CRITICAL WRITING
A Reverie on an Oil Painting: Floating in the Air
Light, yet not wholly transparent; dark, yet not a darkness without daylight.
Everything is in the painting, revealing the beauty of the spirit.
Aesthetics is, in essence, applied psychology. When we have something in mind but cannot express it, this oil painting can let us sit quietly for an hour, quietly enjoying the entire process of recollection and emotional stirring.
The use of the useless. Having no use at all is also a use.
In this painting, I cannot see the presence of life. In broad gray passages that lean outward as though defecting, I faintly discern water: turbid, hypersensitive water, with nothing in it to admire.
But it is not really water.
It is sky. An empty sky that, like water, can freely fall.
There are no living beings in this sky. It flows indistinctly within a so-called homogeneous betrayal, flowing from one collapse into another.
Before things come tottering down, they are always terrified for their survival, always ferociously vicious. And so we long to fly.
Yet there is a woman, very young and also mature. Struggling toward the uppermost horizon, she bravely stretches out her long arms and legs, her buttocks swelling violently and painfully under pressure.
The woman’s naked body, small, delicate and beautiful, glides with clear purpose through the water of the sky. With only a few strokes, the painter has drawn the curves of her legs into a dreamlike sensuality and tension.
Before and behind her, the air is full of death. In a swimmer’s posture, she searches for a vague, unreliable, absurd trap that belongs to no actual life!
The artist uses great expanses of gray to set off human ferocity—and what exactly is that pain concealed behind thought?
Our age urgently longs to experience its own inner life firsthand, whether through religion or something else. Yet this painting’s mystery, even its obscurity, tells us that since humanity began, since women began to bear children, the world’s filth has been subjected to astonishing abuse.
There is nothing we can do.
Desire ultimately makes every fate miserable and narrow. Every person’s.
Fate decrees that there is nowhere for us to escape.
Woman, body, swimmer, ceaseless struggle, effort, persistence, what once was…
If art reflects only one person’s fate, then it is the entire world.
If the whole world is an absurdity like this gray darkness that leaves nothing behind, then woman is the only dawn: she will reproduce all humanity once again, reproduce the primordial night, reproduce every fractured fate that can be reproduced.
This really is a very fine work of contemporary art—I am deeply convinced of that. What the artist seeks to express is more than ugly reality’s hostility toward beauty.
With powerful thought and brushwork, the artist has made an oil painting that can be passed down, representing humanity’s distorted spirit in a particular age…
It is more than an artwork: it may even be called a rumination on belief.
For instance,
We once believed.
We no longer do. Written in Hangzhou in 2009.