Deja-vu
Zhao Yiqian Solo Exhibition
Huang Du, Curator
Over the past decade, the progression of Chinese contemporary painting, like China's social development, has shown clear developments and changes. This is entirely rooted in the influence of globalization, an open information society and China's own cultural logic. The development of Chinese contemporary painting, whether in terms of content or form, concepts or languages, has presented diversity and fragmentation, in that the sweeping, idealist narratives and expressions of the collective and political unconscious have been diminishing, replaced by the rise of the micro narratives of free individuality, everyday experience and the return to the ontology of art. That is to say, painting must adapt to all manner of changes, and when confronting issues in various stages of social development, cultural contexts, art history and the ontology of art, it must make new judgements and responses. Thus, in the context of rapid social and cultural transformation, the painting language among artists born after 1980 has inevitably proven adaptive to the changes of the times: returning to the ontology of art, placing emphasis on abstraction, and shifting towards everyday narratives.
Compared to the themes of anxiety expressed in the "brutal" imagery of painters born in the 1970s, the paintings of Zhao Yiqian, a post-80s artist, convey prosaic and poetic imagery, demonstrating that this generation of painters yearns to break through the fetters of "brutal" imagery to move towards a natural, genuine and internally free state of mind. Young painters such as Zhao Yiqian, born in 1982, came of age in a depoliticizing consumer era, and long ago cast o the perplexities and anxieties of the previous generation, long steeped in an environment of history and ideals. Zhao's early life was deeply influenced by the increasing market forces and growing civilian culture of the early days of China's reform and opening. In this way, it is not di cult to understand why he would focus his painting on everyday things, or his obsession with timepieces, an unforgettable marker of his childhood times with his father. For the painter, so many objects are marked with memories, bearing the traces of individual events and past culture. His approach is to take these various everyday appearances (of stories, times, spaces, events and images), and carry out a visual decoding and recoding of them to form a "micro- emotional" painting form, a new micronarrative of painting.
Everyone is well aware that this is an era of the rapid replacement and refreshing of information. People are hard pressed to fix memories into their hearts, and seem unable to avoid becoming part of the amnesiac masses - all of us faced as we are with such a reality of flying time, estranged emotions and fragmented pasts. Even so, people love to recollect the past, because memory, in a certain sense, is the chain of spiritual links that ties our sense of existence together. Memory always appears unconnected, incomplete, even fragmented and inaccurate, but it always goes hand in hand with physical appearances (or written words). Physical appearances are legible, condensing temporal coordinates, fixed events and the telling of stories. Of course, people sometimes attempt to restore memories, hoping to gain inspiration and associative ideas through the referencing of physical appearances. Though memory is fragmented and segmented, it exists within social relations woven together from individual experiences and ideological discourse. Zhao Yiqian takes this viewpoint as the starting point for his paintings. He specifically depicts many objects that are carriers for minute memories and emotions, using painting methods to establish connections to easily overlooked objects and images in order to reveal the symbolic meaning concealed within individual emotions and ideologies. The boxes, timepieces, keyboards, plaster molds and other objects he depicts in his works form key points in memory. His appropriation and combination of different subjects deftly pulls them into a surreal setting in which he reconstructs time, space and stories. It is this method through which he drives his paintings, forming a unique trait in his artworks. In A Classroom that doesn't Look all that New (2013), the classroom from his memory is depicted devoid of any trace of people, focusing its expression on the tables and chairs, the blackboard, and a towering cylindrical model at the center. The only classical element, a series of plaster busts, is placed at the right of the painting, as if a magnification of the art models used in class. This seemingly unconnected image is actually a footnote to art education, alluding to the abnormally strict procedures found in the Chinese art education. Notably, Zhao Yiqian has greatly simplified the content of the painting, intentionally creating an absence of people. Though the people are absent, the painting seems to allude to the human gaze, because the objects connected to memory that are the focus of the artist's eye all have connotations of mental activity. If the models are the painter's re - creation of well-trod memories, as well as a metaphor for the dimensions of rules, order, time, repetition and training in art education, then in the rendering of painterly aspects, he has intentionally avoided overly exquisite depictions, emphasizing the organic relationships between line and color gamut, whole and part, tightness and looseness, which he grasps well, reaching harmony between form and function. A similar work in this regard is Lonely Loneliness (2014), in which Zhao Yiqian depicts a lifeguard chair towering over a body of water. A child's oat-ring drifts alone on the empty water's surface. Not a single person appears in the painting. The vast, tranquil water scene seems to be portending some event about to take place. Apparently, aside from the sense of solitude revealed by the painting's form, the painter is also attempting to convey his childhood obsession over an object (the toy boat) and his lack of possession of this object, through which he finds comfort for the soul, making up for his unsatisfied childhood yearning through this image method. This psychological sense of loss serves as the painter's creative motivation and result. Unlike Lonely Loneliness, Zhao Yiqian's A Soft Sadness is a triptych. The painting on the left depicts the moment of a pair of long hands stretching out to play the piano. The central painting comprises purple and black abstract color gamut. The painting on the right depicts a piece of Western classical furniture. The color tone of the three paintings appears quite heavy, and this is closely linked to their import. If the rhythmic piano-playing hands allude to a sense of music, the purple and black color gamut are like abstract notes creating a sense of sadness, while the unaccompanied furniture reveals a sense of loneliness. Perhaps his painting has no intention of creating any concrete interpretation for the viewer, but the overall image provides a thick tone of sadness.
Clearly. Zhao Yiqian's painting method is constantly clashing and converging between memory and imagination, appropriation and fabrication, restoration and revision, forming into an individual visual logic and artistic language. In Deja-vu (2014), the image he depicts seems to force people to enter into their own familiar everyday world of furniture. The furniture, rendered in a light blue tone, is elegant and tranquil. If it weren't for the artist's account, I would have taken it for Chinese furniture. In fact, the artist had travelled to Prague, where he visited a secondhand furniture store and unwittingly stumbled on a sense of deja-vu in the layout. It immediately calls to mind Chinese furniture displays from the 1970s and 80s. That is to say, similar things exist in every society. He vividly conveys this familiar socialist furniture, linking together the similar things that exist in every society. Only the Barr Zeus’s painting hanging on the wall and the skull on the table were later additions by the artist. This use of appropriation and revision infuses the painted form with new meaning.
Unlike Deja-vu, in the work What Appears Complete on the Surface is not Necessarily Real (2015), the artist focuses on extraordinary old photographs that have been selected by time. Old photographs are fixed frames of specific moments in time, as well as records of related event content, and discussions and debates about questions related to those events. The story behind What Appears Complete on the Surface is not Necessarily Real actually stems from an interesting act of photography. A major criminal case took place in the United States in the 1970s, and because the witnesses were worried about retribution, they did not dare to face the camera, instead choosing to take this group photograph with their backs to the lens. Zhao Yiqian decided to create a painting based on this rich source of stories, but when he did so, it was not an objective re-creation but a subjective revision of it. The painter removed everything in the photograph aside from the mysterious backs of the figures, covering or replacing the other content with the sea. The figures with their backs to us are facing the sea as distant lightning bolts streak across the sky. He managed the painting with a nostalgic, mournful gray tone. They seem to be confused with puzzlement or unease as they stare out over the ocean in deep thought. But if we look closely at the details of this painting, we see forms that do not t visual logic. For instance, the men standing in the back row are taller than the women sitting in the row in front of them, and as a row, they block the views of the people behind them, re-creating a very real "sense of absurdity". One could say that Zhao Yiqian's artwork subverts the original intent of the photograph. By revising the photograph and contracting the painted form, he has formed a "third kind of painting" that is neither this nor that - a painting of familiar strangeness. This subjective reading in his paintings doubtless includes or alludes to content - memory as a stage, image as a stage, time as a stage - slowly disappearing in the minds of people. Zhao Yiqian's approach to painting makes them no longer concealed, repressed or ambiguous, but makes them visible, touching on images of narrative, events and individual information. This painting thoroughly reflects on the dialectic relationship between "facts" and "understandings", while also touching on legal issues in 1970s American society and presenting the visual imagining of painting itself. A similar approach is also confirmed in the works We are Tranquil, Tranquil, Tranquil and Barr Zeus's Gleaners (2015) - the refection on everyday experience and visual experience to reveal profound meaning concealed within the picture.
Aside from observing the penetration and seepage of photographic elements into painting, Zhao Yiqian is also skilled at observing the minute shifts in real life, focusing on analyzing the internal relationship between surface appearances and the everyday experience. Specifically, he uses the switching, juxtaposition and comparison of images from different times and places to create a visual "truth" that is difficult to distinguish. Where We are Important or not Important (2015) is a case in point. In this painting, he places two things from different places next to each other. On the left is an old - style furniture store in Shanghai, and to the right is a display of qipao dresses from a museum in Jiangsu province. Notably, the qipao dresses show dramatization of the human form, while also demonstrating the true ductility of the body, alluding to the complexity and diversity of reproductive organs, arrangement and crafting. Zhao Yiqian places great emphasis on painted form, rendering both images in a gray tone to highlight the connections and unitary nature of the physical appearances from two different places. As the painter sees it, as soon as a relationship exists, then the material form nurtures people's temptations, desires and consumer awareness. These physical appearances provide us with a window into the cultural operations of commercial products and consumer fervor. Though their cultural backgrounds are different, there are internal connections between Eastern and Western culture. He treats these everyday objects as cultural signs, carriers of the material and fashion histories that follow social development, and the related social visual experiences. Another artwork that utilizes a similar expressive method is We Have Mutually Existed Here. The left of the painting is a shrine in the Shenyang Imperial Palace, and the right is an imperial dragon robe. At center is a cabinet door of a design commonly found in homes in Shenyang in the 1970s. On the left, however, he has added a subjective touch to the scene, the simple state of life of an unemployed worker. The worker's face is intentionally covered by a balloon, in a touch of black humor. His artwork is not a "revival" but a restoration through a process of appropriation and assembly of fragments. There are not many people in Zhao Yiqian's paintings, but that does not mean he does not care about the human condition. His works often depict a particular person, and that person often represents the face of an entire group in society. One could say that many of his paintings depict non - living things, mainly objects, but as he sees it, inanimate objects are often more meaningful than living things, because "An object can be used by many people, passed by, seen or touched, so an object can express much more than a human figure" (Zhao Yiqian). Truly, his paintings reveal the discursive order within things and use these things to reflect on human emotion.
In general, Zhao Yiqian sets out from individual experience to convey obsessions with objects and the warmth of human sentiments. He approaches the order of things with rational understanding and analysis, as if sifting and filtering through a kaleidoscope. His works place great emphasis on the visual re-creation of memory, and on the interpretation of the relationships between image and situation, time and space, past and present, and metaphor and reality. In his creative process, his formal selections and arrangements of images are not isolated, but instead aimed at drawing them into a set of cultural relationships, bestowing painting with new allegorical meaning through the process of appropriation and revision. Of course, his "appropriation" of images is not to reproduce their form but to recode fragmented images and unearth the chains of significance between historical images and the spectacle of reality, to link perceptions of reality to historical memory, integrate individual experience and cultural allegory, and fuse estranged images with familiar images in order to construct a new form of painted narrative. He drives this visual logic and narrative structure in a way as to emphasize an individual painting form, while also adding to the rhetoric of painting.
Zhao Yiqian's artworks express the intention to break free of the rules and constraints of the system. He uses the microscopic everyday experience as his entry point, seeking balance in a place beyond the quotidian, perhaps showing a surprising facet, and then returns to clarity and tranquility. He loves casting his gaze on those things in individual life experience that are full of emotional import. His works convey tender "micro-emotional" and "micronarrative" forms, using the forms in his paintings to raise questions, and seeking the answers through the narrative information within. Thus, the openness of his artworks allows the viewers to draw from their own experience and intuition as they grasp, understand, associate and imagine on their own.
Saturday, September 26, 2015 Wangjing Neighborhood, Beijing