A. Observing
My works begin with observation, and I think I am more an observer than a creator. I’m curious about many things and I want to allow that to myself. Curiosity drives me to directions I can naturally work with, it is like an instinct. Sometimes things fail; sometimes I make something I didn’t know existed – and that keeps me going. When I watch something, I gradually abandon my habitual perception of things. I may extract some of its characteristics and associate them with other things. In the process, it is no longer like what it was and gradually develop into an image and a story in that space. Once this image is clear enough in my mind, I start to paint. Every visual image has its hidden development potential. And my view of these things is a third-person perspective of self-identity and consciousness. The more I find how I feel about these things, the more I find who I am.
The experience of leaving China and coming to a strange city is another influence on my work. Everything around was unfamiliar to me. The most important thing for me is to re-observe the original living environment in China after keeping a certain distance from it. Scenes, such as conflicting and contradictory city landscapes I used to find in China, become hard to find in England. For me, everything in London is orderly and reasonable. This is the first time I realized how easily space influences me and how fluid my work can be. Being in a strange place often means viewing with unfamiliar eyes, so strangeness becomes a valuable experience. Francis Alÿs is also inspired by travelling in his work. 'My own reaction to the place is itself subjective: it is a bit of dance in between my own concerns or obsessions that I carry with me over there and their meeting with that place, that clash that will eventually lead to a concrete reaction, a piece, or nothing.' (Francis Alÿs, 2010)
Later, I gradually realised that even the definition of "conflict" was in my memory. The visual experience of conflict and contradiction was based on my cultural background; that is to say, I needed to relink the objects around me with my cognition and watch things without any prejudices before I could see them again. As I keep observing, I find that the items scattered in the city are lovely to me, such as trees, street lamps and trash. Some of them have been tampered with by citizens to become useful things, some have been moulded by the traces of the city, and some are just discarded and out of repair as if they were waiting for adoption. I began to record all those things I observed with photography and kept thinking about what was behind these things and how I watched them.
This image was taken on a double-decker bus in London. The trees were shaped at a right angle by the buses. I had always thought that maybe everything around us is unconsciously mutating according to the trajectory of human life. Masks, forks, hair clips, and other artificial objects are redefined by their context. I call it an alienation process.
Sketchbooks have become the best place for me to record those alienated objects. In my sketchbooks, an image is often very related to the previous one. It is an evolving complex that eventually evolves into an instrument or a creature, which brings a sense of surreality and unconsciousness and a very wild and dangerous side. The colour and visual presentation of my sketches have a lot to do with China’s Times Comics magazines. I saw these comics in newspapers and magazines when I was a child. The shapes of the characters in them are exaggerated and based on traditional Chinese paintings. There are only monochrome lines and flat painted colours, mixed with words, short but thought-provoking. Most of the content is a satire on politics, war, and the living conditions of the people at the bottom. As a timely and effective communication medium, these comics probably played the same role as our current short videos.
Times Comics Vol 37 1937
However, when I began to make my first painting What's On Sale Today, I encountered difficulties. At first, I took my sketch as a draft of the painting, I tried to enlarge the drafts on canvas but the final effect was not satisfying. That was because there are more details that need to be painted in a larger scale work, which I can simplify into smaller pieces. And during the painting process, I lost the traces I crated on my sketchbook. During the second tutorial with Feng, where we discuss this issue, I began to think I should take the sketch and the painting as two works instead of one. A painting should not be the larger version of the draft, and I should not pursue the same effect. The reason why I am not satisfied with my paintings is that I tried so hard to imitate the sketches, but forgot to play with the painting itself. She also mentioned that the empty space left in the centre of the background and the spotlight on the top in the work The Claws made her feel like this is a dramatic psychological portrait of the monster, and I can work more on the space behind it. This is a great challenge for me, and I began to experiment with the painting space in my later works, such as The Clean Primitive Man.
The Claw
B. The narrative of things
Before the third tutorial, I showed Geraint the photos I took on the street and told him how I perceive these things. He recommended Richard Wentworth , an artist whose work has greatly influenced mine in Unit 1. He just lit me up and gave me a fresh understanding about seeing.
I read Wentworth's albums repeatedly. The structures of his artificial landscapes were light and ingenious as if every object was telling a poetic story full of uncertainty. I imagine, If human beings suddenly disappear from the earth, an alien traveller will see these photos and understand how cute human beings were. Of course, these photos also have a playful nature concealed in themselves; when an ordinary brick becomes the central part of a photograph, the viewer‘s gaze begins to add its meaning, which shows the ability of human empathy. The more I read about him the more I started to think about my work and what I was attempting to express. I have been trying to find the significance behind the things that I see, but the real value lies in looking itself. I want to Look with a pure eye, as Wentworth said' When innocence meets ignorance. Or maybe there’s a looking which is quite innocent.’
For a long time, I thought I was interested in the process of associating and transforming the form of things after watching objects. Then I realised my view is based on reality and the objects themselves, rather than staying in the imaginary realm. These items themselves stay in reality, but the story or meaning behind them is full of magic poetry. This thought was something new to me—
As I stare at the wires, they gradually became less like wires but a combination of rubber and various plastics, as if I was staring at the text; the text also decomposed into some strokes. My way of looking involves such a deviation, which has long been divested in the city. In the book Flesh and Stone, the author Richard Senette mentions that 'the urban environment is dull and monotonous, and the whole urban environment makes people uninteresting. Compared with the reproduction of the autonomy of modern people’s sense of the body, this sensory deprivation is more significant.' In a city, the functional division of space ensures efficient production, and visual attention always requires a high degree of concentration. However, a large part of people’s creative energy comes when distracted. The creative activity is actually taking place in peripheral space. In China, there are many phenomena which we call Folk Wisdom, and that is, citizens, transform everyday objects according to their imagination and creativity, in response to particular circumstances. This reflects the aura of people who are not disciplined by the urban machine.
With the influence of these sources, I began preparing for my third painting The Gaze. These two rabbits are kept in a cage in front of a small supermarket in my hometown and are separated by a wooden board, broken by biting. When the rabbits grow to a certain age, they must be kept separate. Otherwise, there will be conflicts in the territory, and the weaker one must be killed. Two rabbits are basking together, but both in a small space full of danger. The idea of The Gaze is different from the previous works. As you can see, there is no obvious deformation in this painting. I want to emphasise the tension between them, the gaze of the rabbit hidden in the shadows on the other half of the territory. I painted this sense of unsettling by depicting two holes on the board, through which one of the rabbits is gazing at the other one. The background of this work is still monochrome, but I use the contrast of light and shadow to create an unrealistic sense of space. I found the reference of the expression of shadows from Puperty, by Edvard Munch.
The Gaze, 2021
Edvard Munch, Puberty
C. Body awareness
When visualising various things, I will unconsciously replace some of the objects with my body parts, and find many similarities between daily items and details of the human body. My own body appears to mutate in my work, as are bring feelings of detachment, inaction, and rebelliousness. Following the third tutorial, where we spoke about the notion of body awareness, and the self-portraits in art. I began to research Maria Lassnig , she is an artist whose work transforms the vague, fluctuating, sensitive recognition of bodily perception into the moment the brush is applied to a canvas. I felt that Lassnig really encapsulated the feeling I was attempting to convey in my works with portrait and body. The image I find particularly fascinating is Small Science Fiction Self-portrait, in which our eye is drawn first to herself with a pair of big glasses, then to the strong brush strokes covering all over her body and background. This image is her self-portrait whose eyes are covered, with mouth open. She seems stunned by what she saw.
Maria Lassnig, Small Science Fiction Self-portrait
My Body Awareness in my works comes first from my habit of drawing self-portraits in my BA. It has become a way of learning myself. When I slowly draw my face in front of a mirror, I felt I am touching it with the pencil that I held in my hand. The last work in this unit is a self-portrait. While I was taking a shower, I tried to scratch my back. I struggled and distorted in my narrow shower room with all the glass doors closed. At that moment, I felt I was the tree that was shaped by the double-decker buses on the street, an alienated monster.
At the same time, this piece is the one that took me the longest. I used a lot of mixed materials, such as oil sticks, pastels, acrylics. Instead of painting on canvas, I attached different shapes of paper and canvas together to form a complete picture. I wanted each part of the painting to be independent and closely connected to each other at the same time, so as to create the feeling of dampness in the bathroom. I didn't realize that what I was doing was a work between installation and painting, and I didn't realize that the reason for choosing such a form was actually due to the way of viewing from a scattered perspective. I wanted the viewer to look at this painting as if he/she were reading a comic book.
I visited Victoria and Albert Museum where I was fascinated by these suffering human bodies. These body structures are inaccurate in today's view, but we can see the rich imagination of ancient painters to understand the body structure. Scars on these fleshes present a unique beauty. At the same time, I learned how to handle edge lines from those paintings. Unlike the way that Renaissance artists used light and shadow to create the rounded human body, medieval altarpieces tended to emphasize the flatness of the human body.
Neapolitan follower of Giotto, The Dead Christ and the Virgin 1330s-40s
C. Visual dispersion& Space Conciousness
This work was exhibited on a corner in the class's end-of-year exhibition. Next to it is Fergus's drawing of a towel. Bathroom space was constructed when our pieces were put together. I can quickly retain an impression of the bathroom when I walk fast through this area. When I quickly pass my painting, visual information such as colour and texture automatically combines into a bathroom image in my mind. But when I stepped back and looked at it in every detail, I realised how unreasonable and unrealistic it was; every item in the picture is separated from each other. So I became interested in such a visual fusion beyond painting. Is it possible to turn a space into a two-dimensional plane or space through visual fusion? How do we understand painting in a dialogue?
Chinese artist Zhang Enli's painting also reflects the transformation of plane visual experience. He discovers the poetry of daily life through his observation of everyday life, rather than transcending everyday life in a detached way. He describes a series of containers, ashtrays, paper boxes, buckets, glassware and other miscellaneous objects, and some empty spaces and places. The sense of existence and the loneliness of absence in the room are expressed through various traces of past existence. In his shows, the layout of his works has a certain quality of installation art. People look around in the exhibition hall, moving their bodies, but not in front of furniture objects. He transformed the relatively static visual experience of facing the picture into the vision of action in the three-dimensional space (also the experience of body), which is a re-entry of painting in the physical sense.
Enli Zhang, Temporary Space (2013)
Enli Zhang, Temporary Space (2013)
Viewing shapes memory and cognition. Perhaps we only see when our looking is dispersed. We never gaze in a vacuum and always live in peripheral light. When I look at heaters, I'm looking at teacups, buttons on the water heater, pencils and cracks in the wall. I'm looking at many things spontaneously, and they gradually form a narrative, and I choose to see what I see rather than what I can see. It's a remarkable ability to stay scattered, and this way of seeing contributes to my visual association. In the painting creation of the next Unit, I will further explore the possibility of painting in space, and at the same time, put this observation method into the understanding of the narration of objects.
Draft for new piece , 2022
Book and references
Mark Godfrey, Klaus Biesenbach and Kerryn Greenberg, 2010. Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception. London: Tate.
Richard Sennett, 1996. Flesh And Stone: The body and the city in Western Civilization. W. W. Norton & Company.
Richard Wentworth, 1984. Making do and getting by. Hans Ulrich Obrist ed. London: Koening Books, Lisson Gallery.
Patricia Allmer. (2011, August 11). The Story of Things: reading narrative in the visual. (Anne Reverseau, UC Louvain, Ed.)
Book and references
Mark Godfrey, Klaus Biesenbach and Kerryn Greenberg, 2010. Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception. London: Tate.
Richard Sennett, 1996. Flesh And Stone: The body and the city in Western Civilization. W. W. Norton & Company.
Richard Wentworth, 1984. Making do and getting by. Hans Ulrich Obrist ed. London: Koening Books, Lisson Gallery.
Patricia Allmer. (2011, August 11). The Story of Things: reading narrative in the visual. (Anne Reverseau, UC Louvain, Ed.)