In the early days of the unit, the process of preparation and ideation was always daunting, as I think only contents that are certainly making a strong statement or to reveal itself in depth and wisdom deserve stepping onto a blank canvas. I always carry a sketchbook with me to jot down all the moments when I want to express anything fussily.
However, as Camus claimed, “the valuable artistic creation requires that the artist 'detaches' or 'frees' himself/herself from his/her work in the sense of regarding this work as meaningless”. Rather than devoting my energy to the effort of seeking out an ingenious subject matter, I am gradually submitting to painting what I feel compelled to paint and making what I feel like making, and in doing so I am gaining therapeutic energy and releasing it into the expansion and refinement of my painting language. And by not keep judging the work as deep enough or clever enough, I just focus on painting the feelings that are difficult for me to convey through words. In a manner of perambulation, I ushered in a self-liberation.
During this whole deliberative fumbling, I identified several keywords that are important to me: emotion, narrative, and feminism.
Albert Camus:
"And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge."
Emotion
To make the mood substantially rendered in the atmosphere, the background of my work is always a patchwork of ambiguous blocks of colour. I use thin paints, layered over large areas.
I believe that colours can convey stronger emotions than words. Most of my palettes are blues, olive, purples, the romantic overtones and hazy illusions make them the space of sanctuary. But as Brin-Jonathan Butler said, "at the heart of all romanticism is suffering", most of the emotions I want to express are not optimistic or pleasant, they arise from discomfort, which can come from other people's experiences.
Undoubtedly, art is able of expressing vicarious emotions and feelings, and as an artist, I often feel as though I have to. Sadness can be felt directly in the audience when watching Van Gogh's Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate) (Vincent Van Gogh, 1890), which is "based on a series of sketches he made of war veteran Adrianus Jacobus Zuyderland". And the painter himself, Van Gogh described in his diary that “the sight of the grieving old man as proof of the existence of ‘something on high’, calling it ‘unutterably moving’ to see him bent double in sadness and grief”. He said that “what prompted him to paint this picture was the sight of the old man had moved him to think about life, death, and if there was some higher power”.
One can receive feelings conveyed by works that are not even created from real feelings. At the exhibition Emotions Constructed Through AI Art, (2020), three artists, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Divyansh Jha, and Hanna H Chang, created AI models capable of making artwork and evoking specific emotions in the audience, such as awe, fear, contentment, excitement, disgust, amusement, and anger, which symbolises how AI-generated artworks can "construct timeless emotions people experience with art".
The pictures below are from left to right: Complacency: Dream (2021), Fear: Abandoned Ship (2021), Excitement: Waves of Emotions (2021).
In this way, symbolic images projected from nothingness are reproduced in reality and interact with us, but in comparison, the situations in which these images are placed always bear a resemblance to our experiences of reality - such as the suggestive shape of a boat and the usual palette of emotions in abstract painting - just as normal emotions are generated from the interface and interaction between human existence and situation. However, I would like to explore how one can enter an extremely subjective narration, which is purely about others, purely confided and purely cathartic, that comes from the void that is unnecessarily related to this one or real life.
Perhaps through narrative storytelling.
Narrative
The stories I choose to portray are generally gathered from readings and real events around me that create a sense of the band. Even though they didn't happen to me directly, which allows me to sit comfortably on the sideline, I am always moved by these shared feelings of humanity in a specific state or the empathy towards a particular relationship as my personal experiences are revealed. It makes me want to bring this moment of subjective mood swings into the story itself and paint it.
The same story has been reproduced in different ways by different artists because the perception of a story is so closely linked to personal perception— a classic example being the book of Judith.
Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes (1598) is one of the most famous versions. Judith is depicted with delicate soft pale skin, frowning and tugging back hard on Holofernes' hair and cutting her sword into his throat with a somewhat uncertain ruthlessness; her glorious white dress reflects her shapely and innocent figure. The scene is illuminated by a spotlight and the epic atmosphere is enhanced by crimson drapery.
In the painting of Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith is a woman of strength, with a determined and fierce expression as she thrusts the blade of her sword through the neck of Holofernes with both hands, while the maid beside her also shows the strength of a labouring woman. During the Renaissance, women painters were more often confined to still life or portraiture, and this depiction of human anatomy and bloody violence certainly reflects Artemisia's inner bravery and determination.
And among Gustav Klimt's numerous depictions of women, there are two works entitled Judith: Judith I (1901) and Judith II (1908). In Klimt's painting, Judith is no longer a heroine, in fact, for a long time the painting was erroneously known as 'Salome' because of her sensuality and orgasmic expression. This was considered to be the embodiment of Klimt's fascination as well as his fear of women, and a reflection of men's anxious awareness of the femininity of the era at the end of the century. Klimt no longer celebrated the heroine but reached out to his inner desires and emotions.
As Bacon puts it, “When you paint anything you are also painting not only the subject, you are painting yourself as well as the object that you are trying to record,” (Centurions: 54: Francis Bacon: Innocent Screams 1999). In being secondarily retold, Judith's figure goes beyond the original narrative of the Old Testament and becomes the outgrowth of the artists' reflections and examinations of the world they inhabit and the times in between.
“Who is that omniscient, omnipresent narrator appearing everywhere at once…It can only be God. It is God alone who can claim to be objective. While in our books, on the contrary, it is a man who sees, who feels, who imagines…”[2]
As Robbe-Grillet reminds us, Art is not just a pretty way of presenting a message: it is the message.
Phenomenological writer Alain Robbe-Grillet said, 'Around us, defying the noisy pack of our animistic or protective adjectives, things Their surfaces are distinct and smooth, intact, neither suspiciously brilliant nor transparent'. The still-life itself is in a state of immateriality, as a signifier of the absence of language. The portrait has the same essence when gazed at. Heidegger insists that 'phenomenological 'meaning' is not the abstract 'connotation' of ordinary logical concepts, but the intuitive manifestation of the nature of things. Different experiences give rise to different perceptions of the same object, and I want to evoke this perception through still-life.
Alison Watt called still life can be "very intimate ...... By its very nature, it is linked to a portrait. A still life is a portrait without a portrait". I love still-life painting for its quietness and calmness as well as the storytelling through the objects which is a more after-tasteful and restrained narrative. I replace portraits and plots with imaginary or deformed still-life and place them in situations from stories or experiences.
Two moons
Lamp
Oyster meat
Such objects take on a symbolic role. Two entwined flowers droop over the lamp representing the healing power; the oyster meat, full of feminine meaning, surrounded by solid shells, and showing resistance on a silver platter; and the moon, Leonid Tishkov made a series of photographs called Private Moon, what 'overcomes our loneliness in the universe' and 'uniting many of us around it', which is also found in Chinese traditional poetry. In one of my paintings, it is a symbol of the seeking of man. The moon in the night sky is blurred but real, yet there is a crude, unrefined sketch of the moon on the shower curtain that seems to create a sanctuary, representing - as will be mentioned later - the superficial and trivial sense of 'pursuit' that society has instilled into women.
Out of a fantasy of the 'purified' both spiritual and sensual world that I have created using my own intuition and perception, I hope that the audiences will interact with it and will escape completely into my work.
Feminism
The works of unit 1 arose out of a story that is, in a nutshell, quite simple. The two girls decided to get out of the reality and flee to a new world together. They were hunted like viruses, brittle as dried branches and waltzed on escape boats like Knulp[1]. Finally, they soaked in the dark ocean, and the fugitive ended in the storm of the night.
My growing self-identity has given me the cherishing of my femininity, and I can't help but be fascinated by this secret comradeship that exists only between two women, like Thelma & Louise, or Fried Green Tomatoes. Unlike the patriotism that is celebrated, or the motherly love of the family unit, or the kinship of sisters; they do not fit into the patriarchal-established values of "good women," because their self-identified roles are neither wife nor mother. In this relationship the male is excluded and "The Second Sex" becomes the absolute subject. Simone de Beauvoir elaborates on the importance of this connection and why it is difficult to make in current society:
Women’s actions have never been more than symbolic agitation; they have won only what men have been willing to concede to them; they have taken nothing; they have received.5 It is that they lack the concrete means to organize themselves into a unit that could posit itself in opposition. They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and unlike the proletariat, they have no solidarity of labour or interests; they even lack their own space that makes communities of American blacks, the Jews in ghettos, or the workers in Saint-Denis or Renault factories. They live dispersed among men, tied by homes, work, economic interests, and social conditions to certain men—fathers or husbands—more closely than to other women.
In the environment where I grew up, the female camaraderie has always been deliberately ignored by the media in the traditional patriarchal context, which was replaced by a lot of talk about women rivalling each other for romance.
Trapped in a one-dimensional and conservative trend, people are struggling to maintain a balance between being responsible and "Carpe diem". However, the gazes and gossips from others have become a ruler that is hard to get rid of for many people's internalisation. Many decisions that seem to be made by free will are made under the pressure of social perceptions.
In my hometown, a city that is neither developed nor very ignorant, I saw girls of my age are ready to rush into a relationship that presupposes marriage, otherwise their value in the marriage market is considered "discounted" - the "good years" of girls are considered to wither faster because of the time limit on the " optimal" age to give birth; I saw a single male, whose father is seriously ill, is urged by all his relatives to get married and have children, and after refusing he is considered "unfilial" for not creating descendants as soon as possible to fulfil "the wishes of every father".
The colour sketches below are my reaction to the oppression of my friends around me regarding marriage and reproduction. Using the hands as the figure of a man to show their task of choosing a partner, sacrificing individual aspirations, and having their own kids.
As Milan Kundera writes in his book Slow:" .... he has no fear, because the source of fear is in the future, and a person freed of the future has nothing to fear", the excessive concern for future generations and inheritance means that what matters is always the future instead of the present (or a kind of " not being able to be something" leading to high hopes of " at least I have created something"). And with high expectations of the future comes a lot of tolerance and panic in the present.
In the face of all this depressing reality, in the mourning that comes with the previous story heading towards its tragic ending, I thought of portraying a tranquil, swaying driftwood amid the waves, as an eternal dream in a moment of respite during the storm.
After a series of relocations, interruptions to my original life plans, and unannounced gatherings and partings in a year of turmoil, the outside world became a tumbling, blurring cloud of dust that I could neither see nor reach. After returning to my homeland, where I had been absent for more than six years, I found myself "isolated in a utopian reality" and momentarily lost the courage to explore the outer world. Timidly, I turn towards a more embodied, more intimate, more familiar, slow forming and growing realm - my existence as a human being; only art offers the possibility of its own infinite reproduction and reflexion, as it is neither about social systems nor about the genuine life of the individual. I use my perception as a portal, quietly using paint as a medium to give voice to the emotions of the moment.
[1] Character in Hermann Hesse's Short Story Knulp
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