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皮囊不是个幽默?

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Qingnian Tang

Jonathan Goodman

Now that I have been visiting Chinese artists for the past several weeks, it has become clear that figuration remains important in China in ways that Westerners might not fully understand. This happens in part because learning Chinese is linked to using the brush; calligraphy, for example, is associated with high culture as an art symbolic of refined achievement. In addition to their love of realism, Chinese painters and sculptors strive to describe some of the major social changes that have been taking place in the last few years; their social commentary, in the form of stylized representation, reads contemporary culture in light of China’s attraction to capitalism and its orientation toward consumerism of both the most basic and the most advanced kind. As an American, it is hard for me to fully accept the materialism that has spread through Chinese culture, but I know that I am criticizing such a tendency from an advantaged viewpoint. For many Chinese, this is the first time for them to know the pleasures of consumption, even if such enjoyments bring with them a host of social problems. As time goes on, it looks like the influence of the Western avant-garde will be subsumed within the larger circle of internationalist art, so that the question How Chinese is it?, Will become academic and moot.

This means that the globalization of Chinese art will most likely render it strangely empty of culturally precise value. There is generally a new internationalism taking place, and it is increasingly difficult to read art as being in concordance with a nationalism or an ethnicity. Still, it cannot be said that Chinese art—the kind most affected by Western work done in the last couple of decades—has entirely turned its back on describing the mores of a culture whose traditions are its greatest strength, and its greatest problem. Within the coherence provided by a global awareness of the artist’s position, the Chinese avant-garde assesses its own health by referring to historical anecdotes and ideas; however, this material not only supplies artists with traditional subject matter, it also argues for the persistence of Chinese culture in the face of the waves of change moving through its society. Thus a tension exists between the anonymity of globalized art—work that refuses to connect with cultural legacies—and a specifically Chinese persona—work that embraces the past for its ability to provide a context. While it can hardly be asserted that Chinese art will completely transcend its own origins, at the same time we must recognize the inherent conflict between the two modes of expression, tradition and its discontents.

The cultural properties of figuration enable Chinese contemporary artists to combine their remarkable technical skill with a vivid sense of societal disruption—for example, there are the profound canvases of Su Xinping, who trades the benefits of supercapitalism for an allegory of loss. His acute reading of spiritual isolation, in the face of a society that places communal good far ahead of individualism, results in compositions that are deeply moving. Indeed, Su’s work argues for an identifiably Chinese content, although his reading may well be familiar to Westerners frustrated or angry with the emptiness of consumerism. Our humanity is at once precise and general, in the sense that we belong to categories that are national, ethnic, religious, and even (in the case of the Chinese) racial but participate in a shared life of thought and emotion. Su’s work is at once Chinese and transnational, effective in its particular circumstances and global thrust. A genuinely major painter, Su moves in accordance with his given background and his chosen experience, enabling him to paint works that appeal to all of us. In doing so, he makes Chinese art available to transnational influences. Other artists, such as Xu Bing and Zhang Huan, do the same thing.

Tang Qingnian, the subject of this essay, was born and educated in Beijing, graduating in 1984 from the Central Academy of Art and Design (which has since merged with Tsinghua University). Active in the mid-1980s, he participated in China’s “New Wave” art movement and was one of the primary exhibition coordinators for the “China Avant-Garde” exhibition held in Beijing in February 1989. In light of these activities, it is fair to say that he has been involved in the contemporary art movement for some time. Since 2006, he has been working full time as an artist, and his present work clearly illustrates the tensions between art and consumerism, and realism and abstraction. Tang has embarked on a remarkable series of sculptures, composed of such materials as shopping bags and articles of clothing, which outline, in negative space, the life-size figure of a person. Effectively delineating the human body by portraying its form in absence enables Tang to concentrate on the materials that comprise the body’s frame; these materials are built up and around the form, giving it its presence through the existence of negative space. The viewer who experiences these sculptures sees them as both figurative and abstract—the former because the body’s shape is presented, the latter because the materials register abstractly when the sculpture is seen from a different, non-frontal view.

Working in the way that he does, Tang openly debates the ongoing differences between a realist and an abstract approach to art. It is a truism that no work of art is entirely one way or the other, but nonetheless there are clear tendencies that will orient the artist’s work toward figuration or nonobjective art. Tang’s works are unusual in that they posit, at the same time, a pure abstraction and an equally extreme realism, even if the figure is presented in negative space. In one piece Tang has arranged empty shopping bags of exclusive stores, such as Armani Exchange and Chanel, so that they construct the artist’s usual absent persona, whose only identifying feature is its existence as empty space. The link between these emblems of luxury and the concurrent emptiness of the person they quite literally form cannot be overemphasized; Tan’s figure is neither man nor woman, neither Chinese nor Caucasian, and the lack of identifying features only underlines Tang’s implicit point: that the shallowness of consumerism is more than national; it is actually universal, affecting the entire world. This notion might seem simplistic or even dated to the more jaded of Western observers, but the point remains that China is experiencing the psychic quandary of unchecked materials at this point in time. And we remember that Tang lived in Los Angeles for a number of years.

Indeed, the concept of overconsumption is relatively new to a society that not so long ago was taken up with Marxist ideas. Tang wisely refuses to make any overt comments in regard to the troubles that accompany the empty purchase of things; more important, we know from his biography that he worked in advertising, that branch of business intended to inflame our desire for acquisitions. So Tang has experienced first-hand—indeed, he has added to the effects of capitalism. His position has made him think in very concerted ways about the preservation of the self in circumstances where almost everything is for sale. Psychic survival entails, for Tang, the practice of art, in which the symbols of affluence—the shopping bags of chic, affluent stores—literally become the frame of humanism. The body he portrays makes us realize that the purchase of goods exists at best as a conflict we need to recognize for our own good, at worst a blind need to accumulate things in ways that profoundly harm our humanity. But this reading is to some degree imposed on work that does not judge so much as present the symbols, the objects themselves, of the consumer’s dream.

This piece and others by Tang beg the question, Why do we work so hard to accumulate things that we can only leave behind in our mortality? Looked at closely, materialism seems, at least to this writer, more than a little absurd. Yet the desire for objects symbolic of social and financial success dies hard, and we have examples of luxury that go back thousands of years, for example, in Egyptian culture. Clearly, humanity’s love of consumption is one of the imponderables of our nature, and Tang’s unorthodox use of materials slyly subverts the current Chinese obsession with the purchase of goods. In many ways, the situation in China is beyond commentary or fulmination; like America, China’s economy relies on a constant cycle of manufacture and consuming, without which there would be no reason to produce so much stuff. Brand names and credit cards, the engines of China’s brave new world, are terribly familiar to Westerners, as are the problems with inflation and the moral quandary of overconsumption. It makes sense that the person revealed by the arrangement of the bags exists only in negative space; the figure literally derives from the bags’ use as a frame; otherwise, he or she is nonexistent. So there is a genuine absence of self written into Tang’s doubt regarding human authenticity, overwhelmed by various twenty-first-century pleasures.

One could apply Tang’s irony against his own work: Do we really need more art in a culture glutted with esthetic objects? While Tang does not address this problem directly, he consistently presents his work as a silent critique of our worship of materialism. This means that the thrust of his criticism is physical and spiritual, actual and immaterial. Additionally, on another level, his art works as abstraction; if we look at his pieces at angles that do not include a purely frontal orientation, we find that the works stand out as exercises in assemblage, accumulations of objects that work as pure forms. In another piece, Tang has attached articles of clothing to the simple steel frame that serves as a support for the assemblage; in the negative space outlining a human figure, he has placed plastic hangers as decoration. In basic ways, then, the artist allows his materials to do the work, although the insight that we are facing a figure built of negative space is clearly and quickly evident to most viewers. Tang’s allegory of implicit forms is consistent from one work to the next, for he builds on repetition to make his point, as many contemporary artists do. It should be remembered, however, that his point is not judgmental so much as it is descriptive—of a very modern problem, nearly an illness, based upon our love of luxury.

If it is true that Tang’s assemblages are simple exercises in the definition of the figure, we would not worry so much about his stance toward the society to which he belongs. In one work, the frame of the body is established by a gathering of red balloons, which define a figure embodied by transparent plastic. A colorful, light-hearted exercise, the sculpture engages its audience in a purely formal manner. This assemblage establishes Tang as an artist who does not need always to critique China, and like any good artist, he is aware of the strengths of the materials he chooses. One of his most beautiful works consists of an assemblage made of twigs and dried flowers, red and white roses. The lyricism of such a sculpture cannot be denied; it reminds us that the Chinese love of nature, as it exists in historical painting and in current work, is rarely equaled. These exercises show that Tang is not always attempting to judge the social excesses that have made their way into Chinese society; his love of the beautiful, indeed of the decorative, carries on within a tradition that is long-standing in Asian art. We are not meant to consider problems in works like these, only to enjoy the imagination of the artist and his brilliant use of media.

So Tang is in fact a more complex artist than we might imagine. His output, or series, belongs to the modernist, extended treatment of a single stratagem or structure, which describe the changes of one variation after the other. While I have emphasized social commentary, it is important to note that Tang is broad in his outlook, making art that incorporates more than one point of view. His inspired use of materials argues for a reading that includes a purely formal critique, without which we would have a less multifaceted artist than is actually the case. I think that this is what is needed in contemporary art: the presentation of a composite imagination, in which variation on a single theme sets up a sequence of ideas and things particular to the artist himself. Tang reminds us of the perils of buying, but he also stands for an inquisitive imagination, open both to public interpretation and to formal analysis. He remembers that art cannot consist of social critique alone, which stifles the mind if it is pursued too aggressively. As a result, he has created works that remain in our thought long after we have seen them. This is a realism of the best sort, an account of ingenuity and genuine feeling, in which art—and not criticism—comes first.