From Ambiguous world to THEY Shansui: My Emotion world
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The “Ambiguous World” (Taixu) has two sources of inspiration. The first is a poem I wrote on the golden ambiance of Lake Taihu in Suzhou lit by the summer sun: “In Lake Taihu’s mystic distance one’s mind roams. The glistening in the void resembles brocade.” Taking the first character of each line of the Chinese original yields Taixu. The second inspiration is Jia Baoyu’s journey through the Illusionary Realm of the fantasyland in the Dream of the Red Chamber, a journey that paradoxically reflects real life. This simultaneous affirmation of illusion and reality also characterizes the Ambiguous World series.
But in further meaning, I prefer to use "THEY" to describe this series. Because of the meaning of "THEY" is Refers to the neutrality of removing binary opposition, not male and female but has both. This meaning of word had been founding in nowadays, and it is fully close to meaning and pronunciation of the monster(類獸) in the Classic of Mountain and Sea (山海經).
In my search for the possibilities of a new landscape painting, I want to use traditional tools but also intentionally to depart from traditional landscape formulae. In my dual desire to embrace and deny tradition, I navigate the gap between tradition and the avant-garde (some may call this tension or deconstruction). I place alien, non-topographical symbols within landscape elements and purposefully preserve certain internal structures of landscapes precisely to confront the ambivalence created by this paradox--this natural-seeming but unnatural complex. Superficially, the landscapes are redolent with traces of humanity, but unlike in traditional landscape paintings, these traces of subjectivity do not amount to a realm for spiritual exploration and inhabitation, an objective world for subjective roaming, or an ideal abode that transcends the mundane world. Rather, the landscapes themselves are worlds of true emotions in which humans exist—they are landscapes of emotions.
In these landscapes of emotions, texture is created by combine-patterned masses. The patterns come from the inner emotions of the creative subject. For example, the spiral pattern represents hesitation, a wild, twisted pattern represents unruly thoughts, and a pattern of dots represents tears…
Some works in the series feature ornamental, wavy (or saw-teeth-like) motifs that articulate topography in wall paintings of the Wei, Jin, and Tang periods. These are symbols abstracted from nature by painters of the time. Compared to the techniques developed in later dynasties, such a flat and abstract painting manner seems primitive. But for me, these wavy landscape symbols evoke the rhythms of the heart, like the waves of an electrocardiogram.
s I began the series, I decided to follow my heart and proceed in an intuitive manner, without predetermined outcomes. Therefore I had no draft or plan, and allowed the images to manifest themselves freely from my momentary feelings and intuitions. I released myself from the constraint of my own habits--the idiom of texture strokes that I had internalized through my long training as a landscape painter. In fact, when I began to work on the series, I already had the desire to break away from traditional landscape forms. I wanted to engage in a dialogue with myself, to listen to my inner voice. But my intuitive expression of the images deep inside myself did not have the grand drama or insouciance of Jackson Pollock's automatic painting; rather, it was a kind of ritual I performed slowly and tranquilly, as careful as dissection. In every stroke, every line, every dot, I conducted a gentle self-inquiry. I do not deny that the dots and lines that make up my images are inextricable from my previous training in brushwork: in my ink handling I used the “dry brush” method, and the rhythms of my dots and lines betray the mechanics of calligraphy. Yet, all these habits arose intuitively and at the moment—I did not purposefully deny them. This state of suspension between control and lack of control is similar, to some extent, to Jackson Pollock’s paradoxical creative state of being “more immediate, more direct” and “denying the accident,” but I chose this manner of painting to be true to myself, not to release myself from traditional forms of brushwork as Pollock did.
In the THEY (Ambiguous World) series, I use the meticulous and realistic painting style of archaic landscapes in blue and gold mineral pigments, not a wash-heavy ink monochrome style. The Ming-dynasty painter Yun Xiang wrote that “spirit resonance lies in the brush, not in ink,” emphasizing “bone” or linear drawing. Blue-gold landscapes already mature in Sui and Tang times, were meticulous and luxurious, employing highly ornamental brushwork and coloring. Fine linear drawing predominated, but it was limited to articulating topographical forms. Texture strokes were rare, and wash common. By contrast, in the Ambiguous Fantasyland series I abundantly use fine drawing and dry texture strokes within topographical forms. Gold pigments in archaic blue-gold landscapes were mostly used for delineating contours of mountain peaks, boulders, bases of slopes, and the like. Japanese painters continued the blue-gold style and used gold paint and gold leaves abundantly in backgrounds. In using gold paint in my backgrounds, I do not mean to imitate them, but rather to convey my impression of Lake Taihu glistening in the sun, with its almost suffocating dense reflections of light. This impression has to be rendered with gold paint, which turns the backgrounds into opaque flat reflective surfaces to express my feeling of near-suffocation at the lake. The flat application of pigment also removes any sense of depth and makes the mountains and boulders seem floating above Lake Taihu.
Chinese painting has always had the characteristics of abstraction and ornamentation, which grant the painter a certain degree of creative freedom. The painter needs not always adopt Western art forms, but can instead comprehend the intellectual system of Western avant-garde and take its overall aesthetics as a point of departure. If one takes the aesthetics of classical Chinese painting as a point of departure, then brushwork and texture strokes are no longer evaluated in its terms, but are rather seen as creative elements that can be mixed and applied at will. Approaching the resources of painting as both familiar and alien, the painter can draw them closer to the inner feelings of subjective existence.
In employing a schemata of texture strokes that mediates between traditional and non-traditional brushwork, the Ambiguous Fantasyland series aims to engender an in-between zone, a neither-this-nor-that, a state of ambiguity in the brushwork. My paintings' seemingly traditional appearance conceals subversion within. Forsaking any illusion of natural and coherent structure, they dramatize instead the existential truth of the internal chaos of our minds.
The simultaneous appearance of many different kinds of texture strokes is the most important feature of the series. The goal is not only to express a complex of various human emotions, but also to reflect the fragmented ethos of the contemporary world with landscapes of pastiche masses and to substitute them for the coherent naturalistic aesthetics of traditional landscape painting.
In the THEY (Ambiguous World) series, different types of brushwork create jarring juxtapositions between landscape masses, expressing skepticism towards the human-nature unity and harmony implied by a coherent brushwork system. One may call this a reaction to a worldview of harmony. In the deconstruction contemporary period today the discrete and crushing flooded my existential experience. But how can one express the dissociation between the human subject and nature in contemporary life through landscape painting? This feeling does not come from vision, but from the soul. Created in a time when grand historical narratives are distant, I am no longer depending on landscape painting as representing the natural world. Rather, I use mutually incompatible topographical forms as a metaphor for complex human psychology and for the alienation of contemporary society.
On the other hand, the series also respond to the real and virtual issues in Chinese ancient landscape painting aesthetic, thinking about "True Sansui (landscape)"and "the Likeness and Unlikeness ". Virtual reality is duality characteristic in Chinese landscape painting. As the symbols in Ambiguous Fantasyland series (THEY Shan Shui) signify the hyperreality world, also a way to reset my emotional world in images that seem like landscapes.