Geel, Gerrit Kouwenaar, M. Vasalis and Ellen Warmond, translated into Chinese by Maghiel van Crevel and Ma Gaoming. Each of the six poems are enigmatic texts full of paradoxes and opaque meanings, that present an enormous challenge to the translator, at the same time providing the visual interpreter with ample space for a non-illustrative approach.
Six Dutch printmaker/artists produced monumental prints inspired by poems of the famous contemporary Chinese poet, author, and filmmaker Yu Jian. “Staunchly unlyrical” and making his readers “see eternity in the most everyday and unexpected places” (Simon Patton), Yu Jian’s poems present their visual interpreters with the equal challenge of tuning into the foreign voice, searching for affinities, and keeping their own idiosyncratic vision.
To facilitate comparison and analysis, all works are shown jointly with the texts that are printed on banners, forming thus an integral part of the exhibition. Both partners of the project stress the performative nature of the project by reading and performing the poetry at the opening and in separate programs.
The initiative for the exchange came from Ursula Neubauer, an Amsterdam artist who had visited Kunming in the fall of 2012. The project has been worked out and coordinated jointly by Luo Fei, former director of TCG Nordica and Ursula Neubauer, representing the Amsterdams Grafisch Atelier.
The event in Kunming took place, with great success, at the gallery of TCG Nordica between April 24-May 31, 2015.
See: http://en.tcgnordica.com/2015/multiple-adaptations

In Amsterdam the project will be presented at SBK KNSM/ Bagagehal
from October 18 through November 1, 2015.
The opening will include a performance. Speakers and readers are Kristien van den Oever, director of the Amsterdams Grafisch Atelier, Yi Lai, Chinese poet and literary scholar at the (Central China Normal University, Wuhan). G.W.Sok, singer and poet and Christianne Rugl Communication Manager. Performance artist Nienke Dekker will interpret two 2 poems of the exhibition.
Sunday November 1 at 3 p.m. a closing music program, from poem to visual art to music by The And.

Perdu, centre for poetry and experiment, will present a related program on October 21. The participants of the panel discussion are Yi Lai, Maartje Smits and Sofie Sun.
The participating artists are: Ning Zhi, Chen Fanyuan, Su Yabi, He Libin, Su Jiaxi, Chang Xiong, Herma Deenen, Christina Hallström, Ursula Neubauer, Naan Rijks, Angelique van Wesemael, and Masha Trebukova

Opening of the exhibition: October 18, from 3 to 6 p.m.
SBK/Bagagehal
Address: KNSM-laan 307-309, 1019 LE Amsterdam
Tel: +31 20-620 13 21 email: amsterdamknsm@sbk.nl
Open on Tue thru Fri: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sat.Za/Sun. from 11a.m. to 6 p.m.
Reachable by tram #10, end stop Azartplein, by bus #48 from Sloterdijk Station and Central Station, by bus 65 from stations Zuid and Amstel.

For further information: www.multipleadaptations.blogspot.com

Thirty Years of Landscaping

Thirty Years of Landscaping
The roadmap of landscape in contemporary Yunnan art
written by He Libin

The year of 1979, was an important one for many Chinese. With the People’s Republic of China witnessing its first year of opening-up and its 30th anniversary, the government’s cultural and art policies began to loosen up. This year, artists working in Kunming, Yunnan, such as Ding Shaoguang, Jiang Tiefeng, Yao Zhonghua, Wang Jinyuan, Liu Shaohui and Wang Ruizhang formed an artist group named “Shen Society.” They  chose the name “Shen Society” for several reasons: first, 1979 was the Year of Monkey in Chinese Lunar Calendar, and one meaning of “Shen” in Chinese language was “monkey;” second, the Monkey King was a popular figure among Chinese; and third, they wanted to express the desire to pursue freedom and truth and uplift social justice, as “Shen” can also mean “uplift.” This group of artists often got together to discuss art, and chose to learn the idea and style from Cubism and Fauvism in modern Western art and to pursue the language of formal beauty in art. In 1980, Shen Society organized an exhibition of 120 artworks from 23 artists in the Museum of Yunnan Province. In the following two years, they organized some artists to hold exhibitions in Beijing and Hong Kong. Their paintings in the main have a tendency of flat painting and decoration deformation, characterized by gorgeous colors, and, through the portrait of the life of minorities in Yunnan, exhibits an aesthetic style featuring intertwined illusion and emotion, exoticism and imagination. The new style, just like a fresh breeze in China’s painting community, at that time still imbued with the style of revolutionary realism in the Cultural Revolution, together with the contention about the style and subject of the fresco1 in Capital Airport, triggered a massive debate about formal beauty across the country, the first nationwide sensation started by Yunnan art. At that time, some younger Yunnan artists were still in college, such as Mao Xuhui in Yunnan College of Art, Zhang Xiaogang and Ye Yongqing in Sichuan College of Art, and Mao Dehai in Northeast Normal University, who asked his university to assign him to a job in Kunming after graduation. These young people, active in thinking, got together naturally, maintained correspondence with each other at college, and went together in Kunming during vacation to watch exhibition, go out for living sketch or discuss art all day and or night. Similarly, they also drew nutrition from Western modernism. But unlike the artists of Shen Society, they accepted the cultural heritages such as expressionism, surrealism, symbolism and existential philosophy. Undergoing the adolescent frustration and rash, they found the Western modernistic ideas and philosophies, particularly those after the impressionism, somehow consistent with their mentality. At that time, artists such as Zhang Ding, Wu Guanzhong and Yuan Yunsheng frequently went to Yunan to sketch, hold exhibition or give lecture. Young artists like Mao Xuhui were also influenced by the concept of “formal beauty2″ raised by these artists. But when they saw the exhibition of German expressionism in the summer of 1982 in Beijing, they were tremendously excited and shocked, realizing that it was expressionism that was the right approach to express their feeling and mentality. Another trace was their experience of traveling to Guishan Mountain several times for live sketch. In 1979, Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing and Yang Yijiang, still college students, went to Guishan Mountain to sketch. Guishan, which they long yearned for, was a village of minority Sani people located about 100 kilometers away from Kunming, a pastoral place very much resembling the scene in the paintings of 19th century French Barbizon School artist Jean Francois Millet. Before them, many senior artists also went there and portray Guishan with the Soviet realistic approach and expressionist language of light. Mao Xuhui and his colleagues also used similar language in their expression, but they always had a feeling that those splendid portraits somehow fell short of their feelings. In the following several years, they went to Guishan several times and gradually found the language that suited their feelings. Mao Xuhui’s “Mother of Laterate: Guishan Series” accentuated the tremendous energy concealed in the red soil, and the people, the trees and herds growing from the red soil are gushing, flushing and erupting, with burning primitiveness and lust everywhere. Zhang Xiaogang’s “Behind Mountain” and “Evening Breeze” exhibit the blunt and rough touches like Van Gauge, portraying the primitiveness and hardship of life in a mountainous village. Ye Yongqing drew upon the composition principles of Western classic fresco in his “Sani Sisters in Shepherd Village,” “Sheep Killed by Wolf in Front of Village,” “Blind Girl Going Home” and “Startled Bird” etc, and sketched a series of pastoral lyric pictures by setting some narrative details and scenes. It was the landscape of Guishan that shed some light onto and awakened their mind long sealed in urban life, and presented a stark contrast with their status and mentality in the city. Back in city, Mao Xuhui finished his artworks like “Red Volume” and “Private Space,” depicting a moving volume struggling to shake off the outside shackles and pursuing the true self when running, reflecting the fact that the confrontation against social ideology is evolving to resistance to everything outside self. Life and dream, reality and illusion, intertwined in his chaotic think, are scarcely distinct from each other. In June 1985, Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang, Pan Dehai and Zhang Long brought their artworks with them and held an exhibition named “Neo-figurative” in the Art Gallery of Jing’an District, Shanghai. What is “neo-figurative”? Mao Xuhui explained in the introduction of the exhibition: “…the concept of ‘neo-figurative’ is devised in an attempt to transfer art away from a vulgar sociological tool and the whole set of false models and social interests that are resulted and to art itself, and to free artists from the position of dependent and slave and restore them to the height of noumenon of man.” Thereafter, the neo-figurative school held several exhibitions in Nanjing, Kunming, Chongqing and the U.S., and later launched activities like “Southwest Art Study Group,” until the full stop when the majority of the members of “neo-figurative” participated in “China Modern Art Exhibition” in 1989.

After 1990s, the artists returned to the status of everyday life, when Mao Xuhui painted “Everyday Epic” series and “Patriarch Series: Vocabulary about Power,” Zhang Xiaogang began to work on “Big Family” which later attracted wide attention, and Ye Yongqing was drawing “Big Poster.” In addition, a school of even younger artists began their journey with a range of exhibition activities: “1992 Painting Exhibition,” “Present Status,” “Individualism,” “Types of Life,” “Urban Personality,” “First Exhibition of Oil Painting Society” etc. Landscape was presented in their artworks with characteristics different the “neo-figurative” school in two ways: first, the anxious sentiment was manifested, and man appears confrontational with landscape; second, the identity of self was blurred, lost, and drifting in weightlessness. In 1992, Zhu Fadong carried out his action of “Notice Seeking Lost Person” in Kunming by looking himself by posting notices seeking himself all over the city in order to express his generation’s feeling of the loss and seeking of self identity in early 1990s. Zeng Xiaofeng’s “Electric Saw and Landscape” juxtaposes electric saw, a symbol of modern industry, and landscape in the same picture, in which the savage electric saw is ripping and devouring ancient architecture and natural landscape, thereby exhibiting fierce clashes between industrial and natural landscapes. Luan Xiaojie in his “Trunk and Branch Series” treats human and tree as a whole body, producing a Delvaux-style grotesquery and surrealistic scene. The objects in the picture, resembling both amputated limbs and muscles, stack in the ambiguous space, glittering with queer shine, while the shallow trunks and branches appear illusive and fragile. Wu Jun’s “Dusk Shadow in Wind” portrays blurred human figure floating above a dilapidated city, with the picture pervaded by endless anxiety. Duan Yuhai’s “Beauty and Limousine” puts a pretty woman, limousine and cosmetics in the same picture, presenting the new orientations and changes in the Chinese society after the 1990s. Li Ji’s “Fashion Girl” also employs the language of gaudiness and juxtaposition by putting a woman with heavy makeup and her pet in a single picture, erotic yet exotic, just like Yamato-e in modern time. In their artworks, everything from the confrontation between humans and their surroundings to drifting in weightlessness is illustrating a kind of potential anxiety and anguish, collectively reflecting the chaos of value, loss of individual identity and the spiritual journey to regain it, juxtaposed by China’s faster process of market reform and urbanization as well as aggravated destruction of natural environment after the 1990s. Their artworks were a reflection of that generation of artists’ collective experience of urban life, and directly heralded the look of the artworks of artists born in the 1970s and 1980s.

After 2000, consumerism and fashion have become the mainstream value in urban life, and the modern popular culture, involving film, magazine, web, cartoon, pervasive advertisements, has constitutes the daily environment for urban dwellers. Artists grown up in such an environment are clearly split in aesthetic approaches: some inherit the scene of anxiety from the previous generation of artists, reflected in their artworks by the tendencies of self-ostracism and anti-metropolitan; others uphold and practice the aesthetics of transient coolness, clamor and popularity, in order to acquire new inspirations and art resources by plunging themselves into the scene of metropolitan consumerist culture. Whether they are anti-metropolitan or putting themselves in metropolitan, landscape exhibits a tendency of virtualization and patching up. Since 2003, several important art events heralded the début of post-1970s and 1980s artists. Exhibitions such as “Health Checkup,” “Sheep Is Coming,” “Altitude Sickness,” “Ultraviolet Radiation,” “Entertainment Is Paramount” etc. on the one hand highlighted the young artists’ sensitivity to and concern about
the relationship between their growth and changes of their surroundings, and on the other hand reflected the divergence of the above-mentioned aesthetic perspectives. In 2003, He Jia began to draw his “Balloon Man” series, which portrays a range of human-like figures without clear identity or complexion, with shining colors all over, drifting or walking in the city or amidst natural sceneries which are thin and transparent, beautiful but illusive just like these balloon men. Zhang Jinxi’s “Glass Man” series exerts the beauty of transparency to the utmost, whereby the body of the glass man reflects the surrounding landscape, which together with the man presents a sense of illusive yet transient vanity. Guo Peng recorded the landscape in Kunming Park with his camera and endowed strong colors to these traditional garden views with manual rendering. Nevertheless, these pictures look in every way like frames of exotic images imbued with a smell of decadence and mustiness. Yu Hua creates an image of a rabbit mingled with man, placing themselves in a metropolitan like a fairy tale, consciously getting lost in the urban labyrinth. Contrary to these artists, some others followed the tradition of expressionism and deliver a primitive and remote flavor with conflicting and turbulent pictures and heavy yet provocative colors. In Zhao Leiming’s paintings, men are always placed in closed space, where even natural landscape appears suffocating, and distorted human body locked in the space is like imprisoned beast struggling. Lan Qingxing’s “Crazy Talk,” “Wind Talk” and “Wind and Rain” portray weeds, starry sky, red trees and red human body to express the desire of man to leave the clamorous urban and return to simple nature. However, would therefore going back to the past be meaningful? He did not give an answer. Shi Zhimin went further with his “Glacial Epoch,” where there is no civilization, no urban, nor the natural landscape today, but the extinction of everything, cold and silent.

As a cross section, the artworks of the above-mentioned artists represent the true situation of post-1970s and 80s artists. Overall, they are more diversified, and values individual difference and experience more, and their artworks also exhibit diversity and new aesthetic tendencies. But this group of artists also generally manifests a tendency of vanity. Whether they are committed to this country or ostracize themselves to somewhere far away, would such approaches actually solve the conflicts and dilemmas in the real world, and deliver an everlasting value to lend the artists experience and enlightenment? Answers to these questions are expected only after necessary observations.

Time keeps on changing, and each generation has their own dilemmas and problems to face and solve, and to confront with the perpetual beings in nature; what the Yunnan artists in the 1940s saw were beautiful landscape and Eden-like minority culture, in which they were enchanted; what the artists in the 1950s saw were the perching images in their inner feeling, where they found their mother of spirituality; artists of the 1960s held themselves slightly aloof when faced with the nature; the disruptive situation of the artists of the 1970s had them see nothing but a realm of vanity whether they placed themselves in urban or returned to nature, whereas artists in the 1980s were lost and enchanted in the landscape of alienation….Facing the eternal nature, what insight do the artists arrive at? Could they acquire from the nature a fundamental wisdom that cuts across everything in the universe, so as to provide mankind today and tomorrow with an enriching and meaningful way of migration in this world? This should be the shared mission and direction for several generations of Yunnan artists.

March 9, 2009 at Yun Yi Xuan, Kunming

Notes:

1. Capital Airport fresco: On September 29, 1979, then China’s largest modernized airport – Capital International Airport, was completed, when 7 giant frescoes in its lounge were also unveiled to the public. Among them was a 27 meters long and 3.4 meters long fresco titled “Water-splashing Festival – Paean of Life” drawn by Yuan Yunsheng, portraying the scene of Dai people (a minority ethnic group living in Southwest China, particularly Yunnan) celebrating their Water-splashing Festival. The fresco consists of two parts: on the front side of the wall was scene of Dai people carrying water, splashing water and dancing; on a smaller wall to the east were scenes of bathing and courting. Because of nudity in this bathing part, the fresco was covered with a curtain several months after it was unveiled for show. On the eve of China’s National Day on October 1, a grand ceremony of completion was held for Capital International Airport, one of the key national construction projects shortly after the Cultural Revolution. The frescos in the lounge unveiled at the same time became a sensational event for China’s art community that year. Among all these frescos, “Water-splashing Festival” was the largest one, and the first artwork appearing in public space with nude human body ever since the People’s Republic of China was found in 1949, triggering widespread debate in media at that time.

2. Formal beauty: In 1981, artist Wu Guanzhong published an article titled “Content Determines Form?” in the 3rd issue of the journal Art that year, for the first time raising the question of “formal beauty” in art. Wu argued that in artworks, the form could came to existence before the content, a proposition that retorting the principle of “content determines form” in art in the Cultural Revolution and triggering a nationwide debate about content and form.