Preexistence and Present Life: The magical world of Gao Feng

Gaolin
(Doctor in History of Arts, Critic and Curator)
March 5, 2007

Human beings have many ways to understand the world, but most are filtered through the eyes.  The boundless universe of talent and splendor, the numerous expressions of society, all of these pass through the naked human eye.   That is why individuals value their eyes with their own life; vision is regarded as the most important tool to perceive the world. For ancient Greek and Hebrew civilizations, the visual and the auditory senses were the major resources to approach the prototype form of truth. Moreover, both the former and the latter were understood as the way to handle the sacred metaphysical world of the real. Subsequently, for Western traditional culture, the way things are viewed and experienced is imperative to understanding the archetype of truth.  The apprenticeship to Plato and Aristotle established the Western philosophy of visual centralism, along with the discoveries of Renaissance artists about the laws of perspective, and Descartes’: "I think therefore I am", a binary philosophical model.  All these cultural propensities are fundamentals for Western classical art as a connection to the real world, and for artists as the main way to access the outside world. In keeping with the past, Western modern art conforms to the tradition of visual centrism and, at the same time, to the needs of a developed capitalist society.

In China, avant-garde and contemporary art, took shape along with the policy, of an open market economy and with the development of international cultural exchange.  During the process of taking, absorbing, studying, creating, and fusing the artistic Western culture and our own art tradition, we became a new personality in the field of art, on the world stage. Therefore, changes in line with the traditional view in Western art inevitably and deeply influenced the transformation and development of Chinese art.  This has already become an undisputable fact.

In this context, Chinese artists have a deep understanding of perceptual experience as an imperative issue within artistic creation, and thus open up an abundant, colorful scope in different themes and topics, showing a variety of styles and patterns. To avoid a simplistic method  or just because there is no way to directly observe and express the microcosmic world, young contemporary artists get rid of the traditional centered vision, to expand their visual language.

Gao Feng’s art work is created, and can be understood within this kind of cultural background. When he graduated from college in the nineties, Chinese contemporary art began to present diverse mediums and styles. Then he came to the capital city of Beijing. In this center of Chinese artistic culture, he felt the strong breath of contemporary art; and started to question how to walk his own path of artistic creation.  All of the young artists born in the seventies had to face these matters and make choices.  Gao Feng, as other artists from this generation, directed his eyes to what lay within his own life experiences and personal feelings; art is germane to his own life, rather than to the outside world of social and political affairs. In other words, art is based on personal life, personal ways of viewing the world, and then on interpretation of this experience, even of some very trivial and insignificant details. It was the love for his pets and his concern about their living habits and emotions that led Gao Feng to study microbes, bacteria, and the microscopic world. This huge and marvelous microcosm has changed the way he views and experiences the world.
   
The microscopic world (germs, viruses, and many micro structures) usually just experienced by doctors and scientists, displays a completely different universe, where microorganisms unexpectedly have thousands of ovals or rectangles; they grow or distort, inflate or contract.  Each type with different shapes and colors, some have long bodies and numerous segments, and others a dense flower at their center. At the same as Gao Feng sights the magic around the microorganisms, he uses the brush to give them shape, makes notes of their scientific behavior and releases his artistic imagination. The great number of sketches and drawings certifies the number of days and nights he indulges in this infinitesimal world. 
He visualizes things around him in an alternative way, including what has already occurred, direct or indirect behaviors, empirical history, as well as what takes place in the present reality. In the beginning and for many years he used only his bare eyes to acknowledge and experience; but now (through the microscope) he offers a special language to reveal his own understanding. This enables us to think about long-term human configuration, to view the world and the authenticity of art expression, because originally, and at a deeper level, all things also have another micro dimension of shape and way of existence.

Thus, Gao Feng’s microscope is like a magical mirror, in control of our world and of artistic expression of all acquired concepts. History and the daily life of the community have changed their original image, position and role. Beyond all doubt the centralized traditional vision does not exist inside Gao Feng’s magical mirror, and instead a completely new visual language and creative power is released from within; every existence can be doubted, and every image of art can be re-explained.

“Preexistence” Series is Gao Feng´s re-understanding of traditional culture. Every corner in the landscapes of Xia Wa, or every tree branch from the paintings of Song Dynasty Ma Yuan, or from Lu Wenyin’s Itinerant peddler, have all become the artist’s re-interpretations. Gao Feng’s version of Ma Yuan’s Tap Song describes the peasant, standing on a bridge during the spring season; the character expresses vivid, curious aspects of life.  The representation of depth and breadth in a landscape composition, the distance between a rock and a mountain far away, are produced with lines that seem to have been cut by an ax, resulting in a solid texture and a three dimensional feeling.  Even the words written on the surface have evolved into long-bearded microorganisms.  Of course Gao Feng is not replacing some details of the traditional paintings with microorganisms, but rather, through his magical mirror, he stands in another world, inspired by fantastic scenes; his brave imagination re-structures a traditional scene into blue and golden yellow creations of his subjectivity.  He saturates the surface with oil and acrylic paint to describe rocks, mountains and characters and in order to portray a sense of drama and magical flow in colored images. The sense of volume and space in the scenery is emphasized by the spectrum of light and shade of the same color, an attribute or visual effect difficult to achieve with traditional water color and mineral materials on traditional paper or silk. Turning again to Lu Wenyin’s Itinerant Peddler, where children from the Ming Dynasty are portrayed as excited and amused by the toy peddler, Gao Feng adds substantial quantities of bacteria, viruses and microorganisms, to displace the original toys in the painting, which become the new treasure of these children who, in Gao Feng’s rendering, lack facial features. 
In this replacement of traditional art work and culture, it seems that the artist is trying to arouse people's past history and stimulate an alternative thinking about it. History is not only built up through the visible text and image, it can also be regarded as a composition by ancient microorganisms, which can only be certified through the development of modern science and medicine.

Reflecting on contemporary realist life, the series “Present life”, also encounters difficulties in escaping the harassment and infiltration of bacteria. In Gao Feng’s urban work, no matter if it is a portrait of a single character or a group image, the artist’s silhouette is always present on the surface of the painting.  His figure, however, does not have any facial features; there is only a kind of cavity which releases bacteria, virus or other kinds of microbes that disseminate and penetrate the city’s atmosphere, corroding each corner of the city, living within the crowd.  The artist’s own silhouette inside the painting is also not curable; his hair, his face, his muscles and his blood pressure, had already become the best shelter for the microorganisms.

Possibly someone will assert that the artist’s modus operandi is a prank; however, the artist spends a great deal of painstaking effort on his sketches and paintings.  In both series the vivid colors and the solid shapes, want to transmit to us strong, intense information – an artist of reality in the traditional sense- skillfully making people aware of a new reality, that is our history and our own existence from an original, hidden point of view, invisible to others.

Gao Feng’s artistic creation, through the use of both traditional visual images and real life representations, is full of important academic values. Neither the “Preexistence” artwork nor the “Present Life “work is a subjective performance. He has gone beyond experience as indirect source of images and beyond first-hand
experience, as a direct observation of self sufficiency and uniqueness.

Speaking from the level of methodology, he accepts the anti-Western vision of centralism, and he corresponds to contemporary Chinese art’s task to diversify the needs of traditional representations. In his own way he delivers an important message: the true vision is not only a mere presentation; rather, we must make every effort still to find it, and in this process of discovery, the original look of the world (including direct and indirect experience), might have different possibilities, full of magical charm and supernatural color. One of the values of art lies in the revelation of the colorful world in all aspects, to stimulate people’s imagination; Gao Feng’s work is inspired by the great ancient artwork. For those works, collectively referred to as "Preexistence," ancient traditional paintings and the re-interpretation of them is not an exhausted project, since for contemporary social reality a micro truth is revealed.  I look forward to Gao Feng’s "erudite and informed" road in the future as he continues to create fresh and inspirational work.