A gallery’s responsibility to the public is to endorse art that not only merits critical attention but also has solid investment potential and may even look good on your wall. The gallerist's job is a mixture of business, pleasure and academic claptrap. It's never easy to get it right. Additionally, the gallery is part of a broader art world alliance comprised of artists, the market and museums that defines artistic value in a tandem of tenuous consensus. As such the art world is constantly looking for works that museums, critics, collectors and galleries, can unanimously champion against the scrutiny of the lay world. As convention would have it in this ‘art world’ young, budding talents are systemically indoctrinated through a great many institutions: art schools, residencies, graduate studios, post grad programs and the like. Afterwards a trajectory of Biennials, group shows, awards, and media attention might bring these budding artists to a gallery like SGA’s attention. Fang Wei is an exception. Alas, SGA snubs the pretense of art world convention and welcomes Fang Wei, an artist who has never exhibited before, with open arms.
While Fang Wei is no stranger to China's exuberant, saga-ridden art world, it hasn’t been that as an artist per se, but instead as an art worker or art businessman or friend of the arts, if you wish. Fang’s legacy in the cultural landscape of Shanghai is well known to many yet his destiny to become an ‘artist’ may not be. Fang’s path to this destination has been long, circuitous but somehow inevitable- once an artist always an artist.
The short version: after studying art in Shanghai Fang Wei left for Japan to pursue his dream of painting but ended up dealing in antiques to support himself; after 15 years he came back to Shanghai, opened up a printmaking facility which catered to China’s top artists such as Zeng Fanzhi, Wang Guangyi, Zhou Chunya and others, including Zhang Huan who he eventually collaborated with in founding an art studio that would end all art studios. Fang helped to mastermind Zhang’s famous ash paintings, woodcut prints, door carvings, big Buddha sculptures and taxidermist works. After leaving Zhang Huan’s mega-studio Fang opened a restaurant, did some part-time antique dealing and then at the ripe age of 42 went back to the studio with a vengeance. “If I didn’t do it now, it would be too late and I would always regret it” the artist reflects. Throughout his various endeavors Fang was looking, absorbing, plotting and, when time allowed, painting. Mostly he took mental notes while exercising his creative muscle as a pioneer in the creative industries. Coming back to the solitude of the studio- man against canvas- was a conscientious and courageous choice. Not only does Fang Wei put his face on the line for the droves of friends, colleagues and clients that he drags in tow as he crosses over to the other side, but his integrity as well... and as a gallery, SGA’s face and integrity are also at stake. But this is where the plot thickens.
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer—1
The cliché goes that the inexplicable in this world is often elucidated through art … and alternatively, as hard as one may try, you can’t explain art by means of rational discourse. Art is lodged in a grey zone where reason and logic are long gone leaving the intuition, emotion and body to take turns teasing the intellect. It is where the human condition, and its subdued existential dilemma, rears its startled head pinning you against the wall with concepts like conception, perpetuity, mortality and ontology. It is where you have to look and look again and wonder how your eye, which has caressed each softly defined surface, has curled itself into a corner, perplexed at still not having seen everything. This is no man’s land where you are tickled silly by fleeting phenomena, by the beauty in the sublime and the aura in its wake. This is where words, no matter how you align them, start to wither and sound extraneous, superfluous and clunky, but alas you return to them as a matter of recourse, of resistance to the rapture of the art at hand. Here it is Fang Wei’s – an oeuvre that resurrects the lyrical and romantic which decades of postmodernity might’ve otherwise suppressed. Fang is a classicist at heart, simultaneously trapped and liberated by his medium. In his work we see reclining nudes, still lifes and portraits- the stuff of the academy, but we also see something more. Fang’s painting pulls forth a soft and new rendition of these themes from a 1000 year old painting tradition.
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow2
Every painter needs a departure point and for Fang Wei it was where and how watercolor and oil paint could converse- a simple idea complicated by medium specificity and Fang’s obscure subject matter. Starting off with a temperate palette of water colors Fang begins to quench the parched paper with broad, undulating strokes. He then adds black Chinese ink, mixed to the consistency of human blood per his father’s instructions, and an image arises from the flood of contrasting hues. Out of the coagulation we make out a night forest with deep colors encircling what seems like a moon but the details elude us. The trees are swaying, superimposing their positions and the moon has metamorphosed into a face now peeking out from behind intertwined branches. In another work a pathway leads to a bridge and the bridge to a mountain but is there a figure floating above the bridge or is it an image at all? Perhaps we are just being seduced into an abstraction of the author’s imagination by way of subtle, barely recognizable clues. Fang’s enigmatic images aim to capture the tenuous signals of consciousness, the point in between conception, registration and short term memory. “I like to explore the point where you see something, look away and try to picture what you have just seen” the author states.
Fang’s self induced déjà-vu pictures are at once haunting and idyllic. In a water color work a man’s arms protrude out from behind a pink haze to cuddle a side of beef as if it were an infant, his features on the upper half of his body blurring away while the lower half is rendered knee-deep in sharp black blocks. The picture is at once inviting and barbaric- a rosy nightmare. The artist himself admits there is an element of fear in his works. Oddly enough the psychological uneasiness that comes out in the paintings doesn’t materialize in conversation with the artist. It is as if painting was an act of exorcism for Fang, a way to release and confront his own inhibitions. In a small watercolor work a man leans over a plate which seems to float slightly above a table. Not only does the plate become an abyss from which the man’s gaze will forever remain fixed but the man’s arm has melted into the surface of the table as well. It is a simple image evoking a philosophical dilemma which can only be found in states of half-consciousness. Fang’s influences come from a great many sources. From photography to cinema to the old masters to Chinese classicism (with a special nod to his own father), the eclectic nature of his inspiration congeals in a surrealistic, almost mystical circus of imagery. However the surreal subject matter in Fang’s work shares the stage with an even more intriguing technical strategy. That is, how use oils in a way that mimics the quality of watercolors, while still retaining the essence and texture inherent to oil painting. This has become Fang’s technical mission.
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow3
The watercolor paintings, while works of art in themselves, often become sketches for larger sized works in oil. Painstakingly, layer by layer, the small watercolor works are translated into oil paint on canvas. From afar the finished oil paintings are soft and smooth having retained the plush and fluid quality of water colors, but upon closer examination a frenetic topography of brushwork emerges. What you see is a field of textures that only the ancient medium of oil paint can muster. Surprisingly it is an intricate web of cross-hatch patterns, dry rough edges and expressive gestures that make up the silky, billowing forms that were just seen from afar. Throughout the modern history of painting artists have always fixated on the magic of the brushstroke and the state of ‘painterliness’. Lichtenstein animated the stoke, Pat Steir exploited the drip, the Abstract Expressionists wrestled with the gesture in every imaginable way, the British artist Glenn Brown explores brush work as subject matter in itself, Gerhard Richter employed squeegees to express just how much we are seduced by the movement of paint across a surface, and now Fang Wei has buried the stroke in a constellation of bulging, watery forms. The transition from the appearance of water colors to the reality of the oils is seamless, almost magical. It is a transformation that only dedicated practice and time can achieve.
While Fang’s painting is a technically proficient accomplishment, it is a method that inevitably ends up beckoning comparison between the original and the copy, the water and the oils, the before and after. Besides the size, from afar the differences are slight – small variations of tone, a certain discrepancy of weight, a vacillation of lines and forms. Up close the differences between the oil and watercolor works are more pronounced, with each retaining its own medium specific features. Yet the comparison is irrelevant. It is a reinvention of the moment, that subconscious state that the author pursues, like retracing the steps in one’s dream. Here each work exists independently, one merely acting as a conduit to the other. Painting, after all is a journey. The relationship between the paper and canvas for Fang Wei is one of map to a destination. After this long journey, on the occasion of the artist’s first exhibition ever we are certain that Fang Wei has arrived.
1.Excerpted from The Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot (1925)
2.Ibid
3.Ibid
