Both Wang Xingwei’s Ji Gong and Duan Jianyu’s The Muse has Awoken No.3 both offer conspicuous comical impressions, which on the one hand, articulate a kind of literary comedy from the narrations of the figures on canvas, their expressions, motion, theatricality and etc., while stylistically – be it Wang Xingwei’s compositional momentum and the exaggeration rendered through brushwork, or Duan Jianyu’s kitsch and crass emphasis – give shape to the comedy of mannerism, providing theatricality for the language of painting. Thirdly, they are comical on a cultural history level as they have adopted the Baroque style to portray the Mad Monk and placed the Goddess on Dunhuang murals into modern countryside context, this kind of casual yet poignant fusion has taken the “La Comédie Humaine” approach to respond to the rapidly evolving Chinese society and the unsettled dust of cultural order.
2017.03.09, Hongbai Town, Sichuan Province, China.
I picked up the remains of an old eagle under a water tower. It fell
from the sky, a long time ago. I extended the wings along my arms . I connect myself with the eagle and walk around and make impromptu movements in my daily living environment.
I want to try to build such a “stage”, where all the individual performers have multiple aspects, including the visible and the invisible, the real and the hypothetical. These bodies are at the same time physical proofs of the real world and symbols that connect all kinds of desires. They are signs of a certain period of history but also void of any specific historical meaning.
Do they exist between imagination and ambiguity? They maintain a relative synchronization within different orders; they are introspective presences in public space; they share the same space but ignore each other. This is a stage filled with normality and abnormality. It is my experiment with video, and my understanding of the world that I live in.
Courtesy of the artist.
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