Wen Yipei: Static Shadow

Oct 13 - Dec 13, 2017

Curator: Sun Dongdong

Space Designer: Ouyang Kunlun

Opening: 2017.10.13  4pm

Venue: D06 2nd Main Street, 798 Art Zone, No. 2 Jiuxianqiao Rd, Chaoyang District, Beijing

Rambling and seeing in the exhibition space, Wen Yipei resolved to make the rhythm of tour and gaze coincide there while the landscape paintings on the wall evoke the historical topic about painting, i.e. the boundary between spatial and temporal arts. The discussion about the difference between painting and poetry by Lessing, the 18th century-German art critic in his famous work Laocoon, is at least partially reasonable from the angle of symbolic economics, in the sense that the audience could look at the details again and again when they face the pictorial symbols that are juxtaposed in the canvas. Hence, painting is more convenient for representation while the continuous symbols of poetry elapse very easily, since poetry is communicated through voice. If poetry is obsessed with description, the audience will have to employ more intensive brain memory to remember these details. Thus, compared to painting, poetry is more suitable to express continuity such as movements, which fits for the physical essence of poetic media. Accordingly, on the exhibition site, the artworks in front of the audience unfold the spatial structure around a power station. Wen Yipei divides the tour into a group of static scenes with respective point of view, sight and sight distance. Just as taking a frame from motion pictures, the audience can move their attention and footsteps along with the artworks, then construct distinctive temporal-spatial structures caused by different tour paths. As it is known, the temporal-spatial structure is experienced by human kind as a whole. Wen Yipei seems to obey the “advice” of Lessing to emphasize the representative depiction though; he connects the fragmental space with the continuity of visiting exhibition and begins to recount his own “tour”.  However, for Wen Yipei, is this exhibition merely a rhetoric game about formal structure?

Painting brush works as an anchor. Once it falls down, it will not stay on the surface of the pictorial sea. It will definitely hook onto the rocky protrusion underwater, which is the knowledge genealogy about painting that is accumulated in history.  In comparison with the lively and vivid spindrift and ripple on the surface of water, the rock underwater is the location anchor through which we confirm the ideas of the artist. To this end, let us return to Lessing’s differentiation about poetry and painting. Actually, Lessing’s distinction of spatial and temporal arts is not as natural as he claimed, yet, it is an artificial definition. Not only did he consciously avoid the temporality of the painting process and the readability of poetry, he also implied an ideological value judgement in his texts. That is to say: painting imitates nature; painting is confined and is an artifact to satisfy the pleasure of eyes; painting produces idol worship and its “illusionary effects” require legal regulation; on the contrary, poetry stands for the rationality of human spirit and resists being materialized in the broader “temporal, discursive and historical fields”.  Although as a protestant, Lessing’s opinions had its religious background, he straightforwardly opposed what he called the “hypocritical elegance” of painting poetry in France and the idol worship of Roman Catholic in France. Thus, beneath the seemingly fair principles, Lessing’s texts indicate the political and competitive relationship on the European cultural map. Nowadays, Lessing’s distinction of poetry and painting is replaced very early with the discussion about the relationship between image and word, which is not the comparison of different media in the classical period, but a modern semiotic issue. As an artist, why does Wen Yipei arise this old topic after almost 300 years? According to Walter Benjamin, “every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably”. Conversely, this topic is relevant to us, or in other words, Wen Yipei’s solo show is the expression of the historical influence in his painting practice.

Here, we have to mention Xu Beihong Studio, where Wen Yipei studied painting in the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), the teaching of which is supposed to inherit directly from the tradition of true-life painting that Xu Beihong developed based on his thinking about “Scientific Fine Arts”. “Science” that Xu Beihong school emphasized in fact has twofold meanings: the reformation of worldview that considers materiality as the primary goal of painting practice and physical especially the technical norms that train the ability of profiling with concrete and rational methodology. The painting practice of Xu Beihong School has developed from his personal choice of artistic ideas into the national aesthetic paradigm of fine arts, from true-life painting to realism. In the historical context of salvation and enlightenment of modern China, Xu Beihong School indeed was able to integrate into the mobilization mechanism of modern states.  In late 1920s, in the debate between Xu Beihong and Xu Zhimo about the value judgement and approach of Chinese fine arts, Xu Beihong also departed from the methods to stimulate the weak nationality and criticized the Western modern arts that Xu Zhimo promoted. Therefore, to some extent, Xu Beihong’s artistic career was an outcome of his political choice. While both Xu Beihong and Lessing have political concern, compared to Lessing’s expression, the true-life painting that Xu Beihong learnt from French classical painting is closer to a moral value. Just as when we talk about science, the utility would first of all calls to our mind, and that is far away from the idealism of Rationality and Truth that Lessing discussed. Perhaps, Xu Beihong had realized this, but the Western metaphysics, just as the painting of “Four Wangs” in Qing dynasty, could not bring any practical usefulness to the real plight that China face at that moment.

However, successors like Wen Yipei, can not avoid this parallax; especially when the agenda of the times have changed, how to understand and transform the legacy of the academic predecessors becomes an issue that we need to confront. Correspondingly, he has overseas artistic experience when he studied in USA. The fact is that his painting before this exhibition looks more conceptually Neo-Geo painting which depicts the interior space of modern architecture, with furniture and lamp decoration that have geometric shapes.  The image is in-between abstract and figurative, but it has more emphasis on pictorial aspect than the Neo-Geo painting.  In this sense, the structural methods of the last series still appear in his artworks in the exhibition. For instance, the architecture of the power station in the foreground is flattened consciously and reduced into an abstract geometric shape to undermine the sense of volume. What makes it different from his previous painting lies in his direct depiction of the mountain and forest in the background and his emphasis on the molding of form and matter. The two separate approaches of painting language converge in the same scene with no conflicts. The origins of this harmony sense of course owes to the painting ability of the artist. But more importantly, Wen Yipei combines the minimalist realism with objectivity that CAFA oil painting pursues, thereby makes his painting into a perception and situation, in a sense the entire spatial structure intensifies this “Theatrical Effect”.

With regards to genre, the artworks depicting scenery by Wen Yipei could be categorized as “Landscape Painting”. For Lessing or Xu Beihong, “History Painting” ranks the highest in the hierarchy of painting genres. Although they have different identities, they live in different times and have different goals, but for both of them, the human figure is the center of their discourse. Obviously, in Wen Yipei’s painting, human is represented as an absent image, which requires the Gestalt of the audience outside of the painting. In contrast with Western oil painting, landscape painting is the supreme genre in the categorization of traditional Chinese painting, whose philosophy believes in that nature as a symbol of “Heavenly Principle” is in accord with human. But look at the artworks in front of us, that the power station as a rational product occupies the foreground while the nature retreats into the background makes it a modernized landscape: the rational image of scientific “Axiom” that Xu Beihong and his contemporaries respected is lying in the place that seperates us from nature. However, what is “truth” on earth? That is not what Wen Yipei’s painting could present. The Western painting theory usually mentions “Shadow” or “Illusion” regarding the origins of painting. To respond, Wen Yipei could only refer to the “Static Shadow” proposed by Zhuangzi with these static images at a moment when we should wait for the light of history to illuminate us in the temporal-spatial structure.