Representing colorful ventures between dreams and reality, Zhou Fan’s paintings depart from “traditional” Chinese contemporary art. The individuality of his vision was recognized by the Chinese Art Prize 2007, where he won the prestigious Honorable Mention Award. Make no mistake, however, that these forays of the imagination are pure escapism. Akin to J.D. Salinger’s classic novel Catcher in the Rye, Zhou Fan’s paintings pose questions about Chinese youth’s dissatisfaction with, and alienation from modern society, using art as a means to self-introspection and euphoria.
Born in 1983 in Shanxi province, Zhou Fan trained at the Shanxi University Department of Painting. By virtue of his disinterest in the traditional painting championed by the University, he pursued other mediums such as photography, video-making and music, which enhanced the creativity of his work. He also experimented with graphic design for its ‘wild learning objectives.’ The list of admired artists is diverse and drawn from a wide range of cultures and mediums: British surrealist Francis Bacon; Japanese installation artist Yayoi Kusama; musician Aphex Twin and Chinese portraitist Mao Yan to name a few. Nonetheless, Zhou Fan maintains that his relationship with these artists is based on interest, not influence. What he extracts from their work, which is manifest in his own art, is their moral and aesthetic essence; that in his words ‘they live truly.’
Zhou Fan is weary of following any artistic “ism.” The subjects of his paintings are composed of ‘what appears interesting and beautiful to me.’ Rather than working from a final design, Zhou Fan revels in the creative process, allowing the character of the art work as it develops over time to determine its visual outcome. This evolutionary attitude towards art making explains why, for all their illogical and surreal character (such as the Good News from East Palace series), his paintings are compositionally well-balanced. Zhou Fan’s most unique asset, however, is his ability to render dreams so tangible that they are brought to the forefront of our senses. Our eyes reel from their psychedelic colours; we can smell their scents and dance to their music.
Although Zhou Fan represents the familiar fauna and flora of our world, none of these objects have any obvious literal or symbolic significance. The doctrinal symbolism favored by critics to explain art is something that Zhou Fans seeks to avoid, preferring instead to create his own worlds that transform the traditional associations of objects. He creates a new logic for their being, dependent on aesthetic, sensual and emotional criteria. In Love of Jellyfish No. 4, a young boy whose face is hidden from the viewer gazes up at a flying, trailing mass of marine and plant life. No longer are jellyfish creatures to be feared and are fish water-bound. In Love Song, the music that the young child is listening to materializes into a plethora of multi-colored mushrooms. Is this a manifesto to the real world, imploring us to free ourselves from prescribed notions of being and create our own?
Social issues are not explicit in Zhou Fan’s paintings, but their emotional dimension can evoke them. The “Teacher, I won’t do it again!” works are a poignant example of social out casting. The obese character was a real-life schoolmate of Zhou Fan’s, the scenario being that the teacher has unnecessarily scolded the child for eating in class. The subject indicates Zhou Fan’s resentment towards modern China, in particular the rigor characteristic of its school system and the over-consumption characteristic of its leisure. But it is still ambiguous as to whether the artist sympathizes with, or looks down upon his protagonist. The boy is so debilitated by his weight that his insatiable appetite is brought into question. The critical question is what spurred such greed in the first place? Zhou Fan’s answer would be modern society and all its pressures, with which he is ‘totally disappointed.’
It seems that we can only hope to reform society and the self by confronting our dreams. In his art, Zhou Fan argues for the destruction of the boundaries that separate dreams and reality. Of ‘Midnight’, which the artist completed during a bout of insomnia, Zhou Fan commented that ‘during that time I discovered that awake and asleep are just like two sides of a mirror. Both of them existed and played a part.’ In true Freudian spirit, here is an artist who believes more in the reality of dreams than the reality of reality, for ‘you can’t play false when dreaming.’ It is this honesty that underpins all his artistic endeavors, to great philosophical effect.
The dream/reality lexicon provides a pool of infinite artistic possibilities, which Zhou Fan exploits by painting several paintings on the same theme. The Good News from East Palace series totals at eight and the “Teacher, I won’t do it again!” series stands at five. This style of painting is like record-making; each individual piece constituting one branch of the whole, that when put together becomes complete. But even though for Zhou Fan art is an endless experiment, it is not an experiment worth pursuing without fun. He once said that sculpture could be a possible future medium because “It’s funny.” For the meantime, however, there is but one aim- to catch a dream and paint it. After an encounter with a ‘Fabricated Scene’ or ‘Love of Jellyfish’, who would ask for anything more?
