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"Out of Focus" exhibits the paintings of three artists, Chen
Wenbo (Beijing), Yan Lei (Beijing/Hong Kong) and Zhou Tiehai (Shanghai).
The exhibition does not emphasize a revival of the "painting" medium, nor
is it focused on painting per se, but it displays an emerging methodology
of artistic creation. In fact, these artists have only come together in
this moment and at a certain point by chance.
Each of the three
artists selected returned to the medium of painting at the turn of the
millennium. Chen Wenbo returned to painting because he didn't believe that
"the scientific and technological contents of medium would make art more
advanced." Yan Lei chose painting following his "question about the
essentially modernistic taste claiming to be contemporary art." For Zhou
Tiehai, his confusing pictures are merely a "consoling pill" for the
novelty-seeking aspects of contemporary art. These artists put themselves
in a situation where they had to fight against two sides. On one hand,
they use painting to resist the tendency toward systemization in
contemporary art. Yan Lei processes photographs with a computer and then
hires someone to paint them for him. Zhou Tiehai uses airbrush techniques
to eliminate the conventional characteristics of painting. Chen Wenbo
traces photos by hand, completely abandoning any production of individual
symbols. A common tendency amongst them is to reduce the technical content
of painting and eliminate the properties of painting, so as to revoke the
privileges of "the artist" in painting and deny any distinctive "branding"
in their works.
On the other hand, they attempt to make this simple
medium more conceptual and entertaining than non-graphic arts. As a
result, their works reveal a common effect of dissociation that is
different from vision, therefore different from the high resolution of
digital images around us. At the same time, they regard painting as a "tip
of the iceberg" in the expression of artistic concepts, thus allowing a
certain non-definedness to become the theme. Yan Lei and Zhou Tiehai are
both engaged in artistic creation with different medium at the same time,
while Chen Wenbo asserts that "the meaning of an artist's work lies in its
indefiniteness. I don't know about my future, of which language I'll use
or how I'll use it."
Technically speaking, the language provided by
present-day art cannot match the digital consumer "images" which accord to
the logic of industrialization. But in their work these artists
demonstrate places such "consumer images" cannot reach. Art seems still
able to find its own territory. And the motive behind this kind of search
lies in the artist's abandoning of tradition realism and symbolism as a
"theory of reflection" and various types of formalism wrapped in various
new media. They reset the focus of art on flexible, variable "responses"
to reality.
Therefore, besides being visually obscure, these
pictures are "out of focus" in theme and symbolism. Compared with those
contemporary paintings with which we are familiar, these works abandon the
narrow tendency towards turning ideology into a system of symbolism and
blind attitudes and views. Instead, they open up the potential for visual
indefiniteness and conceptual forms. They are as the artists' "clicks" on
reality and psychology, and each click realizes an excellent
"transformation."
25000 Cultural Transmission Center
4
Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
(Mailing Address:
Beijing PO Box No.554, P.R.China, 100015)
Tel/Fax: +86 (10)
64387107
Email: longmarch2003@vip.sina.com
Website:
http://www.longmarchfoundation.org/
Opening Hours:
daily, 11am - 7pm |
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