Giving Painting a Cause

- Jiang Yuehong

Since Marcel Duchamp’s conception of “readymade”, how can we give painting a cause in the age of mechanical reproduction, a reality of the ubiquity of a camera lens once stated by Walter Benjamin?

While the paintings by the super-realistic Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali have presented us wonders, the impressive ones by the abstract-expressionistic Jackson Pollock and William de Kooning have revealed us certain traces. The practice of painting thus goes away from our daily experience and Andy Warhol, the smart Pop artist, turns to those consumed and popular signs or images that have been endlessly reproduced and spread-out in the commercial world, reproducing and re-circulating them as “readymade” in name of art. As a result, with its participation into daily life, painting of modernism finds itself declining in artistic practice, although considered as a paradigm with its priority of art form for art’s sake before.

By all appearances, artists today must explore a solution to the dilemma of painting being bounded either by certain form or by certain concept, and take it as their core mission to branch out the potentials of painting as a mean of the contemporary art practice via an effective convergence of the followings: the sociological meaning of photographic imagery, the political connotation of the “ready-made” conception and the esthetic nature of painting as handiwork. Instead of derived from photos, Gerhard Richter’s photo-painting serves to make their painted copies, which indicates that a photo as a picture connotes the possibility of shaking off personal experience, so there is no style, no composition, and no judgment but a probability of painting’s revalidation in the contemporary art of diversity while its participating in daily life today through taking in and questioning on the role of photography.

Then, how can we extend photo-painting beyond Richter’s border by a breakdown of the similarity on painted surfaces and the “given” subjects of political recollection or historical wounds? Wu Haizhou’s series of the motif “Park” is what allows us to interpret the art of photo-painting in the context of China today.

Wu’s attention to the parks frequently used as commonplaces of any souvenir photos in China contributes to his sustained concern of the motif “Park”. The collected photos themselves are documentary, recording and saving the material and spiritual aspects of Chinese daily life. Different from the explicit western expression, Chinese expression in painting is traditionally sensitive and implicit to a certainty on any “weighty” political or historical subjects. A shift from a private garden to a public park in China implies a shift from an individual space to a collective space, from a private place to a public place, and from a cultured gathering of scholars to a get-together of the ordinary people. Behind such a shift in the concept and role of a space the main body of history has changed. A public park as an indication of the modernized Chinese life in the given period of New China is a space open to the exposition and delivery of the common awareness. It is a playing place not only of gathering groups but also in favor of amorists. 

Taking photos as “ready-made” in conception, Wu elaborately selected some personal pictures and some published photos of media that all were taken in a park setting, using them for his painting imagery. When he paints by hand to “copy” the readymade image of a park that really touches him inwardly, he is its eyewitness and active participant. Thanks to his education in Chinese ink painting starting from childhood and his insistent practice in calligraphy, with a self-restrained control of his affective expressions in drawing those images imitatively, he naturally brings about a smooth making-out style plus the delicious effect of colors to his painting. It generates a blended and implicit interplay between the style formation and the motif delivery of his painting.

From his photo selection to the end of “a painted copy”, he re-builds a park bearing one’s memory of those days gone old. Wu’s own personal experience and growing-up traces seep from the series, and so does his yearning and recalling of that age gone already in time but staying still in mind. The subject and style of his paintings breathe a vague and mingled breath offering a sense of warmth mixed with melancholy in feeling and a kind of geniality tied up with alienation in mood. Seemingly, the artist insists on keeping himself away from those scenes, objects and figures in painting, even from his first stroke.

He arranges himself deliberately being here in a temporal distance from the parks of that age there. It is in his personal manner of actively backing self off that he re-constructs a different space which has never presented but is even named as a public park by us in our public context. Thus, the most daily and usual common awareness of a park speaks out via his paintings, although such a voice were never heard openly before.

Obviously, the efficacy of Wu’s series comes from three factors: first, the series through the medium of paint suggests a reaffirmation of the daily and concept art relevance of painting; second, he finds out a right motif with the inherent necessity of taking photos as “ready-made” and his appropriate style of delivery in the context of China today; third, more importantly, his practice would be interpreted as an logical engagement with photo-painting in China.