Youthful and Private Recollections
Zhu Qi

The paintings by Shen Dapeng demonstrate the new artistic tendency of the 80s' generation. His age group grew up in the social backdrop of the rising of China, and yet his paintings, on the contrary, offer us an in-depth description of the private memories of a youngster—from the illustration of his father and sister, to fashion and to dreams of a surreal nature.

Perhaps the paintings produced by this generation of artists may not be consider great works of art, but they do present a kind of absolute self-reflexive authenticity. The paintings by Shen are similar to the private notes written by a juvenile; he paints only those he can relate to from his own private recollections, such as his father, his sister, and himself, and nothing else.

The subject matter that he has painted the most is his father. In one instance, his father is shown as a laborer from the northeast of China. And in another instance, his father appears to be a laid-off worker. Goggle-eyed, hair-raised, his father is depicted as someone staring up at the sky in pure astonishment. In yet another instance, his father is portrayed as a chubby yet strong-looking topless butcher lying on a steel frame bed.

Shen fabricates a new type of "father"; this father is not the collective fatherly figure as imagined in the eyes of the older generation. This father figure is his and no one else's. In this case, the "father" figure is privatized, and this has led Shen to utilize a meticulous, microscopic way of painting: super-realism. Shen paints his pictures very slowly because he feels the need to illustrate all the details of the body and of the skin; a lot of areas are more detailed than what it appears in a photo—this include details that are not even included on the photograph itself.

Yet he does not think that he is copying from a photograph. He believes that his father, as painted in his pictures, is distorted; areas such as the skin and scars are imaginatively enlarged—such cannot be made with a photograph. Through realism, the image of his father is captured with a kind of Northeastern-socialism-cum-industrial-age-recession-lower-class characteristic. The work not only presents a realistic aspect of the ragged body, it also imbues a kind of "body warmth" and a site-specific mentality.

What is interesting is that Shen's "father" image does not point to a kind of social concern or a kind of collectivism, but a turn to an extreme form of privatized viewing. He has also painted a "self-portrait," depicting himself as a small butcher with a youthful expression of sluggishness and absurdity. But the way he characterizes himself is similar to many of those of his 80s generation; such is produced by a better way of living in comparison to the past generation and thus produces a new kind of temperament in their artistic practice. Shen has also painted his sister: a cool young lady wearing a sexy outfit, holding a cigarette fashionably with an inexperienced, vacant-looking expression.

Father, sister, and himself, Shen has completed the fabrication of a private genealogy of his family. On one level, painting is a means of making images for Shen. Through a meticulous painterly method, he has produced a private history of images. The “privatization” of images seems to be the inevitable result coming from his generation, since they have all experienced the social transformation in China. In Shen’s private recollections, it almost seems as if he no longer trusts anything that he has no direct contact with; he has simply lost interest in anything outside of his own experience, memories, and imagination.

Such has turned Shen’s paintings into an act of instinctual response. There is a drastic difference in the way he paints his figures in one period. If the subject is his father or sister, then he paints it in a very realistic, life-like manner. But if the figures are outside of his private circle, then they are depicted as hollow husks, emptied of human essence.

His recent paintings has turned towards a very realistic, strongly decorative, and imaginative approach, such as a boy with a pair of apples; a baby in thorn bushes, or a cartoon child bearing a gigantic fish. It seems like he is working within his own imagination without trespassing beyond his own boundary of experience. He is limited to his own private recollections. Shen is not interested in anything that is public, historical, conceptual, and experiences that are indirect. He feels safe, free, and with a sense of dependence while working within his own private territory. Thus super-realism, perhaps, is the best means to express his privatized narratives.

Shen’s “privatization” of images is not a singular tendency; there is a group of people of his age who are involved in the illustration of such a style. From a strive towards “individualization” in the last generation of the past 20 years, to Shen’s own generation interested in “privatization”; how do we define the meaning of such an orientation? Perhaps “privatization” itself is the meaning itself; it does not need reference points. This makes Shen’s art practice—on the level of expressing human nature and language—more refined and delicate. But that also makes the arrangement of his pictorial greatly reduced to the expression of just youthful and private recollections. In an age of high-speed fluctuation, what else is there for the younger generation to depend upon but their own private recollections!