Poetry and Words. The concept of poetry can be extended to all literary and artistic creations, including traditional ink painting. This elegant style of painting is known for its clean lines, colors, complex emotions, and evocative aftertaste. This in itself is a paradox, less is more, and white is black. Like the poem's attempt to turn worldly emotions into simplicity and innocence, ink painting also consciously shows its restrained temperament.
It is no wonder that Tian Xiaofei made the following evaluation of Chinese culture, she said: Chinese culture is a highly conscious culture, and because of this, it is so averse to self-consciousness in terms of concept, so that it equates self-consciousness with hypocrisy, but everyone knows that "conscious" behavior is much more complicated than simple "hypocrisy" or "disguise". ......Chinese culture is a mixture of sophistication and naivety: it is precisely because of the sophistication of the world that one is so eager for the opposite of oneself, and at the same time naively believes that oneself is indeed naïve.
This kind of Zhuangzi-style longing seems to have become more and more impossible after ink painting entered modern society. On the one hand, the hustle and bustle of modern material life has changed people's mental state, and they are exposed to themselves, and on the other hand, ink painting, as a traditional technique, needs to maintain its basic artistic characteristics and try to preserve its gentleness and generosity. But the problem is that sometimes the greater the contrast, the more things can be accommodated.
For example, Wang Li's "Homage to Matisse" series of paintings is nothing more than the memories of adolescence, as well as the desires, yearnings and secrets of modern life, which are interrelated with Matisse's beastly painting style, conveying an ugly image and challenging the puritanical ascetic classicism. Unlike those dignified and elegant ancient bodies, such as the graceful figures of ladies in traditional paintings, Wang Li's paintings attempt to break such aesthetic illusions. These bodies are decadent, even **, showing abundant lust and desire. These "heavy bodies" convey the pain and desires that modern people cannot place, they are consumed, wasted, and useless. Old Hugo once trembled because of Baudelaire's sinful Paris, Yeats once exclaimed in the face of the arrival of modern times that "a terrifying beauty" is being born, if you follow this inference, then Wang Li's practice of describing the unbridled world with the pen of implication is the beauty of shock, the beauty of horror! It not only represents the artist's pursuit of modernity (the modernization of traditional painting), but also expresses a reflection on modernity.
Wang Li once had the following passage of the master's self-teaching, which can be cited as evidence: How to draw? The contemporaneity of the subject matter is a choice, and the contemporaneity of the language will become an adventure, not to mention that my own learning experience has made my fascination with traditional media a complex, and the aesthetic space constructed by brush, grinding and rice paper has brought great restrictions to this intellectual adventure, and it is this complex and this limitation that gives the expansion of traditional painting language the charm of today.
In addition to intervening in the current context through subject matter, Wang Li's paintings are also good at interpreting life from a different perspective. Different from the previous ink paintings, which only focused on the elegant landscape or the shaping of the ancient artistic conception, he focused more on the details of daily life or local fragments of life.
If traditional ink painting is intended to convey poetry and tell a moving story, Wang Li's work attempts to dismantle poetry and narrate the extremely banal and trivial contemporary daily life. In other words, Wang Li's paintings reject grand historical narratives and heroic deeds. Works such as the "Because of Poetry" series, "Balcony" and "Orange Juice" convey the emotion of dissolving the narrative and allowing the world to slide into vulgarity and barrenness. The fact that his characters are blurred and featureless means that each of us can be seated, and it alludes to modern life and the mundaneness of the individual. The lonely and languid body in "Orange Juice" and an inconsequential drink together constitute a mockery of those so-called meaningful lives. All anyone who looks from afar on the balcony can see is a geometric, emotionless, crowded complex of buildings, and there is no bright sun or shining stars in her vision. This reminds us of poetry, of Kitajima's "In the age when there were no heroes, I just want to be a person", and Han Dong's "About the Big Wild Goose Pagoda".
As Milan Kundera pointed out, in the twentieth century, literature has developed into a one-dimensional "reality of life" that reflection theory is concerned with, and "literature is an exploration of existence", :* does not study reality, but studies existence. Existence does not already happen, existence is the possible place of man, what all man can become, what all man can do. Home finds people this or that possibility, draw a "picture of existence".
The same is true for the art of painting. With the changes in the living conditions of human beings and the deepening of major spiritual propositions, modern painting has become an artist's "wandering of the individual spirit and the adventure of form". Painting, as a product of imagination and narrative, has become closer and closer to what the semiotic master Roland Barthes called "deception". "Historical truth" has receded to the periphery of artistic vision, while at the same time "narrative truth" has begun to become the focus of attention. In other words, the focus of people's understanding and interpretation of art has begun to shift. They are no longer concerned with what the work is drawing, but with how it is drawn.
As we can see, Wang Li's works do not apply to specific cultural or artistic situations, but always tend to depict an abstract and ambiguous background. These detached backgrounds can either be interpreted as the emptiness of contemporary life, or they can be seen as the loss of memory space. Even if we can sometimes delude ourselves into believing that these backgrounds exist somewhere in the planet, we still can't help but face the great sense of loss that comes with their striking similarity. They do not shine as unique carriers of historical memory, but their significance lies precisely in their reproducibility. Benjamin said that the spirit dissipates and everything is reproduced by machinery. It is precisely with his wit that Wang Li skillfully uses this kind of reproduction, satirizes such overlaps, and "indulges in the interpretation of an ink image with a pop flavor".
And interestingly, even the size of the picture used by Wang Li has distanced itself from those "big paintings". He used a size about the size of a diary, which he said was deliberate. Just as people are accustomed to heroic stories and grand histories, the world of painting has always been shaken by its huge size, but it is worth asking, in this era when it is too late to "imagine", how much sublime is left to consume? The gods revel, the revolution is no more, and what remains for us may be this diary-like trivial and lengthy life, empty and bare bodies.
From tradition to modernity, and to understand tradition through the present, our painter Wang Li is constantly seeking the modern spirit of ink painting and reflecting on modernity in the intertextual dialogue between modern and classical. Through the elegant and distant atmosphere of ink painting, it expresses the chaotic and disorderly and trivial and empty life situation of modern society. Through a lonely body like a corpse, he depicts daily life, delves into the interior of the contemporary world, and perceives the meaning of existence. He is witty and honest, cold and insightful, and ultimately forms his own series of personal visual notes.
(Wen Baihua).
*: Qianyi Space).
Artist Profile
Wang LiPainter. He is currently a professor and master's tutor at the School of Art Administration and Education of the China Academy of Art, a graduate student co-tutor at the Academy of Fine Arts of Shandong Normal University, a member of the Academic Committee of the Guilin Art Museum, a member of the China Artists Association, and a member of the China Literature and Art Critics Association. He has published a number of personal painting collections such as "Desk Paintings", "The Sky of Pai Ling", "Unbearable Expression", as well as "Wang Li's Paintings", and participated in the editor-in-chief of "The Clock Suddenly Turned Fast-Born in the Seventies" and many other literatures.