Lu Fang ying

Having established emotion, narrative, and feminism as the core of my approach, in unit 2 I began to prefer to construct dream-like, ambiguous spaces, filled with scenes composed of a mishmash and fusion of memory and subconscious elements. 

Narrative: fragments of nostalgic memories and imagination

When a fresh season of loveliness comes pervading, I am always happy to walk outside. Alone, the physical body moves between the shifting scenes, during the spreading of the omnipresence, gladly experiencing the feeling of the self-life itself intersecting with the natural surroundings, as Wilde wrote in prison: With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy? 

When I am walking with someone, the free-flowing mind turns into a hasty fleeing away in the silence between conversations, more rapid, less logical, and disorganised. In such a constrained, "perverse pleasure and strange passion", as the mind linger briefly on each reef-like memory, I am always curious to find out what kind of string leads them to each other. Is it possible to implicitly depict this ineffable, personal string by creating a picture that intermingles fragments of present and memory scenes?

Painting is closely associated with memory - even realistic painting is, strictly speaking, painting from immediate memory. Episodic memory integrates visual content, words, facts, and the emotions of the moment, storing them in a memory capsule that is separate from each other. When triggered by certain cues, which acts as a hook to bring up memories in different capsules. In addition to remembering a specific event, this process also involves re-experiencing the psychological state of the moment, as if travelling between different spatial and temporal dimensions. But as Eric R. Kandel says, memory is indeed a kind of restructuring, and memories are always mixed with subjective imagination.

Marc Chagall does not admit that his paintings are imaginary; he emphasises that he paints from reality, but it is his internal reality that is, I think, equally well-grounded in the reconstituted memories of his fantasy. 

Nostalgia, I think that's the word, is what I intend when I look back. In Chagall's paintings of village memories, what strings together the fragments of his nostalgic intentions are his gift for happiness and his instinctive compassion, which according to Cogniat are elements that remain permanent in Chagall's art, even in different subjects. I am curious if there are permanent elements of my art that remain accessible to the viewer.

Fountain of lions and persimmon branches from homeland is a work of memories, which I made after a walk with someone in Regent's Park. 

In Search of Lost Time, Virginia Woolf remarked in a striking way: Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence ... Scarcely anyone so stimulates the nerves of language in me: it becomes an obsession. About what this great work is trying to tell us, Saul Bellow explains that an artificial curtain woven by beliefs, passions, habits, prejudices, etc., can easily lead people to believe that they are living in reality. It is paradoxical that only art, which is a creation, can penetrate the illusory veil of life and reach the other side of the truth. 

To discover the truth of our experience and to evoke it in the reader, Proust exercised his extraordinary analytical and descriptive powers. Joseph Conrad saw this endless probing as the key to his genius: “Proust’s work . . . is great art based on analysis.”

Text and images are received differently in the subconscious, and to the viewer, an image is an inert object that cannot speak back. As an image creator, beyond satisfying my own self-analytical pleasure in the painting process, I also consider how can an image that is created by another interact with the viewer, generating questions and providing answers in the process of viewing? As Freud said, usually in the presence of a great work of art “what grips us so powerfully can only be the artist’s intention, in so far as they have succeeded in expressing it in their work and in getting us to understand it... it is not only a matter of intellectual comprehension”; what they want to arouse in us is the same emotional state of mind, the same mental constellation that gave them the impulse to create. Which I suppose is why it is so important to use symbols that evoke feelings that are communal in the expression of the intimate, just as an invisible hook is needed to hang the cloth of the artist's intentions on a smooth flat surface.

Translation: Reading and reproducing discourse and symbols

No matter how close one is, one cannot "observe" something directly: when looking physically at an object, it is refracted light and neural signals that stand in the way; when trying to observe a concept, it is language and perception that stand in between. 

Psychoanalysis is the core of the act of creating visual art from concept, Because it is the tool that identifies, analyses, and secondarily transforms the phantom in the mind. Christopher Bollas defined visual images as linguistic performance（iconographic utterance）. “A double reduction takes place here: the visual utterance is reduced to iconographic signs, and these are in turn translated into words”, Bollas said: “This first reduction of performance to theme is more decisive than the second, which is only the secondary act of giving the theme a label.”

Ekphrasis is a genre of poetry that uses words to translate scenes or paintings. During its encounter with the image, the image is “a holding place of meaning”, already “structured by psychological processes, servicing them as the carrier of effects, phantasies, and displaced meanings… it can inhabit an object, a thing, a picture created visually or in literature. It is never pure, purely visual, or even perceptual”. 

Natasha Trethewey's poem Mestiso is the Ekphrasis poem describing a casta painting of the 18th century. As a mixed-blood artist, she uses the words "light", "soft curl", "as white as", and "as fair as" emphatically to describe the genetic physicality of the figures; she has imagined the golden letters on the background canvas as "an equation of blood", and the act of the father placing his hand on his daughter's head as "the physiognomist does the mysteries of her character".

1: De Español y de India Produce Mestiso. & Mestiso by Natasha Trethewey

That is, images are deliberately (intentionally or involuntarily) instilled with selective meaning by the poet and translated into words, a process that Roger Robinson calls narrative imagination can make the jump from paintings. In it 'Counter narratives' may be created, and there is an innate human desire to complement narrative imagery on still images, and to expand the story, “perhaps truly speculations might unveil some truths or even a facade of truth to make up for gaps in the imagination. But we also have different readings of what might have existed.” He said: “It kind of hints to survivals.”  

All interpretations may be subsumed under the idea of imagination, thus making them partial and empirically different. Genuine imagining must come from a curiosity about how another narrative might be, and the discrepancy of reading visual symbols cannot and should not be diminished or replaced. As Kant said, what can be understood by us is what we construct subjectively rather than the objective facts of the thing-in-itself（unknowable noumenon）.

Some symbols belong to a particular communal group, as peoples who share the same culture and history have their own symbols. When I watch a work of art, I like the pleasure of meeting the symbols that I identify with, which brings me the feeling of meeting an old friend in another country; as a creator, I equally want the viewer to meet up with my symbols. But there are always symbols that are private, that arise from experiences that are only personal.

The moon recurs in my work. In the Unit1 piece A farewell waltz over the swaying sea it symbolises the spiritual quest of man - a blurred but real one in the night sky, while the sketch of the crude artificial moon on the shower curtain seems to represent the superficial and trivial sense of 'quest' that society has instilled into women. In Unit2, I give a more expansive narrative of the moon-shaped crystal-like object that surrounds the eternal stone - it is not only something, but also someone's period of time, a collection of certain sparkles. 

A story-narrative painting is a interesting kind of narrative image, that is, the object of its narrative is not something that actually happened in real life, but in a ‘story’ from other fictious contexts. According to Plato's theory of imitation, the 'story' is an imitation of real life, then the image is an imitation within an imitation, a narrative within a narrative. In this unit of my story paintings, I have begun to explore the multiple translations of objects and symbols as non-figurative, and to create original 'story settings’ for the private doubts and desires, rather than being satisfied with merely illustrating specific episodic with deliberately designed images.

Improvisation: a moderate subconscious indulgence

Action painting is a kind of psychological healing, as well as the guidance and realise of the spirit. Therefore, the final image it produces is only a by-product of the process.

My paintings nearly always start with a thin layer of priming colour and gradually 'find' the composition and rhythm by directly putting traces on the canvas. I have a habit of leaving a few strong traces in the early stages on purpose as a guide for later - traces that are unthought-out, an act that Nicolas jokingly described in a previous critique as me creating 'a little trouble' for later. But I like the idea of 'laying a trail', and eventually, I will always find that this unconscious trail will be at the centre of the action.

I assume that distinguishable gender ethos is one of the central aspects of everything, especially the process of unconscious action painting. Pollock's work gave “a sense of being as open and free and surprised as possible”, he was trying to ‘separate the artist from the subject of the painting'; whereas Kusama's repetitive paintings aimed to create contiguity with her subject-the body of her mother. Helen Frankenthaler extended Pollock's method by thinning down her medium so that paint soaked right through the canvas, which created a stained image. “Her image of a relaxed marine vision of transparent planes avoiding overlapping was defined in direct contrast to Pollock's muscular, densely interwoven, and superimposed skeins and arching loop”. In contrast to the drip and splash which are “cut off” from the subject of the painting, Kusama's repetitive dots and Frankenthaler's ‘stained' suggest a gentler “touch”.

I always dreamt of having the ability to be invisible or to fly, but invariably these abilities did not bring me relief or ease; instead, someone or something is always chasing me. The shadows from the scorching sun in the sky reveal the whereabouts of the invisible me, the cramped spaces or the spires of structures restrict the possibility of flying - I cannot be what I want to be, unlike a fish in water. This revelation behind the dream and the subconscious response to the realization of desire intrigued me, which motivated my first sustained engagement with psychoanalysis: the collaboration of images and desire.

Hiding and escaping is my attempt to frame the desire for hiding in an image， while hinting at the myth of a childhood memory that was almost lost been rediscovered again.

Freud thought of his project through the metaphor of scenes: the primal scene, the sight of castration, and the scene of the dream, whereas I want to depict the cryptic self by constructing scenes: about memories, desires, fears, perceptions, obsessions, sublimations, delusions, pleasures, and anxieties.