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In recent works I have been committing myself to the development of an individualistic discourse in and from the fountainhead of the painting. In an attempt to establish a new set of languages for ink and wash painting, I have tried to bring the ornamentality, allegoricity, and narrativity of the painting into play; making ink and wash painting a genuinely open language that can be adapted to pluralistic expressions and meet the challenges of contemporary culture. Meanwhile, I am keen to seek a kind of otherness—for the present age is one of both individuality and pluralism. |
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A Self-Account of Artistic Creation – Wei Qingji
In recent works I have been committing myself to the development of an individualistic discourse in and from the fountainhead of the painting. In an attempt to establish a new set of languages for ink and wash painting, I have tried to bring the ornamentality, allegoricity, and narrativity of the painting into play; making ink and wash painting a genuinely open language that can be adapted to pluralistic expressions and meet the challenges of contemporary culture. Meanwhile, I am keen to seek a kind of otherness—for the present age is one of both individuality and pluralism.
“Ink and wash painting” is neither a label of my identity nor a tool to strive for cultural rights. Instead, it is a conscious choice for the expression of my own ideas—I am fond of and good at employing such a medium, for its extreme plasticity provides infinite possibilities for the linguistic expression of painting.
Through the medium of ink and wash painting, what I seek to express is the material and the spiritual in painting. At the same time, I tend to endow my works with a new humanistic spirit. The drawings have become an open space haunted by all my experiences, feelings, thoughts and memories. What is implicated in those suspenseful, pan-religious situations is perhaps new imaginations, personal passions, the subconscious, historical marks, religious mystery and, of course, sexuality and temptation.
Most of my paintings concern themselves with memory or everyday life. I’m interested in exploring the relationship between the traditional and the contemporary, or to be exact, in finding out what has remained in today’s life that has always been with us and in what forms it exist in us. I have great interest in historical unity and continuity, for I believe that tradition, as a spiritual flux, can keep our memories coherent and is thus indispensable to the maintenance of the vitality of our culture: it can be something recognizable while at the same time ensuring the constant transformation of our culture. To be sure, we can never return to the past, nor can we express ourselves in the same way as before. I’m dedicated to making traditional media utter new voices and making both images and ideas relate to our everyday experience.
What I’m most concerned is the relation between the traditional and the contemporary, though it may be vague and ambiguous. But this very vagueness and ambiguity are exactly where the charm lies. It is of trivial significance whether this relation is a kind of connection or a sort of betrayal. Instead of elucidating explicitly, I’m just trying to suggest via neutral expressions, so that my narration would not fall into a kind of discursive hegemony. The way of painting that I have been sticking to is in fact my current cultural standpoint: to not aiming at being faster and newer.
