Vitamin Creative Space

 

Golden Bough about to Flower; Big Breasts Want a Trim
Hu Fang

1

I was eating at a noodle shop in Shenzhen when I noticed a young cook with a distinctive hairstyle: purple-tipped locks trailing down his cheeks like overgrown creepers, blond spikes on his head evoking ripened stalks of rice. I had to repress the urge to ask whether he was a member of a shāmătè family.[1] Why bring up the “shāmătè ambivalence” that has polarized the country for so many years now?

From the Baidu entry: “If the xiăo qīngxīn [small fresh] scene is increasingly cited as the mainstream urban youth culture, and the Xuri Yanggang band packaged by the media as a form of grassroots culture, then the shāmătè are a veritable ‘weed culture.’ They grow where no one looks, nor does anyone care for them once they have matured. Neither respected nor valued, they face the prospect of being ridiculed, consumed and instantly forgotten.”[2]

And: “Culturally, they all face the predicament of being viewed oddly in the villages and scornfully ridiculed in the cities. At the same time, given the monopolies of discursive power, stories from the villages and smaller cities hardly ever appear in the urban media, while even the most trivial events in the big cities can become news.”

2

In contrast to the shāmătè and their extreme dependence on the “wash, cut, blow,” the women of “Sharp Sharp Smart,” clad in their floral-print indigo fabrics, shouldering their wicker baskets and living by the land, probably sound like something out of a rural lament (the song already sung for so many years in modern history, played out across different variations). Watched over by their geese, they radiate a mesmerizing glow, while the geese repeatedly strain their slender necks, as though in response to some enticement. Henry Moore-style sculptures infected by the floral patterns of their indigo clothing; Malevichian colors conjuring the pair of peasant women bearing kitchen knives in their hands (colored bands that are both garment and complexion; both material skin and material attribute). Here are images of the African women who gave birth to humanity and inspired Western modern art, carrying vessels on their heads – theirs is the Golden Bough-like legacy of primitive man.[3] If the city’s temptations do not turn these women into naked, lost souls, there is a good chance their floral fabrics and baskets, their exorcistic masks, will protect them, like amulets. Thus some of them even have the confidence to dominate those downcast men consigned to form the urban labor reserve, lightly raising their whips above their backs.

3

In fact, everything is disturbed, and standing before Duan Jianyu’s paintings I sense the faint quivers coursing through my body, which make me realize that without a more appropriate language (such as the “Martian” so cherished by the shāmătè), I cannot adequately depict what I see, there is no possibility of preserving from the start the unity of the primitive experience suggested by the body’s trembling, as well as the ecstasy that comes from the experience of disruption – an ecstasy that has been almost completely exhausted in the experience of contemporary life. Compared to those creations in which one projects a conceptual vision onto the canvas, or uses the standards of an ideal form to unsettle reality, the question of how to make the work into something “as chaotic as reality” is far more interesting and challenging. Ultimately, the artist must transcend painterly technique to liberate the inherent ambiguity and complexity of living.

Evidently, it is no longer possible for me to recount the stories of these paintings here, as we have already reached the “frontier of images.” Just as Duan Jianyu wanders the boundaries between abstraction and figuration, so-called narrative follows the logic of painting itself, and unknown experiences open up. Perhaps it is precisely because the challenges confronted by the issues of painting-ness developed here are so great that the problems Jianyu sought to resolve could only slowly be unraveled over the course of the past three years through the “Sharp Sharp Smart” series of paintings – as though, rather than following a trajectory, each painting diverges from a certain presumption, multiplying the paths through the forest and the unpredictable directions of each fork, bringing about split implications, confusion and absurd rapture. When this deranged picture of human existence appears, Duan Jianyu still has to boldly but carefully deal with the ubiquitous ideological forms exposed by her brush tip, so as to avoid the temptation of morality and the extrapolation of form into a symbol of the times, a social metaphor, a conceptual index, the snare of art historical projection. Ultimately, spending time with these women, these baskets, these landscapes and monkeys, the artist herself becomes one of them. Grabbing a brush, a monkey takes her place – her position among these historical, interstitial lost souls is in constant flux.

4

The struggle toward this moment of dissociation from the gaze and position produced in the painting process is probably shared across several generations in the history of modern and contemporary Chinese oil painting, with each taking its best shot according to the limits of its experiences. But it is only when these inescapable historical experiences are internalized as elements that can be identified with individual life experiences, and enjoyed as the joke played on us by history, that it becomes possible for this “dissociation” to truly occur, or, in the words of the French philosopher François Jullien: “In order to operate this ‘shift,’ we need to recast our language and its theoretical assumptions. As we proceed, we must divert it away from what it finds itself inclined to say even before we speak and open it up to a different intelligibility, urging it toward other resources.”4 Simultaneously, we have already passed today from an age of material consumption to one that is fixated upon the consumption of life experiences, and the “dissociation” that develops from within this life is no easy matter.

Perhaps such “dissociation” and “shifting” actually start from a kind of “abandonment.” Just as she neither explicitly exalts nor opposes the shāmătè, in Duan Jianyu’s work the painting is not the result of selecting an image and expressing meaning. Instead, it grows from its proto-concept and outline of different modes of living into a painted reality. Continuously impacted, resisted, altered and formed by the pictures that emerge from different influences, situations and awarenesses, this reality has the same complexity as the material reality before us. It will never simply submit to the artist’s ideal image, nor does it necessarily succumb to the temptations of style and the “correct” interpretation of the work’s intent. At the same time it is also based on a renewed faith in the relations between painting and life experience: the aura of humanity necessarily born by those colors, lines and forms can only be found in the process of returning to painting’s spirituality. In the picture of human life she has developed, Duan Jianyu responds to cacophonous reality not through its immediate conversion into formal style but rather by unearthing the potential of painting, and this is the reversal of contemporary desire brought about by the insight of painting-ness itself.

5

Not for the first time, Duan Jianyu has brought her painting back to the rural world, but this rural world has already left the land behind, and has no foundation. This is precisely the origin of shāmătè, a word of such Chinese characteristics, a word marked for prejudice. Between the “Sharp Sharp Smart” series of paintings and the shāmătè as contemporary socio-cultural phenomenon, there is at most, in a refraction of the conditions of human existence, only a kind of “abstract relation,” or a relationship similar to the “sub-belief” described by Xu Tan.5 They share the same rural world, but the people of this world have already left the land. The seductiveness of the rural world is not only repeatedly consumed, it also implacably occupies the timid nerves of the contemporary people.

In our rural worlds, there are “big breasts and wide hips,” and there is also the “ordinary world,”6 but until “Sharp Sharp Smart,” I had never seen such a portrayal of women in the history of human figuration. These are the contemporary images that are regurgitated in a backwoods modernity that has endured its share of humiliation, but they are entirely free of any ideological framework, nor do they adhere to the kind of artistic myth that proclaims the refinement or vulgarity of the countryside. Maintaining an elegant performance between the abstract and the concrete, they bear such a profound tenacity and openness that not only their figures but also their plants and vessels have been infected with an exceptional vitality – a displaced vitality that seems to sparkle all the more through shanzhai-style imitation. Through “Sharp Sharp Smart,” the “rural world” is turned also into an “originary world,” from which we might appreciate why Jianyu devoted these past many years to this direction. And, having slowly taken shape, this “originary world” and its particular appearance can finally make us linger for a moment: It is not only an appropriated place, but also a traceable place; it is both a place to settle down, and the place where the counter-attack begins.

Text © 2017 the Author

 

Related Links:
Duan Jianyu: Sharp, Sharp, Smart