Living in the World
Zhang Zhaohui
No one can deny this. We live in a society pregnant with raw desires and riotous with rigorous competition. Society generates anxiety, instils fear and brews exhaustion. Through the manipulation of images of real life, however, some artists manage to create a realm of imagination that offers us temporary respite from reality while satisfying our need for fantasy. He Jian belongs to this category of artist. Grounded on the soil of everyday life in contemporary Chinese cities, his works transport the viewers through time and space. There, reality meets history. Standing in front of He Jian’s paintings, one is often tickled by a sense of curiosity: How do they combine everyday life of today and thousand-year old images? How did life back then differ from life now? Can traditional images and contemporary everyday life form a harmonious mélange?
He Jian’s works have a unique and clear temporal dimension, which is generated by presenting the contents of contemporary everyday life with the painting techniques of antiquity. In a way, it is like a sheet of sensitive paper fixed with images from two negatives of landscapes from two different points in time and space. The result? Irresistible graphic charm.
In today’s variegated social reality with its rich visual environment, artwork which stick to the doctrines of traditional art formats such as ink wash, landscape, and gongbi painting, find themselves at an undeniable disadvantage. This contrast with modern art, which is armed with a broad spectrum of general and technical media, as well as abundant conceptual tools at its disposal. As a result, traditional painting is in desperate need of a transformation. However, what traditional painting, as a symbol of national art, requires isn’t a superficial face-lift, but a thorough detangling and reformation on a conceptual level. In this sense, He Jian’s artistic exploration has obviously made a significant step forward.
Although his works have not completely shrugged off the cultural and historical baggage of brush painting, they have made an attempt to reformulate this baggage. With a postgraduate degree in brush painting, He Jian is not only familiar with the language of traditional brush painting, but has also thought a great deal on the subject. Admirably, he has succeeded in breaking away from the conceptual trap set by traditional brush painting. By tracing back a thousand years to the Buddhist fresco art, he has found the fleeting moment of artistic enlightenment in a tradition buried in the dust of history. He found what touched his heart. In so doing, he also urges us to evaluate tradition from a new light and interpret the relationship between tradition and contemporary art with a fresh outlook. After all, the most important thing to both the production and reception of art is how artists describe and interpret real life.
He Jian’s work is a depiction of what goes on around us in everyday life. For example, the "Wedding Gown" series depict weddings. The "Faces" series is a reflection on intimate relationships and human friendship, while other works capture scenes of family life or dig into the mental life and psyche of the modern youth. While the contents of his paintings focus on everyday life, their backgrounds incorporate traditional visual symbols such as waves, lotus ponds, auspicious clouds and pines. Thereby, contemporary mundane life is reinserted into the backdrop of traditional visual narratives. Take the "Wedding Gown" series for example. Western-style wedding ceremonies and costumes are allowed to have dialogues with traditional symbols and visual vocabulary. China and West, Reality and Tradition are tightly interwoven–a true representation of the cultural landscape of the contemporary Chinese society.
In order to authentically present the force of spirit and to voice the psychological complexity that has never been experienced before, He Jian believes that Chinese painting ought to be freed from its obsession with the spiritual and the metaphysical. Its gaze should be refocused on the contemporary life and state of existence. The qualities embodied in his works qualify them as contemporary art. Indicated in both the concern for, and representation of, everyday life, his personal artistic vocabulary is in line with the methodology of contemporary art.
Their conceptuality is manifest in the temporal and spatial criss-crossing and overlapping images. For instance, in his work, life means mundane everyday life while human characters embody today’s sense of reality. Counter-intuitively, this sense of "present" is expressed by ancient techniques and stylistic expressions. Moreover, the stylistic formulation of human characters in his works derives from the fresco painting of Yongle Temple in Shanxi. This is particularly manifest in the graphic forms of faces and hands. Meanwhile by utilizing various surface treatments, the artist has also managed to create a variegated effect of textures that resembles ancient fresco painting. Despite retaining the visual effect of fresco, the life and scenes depicted in his painting draws one back to contemporary reality. In this manner, the similarity of two distinct temporal worlds is brought to the fore. At this point, a lurking conceptual metaphor starts to emerge: How does the mundane world today differ from that of a thousand years ago? While asking this question, living in the world seems to be charged with significance of eternal value.
He Jian’s creative practice has two more meanings. On the one hand, it shatters the established format of brush painting. Not only does he inject fresh visual imagery into an ancient artistic tradition, he also succeeds in bypassing the cultural and practical impasse faced by so-called "abstract" and "experimental" ink wash painting, while freeing himself from their technical and interpretative limitations. On the other hand, he has offered a reinterpretation of the relationship between the tradition and the contemporary, while dissolving the conflict brought by employing traditional painting vocabulary to express the sentiments of contemporary urban life. Obviously, He Jian has his own understanding of tradition versus the contemporary. Tradition can serve as a nutrient of contemporary art, while contemporary art is the extension and mutation of tradition. Hence in his work, the language and iconography of traditional art becomes productively fused with contemporary everyday life.
I watched a DVD of the American series Sex and the City yesterday. A hilarious scene from the episode stuck in my mind. Samantha, simmering with desire after failing in her attempt to seduce a handsome young priest to bed, went into a small room by the chapel to masturbate. At the climax, her blissful groans of orgasm became homophonous with the choir singing from the chapel. At this moment when religious asceticism coincides with libidinous discharge, a worldly pleasure is created and wonder of mundane life is born.
He Jian’s work seems to me to share a similar type of feel. When the stylistic techniques of ancient art are transfused with the contents of contemporary life, vibrant fantasies of imagery are produced along the way. The modern is blended with the ancient. This, however, carries a hint of irony. Put plainly, all the excitements and pains of real life are diluted and flattened out through a gaze of religious transcendence. Is it not true that painters from ancient times also used the brushes to depict their version of everyday life? Despite the mechanism of religious filtering, the characters and scenes in the fresco painting were after all a true representation of contemporary life and sentiments of that time.
As a young artist born in the 70s, He Jian’s artistic production represents a new outlook of art today and its future prospects in the eyes of the younger generation. He neither rigidly abides by the prescription of traditional norms, nor chases indiscriminately after the dictates of global trends. Instead, his personal definition of the contemporary is generated by his own experience of living in the world. Tradition is continuously updated and reinvigorated through probing investigations into its older versions. In He Jian’s artistic world, the contemporary is allowed to link and converse with tradition. In the process, new relationships are formed and new art is created.
