​

Keywords

Visual dispersion

Spacial Painting

Psychogeography

​

​

When I am in a gallery, I can feel the impact of each work around me in that space. When I look at a painting, the memory of the previous image is affecting me, so that I can make connections between different paintings. When the space of an art museum becomes crowded and we have to look at many paintings at the same time, how should we look at paintings? If a space only has one painting, how should we see it?

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

People's watching is not static. We are watching while moving, passing. Peripheral vision shapes our memories. Human viewing incorporates the perception of speed. The construction of urban space is to maximise efficiency but at the same time weaken our viewing. 'When the function of the reading space becomes purely mobile, the urban space itself loses its appeal; the driver only wants to pass through this space and does not want to pay attention to it. Space. The state of the moving body also increases the separation between the body and the space. The speed itself makes it difficult to pay attention to the stillness that flies by.' ( Paul Senette, Fresh and Stone) Urban space constantly strengthens our visual attention in the real world but tears it to shreds in the virtual Internet world. 

​

Psychogeography is the exploration of urban environments that emphasizes interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes， and follows a loosely defined urban practice known as the dérive. Psychogeographic writing can be thought of as an alternative way of reading the city.‘The practice of de-familiarization and the choice of encounters, the sense of incompleteness and ephemerality, the love of speed transposed onto the plane of the mind, together with inventiveness and forgetting are among the elements of an ethics of drifting we have already begun to test in the poverty of the cities of our time.’（Guy-Ernest Debord ）Such urban wandering is a aimless walk, ready to encounter. It also involves visual dispersion.

​

'the painter of modern life,” was a man of the world whose domain was the crowd, “just as the air is the bird’s and water that of the fish.” He desired nothing more than to merge with the throng and to dwell in “the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite,' Baudelaire wrote in an essay on the painter. The crowd was '[a]n enormous reservoir of electricity” that gave him the opportunity 'to be away from home and yet to feel at home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and yet to be unseen by the world' This reminds me of Richard Wentworth's photos. it's not just buildings and roads that shape our mental maps of cities, but also people and objects.

I'm interested in the way maps are made. All three-dimensional Spaces can be compressed into a flat booklet, and we can walk through the urban space according to these symbols and lines. In this process, three-dimensional space is transformed into a plane in our mind, and the plane can also be transformed into three-dimensional space. This way of thinking is constantly happening in our minds.

​
 

 

​
 

 

 

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

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. Zhang Enli's paintings changed the relationship between man and painting, and also changed the existence of painting. It is a major breakthrough to transform the existing form hanging on the wall into an inclusive painting space covering the audience. His installation paintings absorb people into the work. Such works also encourage audience participation. Once the audience steps into the work, they encounter the possibility of a new relationship with time and space. In a particular work, we have the fact that travel in time and travel in space happen simultaneously.

 

 

​

​

Artist

Richard Wentwort

​​Enli Zhang

Akira IkezoeI

​

​

Books and resources

Richard Sennett, 1996. Flesh And Stone: The body and the city in Western Civilization. W. W. Norton & Company.

Simon Fisher, Ocula. [Online]
Available at: https://ocula.com/magazine/features/zhangenli-psa-2020/

Karen O'Rourke, 2021. Psychogeography: A Purposeful Drift Through the City. [Online]
Available at: https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/psychogeography-a-purposeful-drift-through-the-city/

​