第89期 跨水墨与个体策略（2014年）

学术主持：付晓东

主题：林海钟 吴强 董天昊 马骏 刘琦 梁硕 赵鹏 姚媛

新作：杜小同 刘野 曾健勇 谢晓虹 杨光  韩方

 Issue No. 89(2014)

Theme: Cross-boundary Ink Paintings and Individual Strategy

Academic Host: Fu Xiaodong

A.T: Lin Haizhong, Wu Qiang, Dong Tianhao, Ma Jun, Liu Qi, Liang Shuo, Zhao Peng, Yao Yuan

A.N: Du Xiaotong, Liu Ye, Zeng Jianyong, Xie Xiaohong, Yang Guang, Han Fang

跨水墨与个体策略
Cross-boundary Ink Paintings and Individual Strategy
学术主持：付晓东 ACADEMIC HOST: FU XIAODONG

 

背景篇
如果我们想象一个浩淼巨大的坐标，当代视觉文化系统存在于此，横向罗列着人类文明的不同领域学科的发展，纵向伸展着人类学古远历史与未来无限的时间轴。每个人都有一个自己存在的时间和空间上的轨迹。一方面，我们正面临着一种整体建立在西方当代艺术价值观系统之上的中国当代艺术，对国际化样式的批判和普世主义的反思迫在眉睫，急需认真对待本土的文化系统所能提供的巨大的文化资源。另一方面，我们又时刻处在东西方政治、经济和权力所构成的动物园里，在越来越多的国际展览、交往所组成的网络中，艺术家、知识分子、媒体、收藏家之间形成了难以预测的交流场域。在全世界范围内的思维的共振和竞技中，谁都难逃相互的影响。

 

什么是跨水墨？
“跨水墨”是当代艺术与水墨之间的不断变化着的即时关系。“跨水墨”，不仅仅是依赖于其他媒介的跨入，装置、影像、行为等不同的艺术媒介的思维方式被原来从事该领域创作的艺术家习惯性带入；也包括从水墨媒介自身探索者的跨出，向水墨之外的周边系统和不同领域知识系统的迈出。“跨水墨”一方面是相同文化场域中相近话语的明显不同，彼此之间的不认同、陌生化和外来感。另一方面，反映了跨国文化和跨学科领域流动，并彼此融合的特点。这需要一种富有挑战性的对话性立场，并且承认“水墨”和“当代艺术”之间的界限从来都是模糊不清的。
随着不同的知识系统的渗透和融入，如果仅仅是把水墨作为一种媒介对象而进行延续，无疑低估了水墨自身作为一种知识系统的价值。“水墨”在词汇上确实是以材料来进行命名，就如图纸本、布面、摄影之类。不过水墨并没有被直接归入至纸本或者水彩之中，而“水墨性”或者“水墨精神”又反复地被讨论。对于“水墨”的习惯性理解，我更愿意把它作为一个知识系统对象，代表着如宗白华所说的“中国艺术精神”，一整套传统的审美程式和内心积淀。这也是为何我们一直无法心安理得地仅仅把它看为是可以任意处置的媒介自身，而不携带某种特定的意义和属性。这就如同在中国画中，“笔墨”从来指的不是“笔”和“墨”的工具材料叠加一样，而是对“笔墨”作为审美范畴的一整套规范和要求，名称只是借代的指称而已。水墨只有自身成为一个具有一整套价值观方法论的系统，才有可能真正地和其他门类和学科进行交换。这个系统包括历史上逐渐形成的那些，被扬弃和被保留的传统。不仅仅是经典的中国文人画的传统，也包括汉唐卷轴画、宗教和墓室壁画、民间艺术传统等。其中整合着石雕、器具等不同的艺术门类，时代的文化心理在每一个片段中留存。我们是否可以把“水墨”系统更加宽泛地理解为关于中国传统的种种文化精神、审美习惯和历史知识？即使是在遥远的古代，水墨依然不是孤立存在，而是和宗教信仰、礼仪观念、社会习俗、人情交往等等紧密联系在一起的，原本也是与即时的整个社会的所有意识观点，互相渗透和交织。所以，水墨从来都具有这种历史的记录性和交融性，从来就是一个不断变动和汇聚筛选的历史。这个过程从唐代的西域画风的“凸凹寺”，到宋代的文人“以书入画”，到清朝郎世宁所代表的西洋透视画法的进入，再到新中国成立后的新中国画改造时期，水墨一直是以“跨”越的方式不断自我更新，再生，在不同的系统中扩展充容的。

 

关于个体策略
构建总体性宏大理论体系，总是试图把特定的个体归纳入抽象、概括的话语之中，使个体成为整体的注脚，压制了个体存在作为社会批判的潜质。本期选取的几位艺术家分别以自己不同的对待和借鉴传统的方式，结合自身所特有的知识系统和特质，进行了外表波澜不惊，但内在狂飙突进的尝试。改变的不仅仅只是面貌，更多的是思维的方式。本期里的艺术家更多的是使用了传统的笔墨方式，传统的构图和造型，但却具有了更多的观念艺术或图像学上的转化。传统的形式也成为了表达作品内核的必要的实施条件之一，而作品的叙述性、批判性、情感化、特殊题材的引入……这些支撑着传统手法新的使用方式，成为了每个艺术家不同的个体策略。

 

BACKGROUND
Imagine a vast coordinate where the contemporary visual cultural system exists, the horizontal of which is packed with the development of different scientific fields of human civilization and the vertical of which extends the timeline of the ancient history and unlimited future of anthropology. Everyone has his own track in the time and space he has lived. On the one hand, we are facing with the Chinese contemporary art which is generally based on the system of the western contemporary artistic values. There is urgency to rethink the internationalized criticism and universalism as well as to seriously treat the immense cultural resources provided by the local cultural system. On the other, we are always in the zoo composed of the eastern and western politics, economy and power, in the network constituted by the increasing international exhibitions and communications, and in the unpredictable communicating domain formed between the artists, intellectuals, media and collectors. In the worldwide resonance and competition of thoughts, no one can escape the mutual influence between him and others.

 

WHAT IS CROSS-BOUNDARY INK PAINTING?
“Cross-boundary ink painting” is the ever-changing real-time relationship between the contemporary art and ink painting. “Cross-boundary ink painting” not only depends on the stepping-in of other media, or with the thinking patterns of different art media, such as installation, image and performance, habitually brought in by the artists from their original working fields. It also includes the stepping-out of the explorers themselves from the ink painting medium into the surrounding systems and the knowledge system of different fields outside ink painting. On the one hand, “cross-ink painting” presents the obvious difference between the similar languages in the same cultural domain, and the disagreement, the estrangement and foreignness between each other. On the other, it reflects the mobility and mutual integration of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary communications. There is a need of some challenging dialogic standpoint and the acknowledgement of the ever-blurring boundary between the “ink painting” and the “contemporary art”.
With the infiltration and integration of different knowledge systems, the simple extension of ink painting as a kind of medium undoubtedly underestimates the value of ink painting itself as a kind of knowledge system. Although “ink painting” is named after its material, just like drawing paper, canvas cloth and photography, ink painting has not been directly categorized into the kind of drawing paper or water color whereas the “feature of ink painting” or the “spirit of ink painting” has been repeatedly discussed. As for the customary understanding of “ink painting”, I’ d like to take it as a subject of knowledge system with a complete set of traditional aesthetic formula and internal accumulation, which represents the “Chinese art spirit” as what Zong Baihua saidas well as. It is also the reason why we cannot simply regard it at ease as a medium which can be arbitrarily disposed without any specific meaning or attribute. Just as in Chinese painting, “brush and ink” never refers to the simple sum of the tool and material – the “brush” and the “ink”, but a complete set of standards and requirements of the “brush and ink” as an aesthetic category. The name is just a metonymic reference. Only when ink painting itself becomes a system with a complete set of values and methodology, it is possible for it to have real exchange with other categories and disciplines. The system includes the gradually formed traditions, which had been sublated and reserved traditions in the history, including not only the classic traditions of Chinese literati paintings but also the scroll paintings, the religious and tomb frescoes and the folk art traditions in the Han and the Tang Dynasties, in which there were the integration of different art categories such as stone carving and utensils, with the cultural psychology of times existing in every fragment. Can we regard the “ink painting” system more broadly as various cultural spirits, aesthetic habits and historical knowledge about Chinese tradition? Even in the far-off ancient times, the ink painting did not exist alone but was closely related with religious faith, decorum, social custom and interpersonal communication, and was at first mutually infiltrated and mingled with the ideological views of the whole society at that time. Therefore, ink painting has always been featured with the record and blending of history and a history which has always been changing, accumulating and filtrating. From the “concavo-convex temple” with western painting style in the Tang Dynasty, the “integration of the features of calligraphy into painting” by the literati in the Song Dynasty and the introduction of western perspective represented by Giuseppe Castiglione in the Qing Dynasty to the period of painting reform after 1949, ink painting has always been self-updating, reviving and expanding itself in different systems with the “cross”-boundary approach.

 

ABOUT INDIVIDUAL STRATEGY
The construction of an overall and macro theoretical system always tries to categorize specific individuals into the abstract and general language, making the individuals the footnotes of the whole and thus depressing the potential of the individual existence to become social criticism. In the current issue, the selected artists, with their respective ways of treating and imitating the traditions, combining their own specific knowledge systems and characteristics, have conducted trials which are placid in the appearance but progressive internally. What has been changed is not only the appearance but more of the thinking patterns. In this issue, the artists have more resorted to the traditional way of ink painting as well as the traditional picture composition and modeling, but at the same time have applied more conceptual art or iconological transformation. The traditional form has also become one of the necessary implementation conditions to express the core of the works, while the new ways supporting the traditional techniques such as the narrative, criticism, emotion and introduction of special subjects of the works have become the different individual strategies for each of the artists.