Wang Yin: Mother and Child 2023
母与子：形体、时光与迹象
从生命中
幸存的字词
请再和它做伴
一会儿吧
——贝克特
1
母与子：面对着这个词，每个人都会有内心微妙的起伏，每个人都深知这个词背后那些无法言说的情感，那些属于个人生命历史中跌宕的时刻——作为人类的一员，这个词将牵引着我们回到生命关系的源头。无论是谁，我们都曾以同样赤裸的肉身降生在这个星球上。
母与子：既为血缘，也是命运。当一个艺术家试图描绘人类生活时，他/她和所描绘的对象可能有异常多样和复杂的关系，往往越是具有普遍性的题材，越是让人追问它所浮现的时刻和艺术家生命时间的关系，艺术家的生命体验由此成为作品降生的媒介。但最终，在王音的绘画中，除了对人类基本关系的提示之外，没有透露更多的故事:只有形体相互“依偎”着，成为久经磨炼的某种“情感的形状”。
2
形体的来源保持着无名的状态（犹如我们生命的终极隐晦不明），而塑造他／她们的线条和色彩本身，无一不在诉说着他／她们的来历和某种时代的印象：那些浅淡而明净的中间色可能会唤起某种现代生活伊始的乐观气息，体态联结起我们年少懵懂和心智萌动的朦胧印象，以及日常相处那些亲切而略带羞涩的记忆。在和王音绘画相遇的最初一些时光中，画面似乎演变成连接情感和记忆变奏的容器：一个形状，产生另一个形状；一种痕迹，连接另一种痕迹；一片色域，重叠起另一片色域；一个动作，呼唤着下一个动作。
进而，我试图体察着每一笔触的痕迹，是怎样在彼此相异的时空中，传递出生命的共感和成长的意味。我揣摩着手臂的转折，眼神的顾盼，衣服的褶皱，肌肤光影的变化，形体交接的隐显，我似乎在等待这样的时刻：穿越文学中的悲欢，艺术史中对“母与子”这一母题[1]的持续再现，我们最终可以从“母与子”关系预设的框架和感知惯性的来源中走出来；王音绘画中所凝聚的生命经验，终究可以慢慢渗入到我所在的时空以及和绘画的身体关系中。在这样的时刻，我能够直面，并领悟那些我们以为熟稔的情感，同时也可能是生疏和游移的。
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于是，这些抽离具体时空的背景，形成了近乎“虚”的空间；而绘画中的形体，就像是从中浮现的“实”体，虚实相映着，让人感到某种具体可触的“情状”——生命的感受在此沉静诉说。色彩、块面、线条的此消彼长，犹如生命本身的渐变过程，艺术家所探索的，似乎不是关于某种人生的有限存在，而是时间和生命这一虚实相生的隐秘因素，这一“物象之源”[2]。
从这样的源头开始，本应属于生命的伦理关系充分转化成绘画本身的伦理性：绘画中的所有要素几乎平等地展开，艺术家让本来有可能相互冲突的元素彼此中和，例如，相交的形体中，色彩和线条既保持着各自的边界和轮廓，而那“亲密的边界”又相互交错、浸泅着，犹如骨肉相连；画面空间的展开，不依照透视的远近，也无分光线的内外，犹如平等对待和充分包容生命中相互矛盾的不同价值——王音将激进的绘画方法隐含于一种需要时间去铺垫和打磨的过程中，他一再减除画面的效果，一再“修辞”[3]，以情入形，以至“语短情长”。
尽管没有戏剧性的叙事，《母与子》系列中，形体在画面中的不同组合和叠加，往往会让我们产生对于人物关系的丰富想象，就像汉字偏旁部首的不同组合所产生的意义的联想。终究，这是属于生命不同阶段的“意象”，我从画面中更多体会到的，是诸如“临行密密缝，意恐迟迟归”这样的诗句所提示出的关系：母爱具化为儿女缝衣，与此同时，儿女的身体和母亲赠予的衣衫合一，转化为思念的形体。耐人寻味的是，在《母与子》的系列作品中，身体的动作和衣服的褶皱也互为表里，层叠出相互渗透的意象性空间。
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有时候，在这些绘画面前，我会在不经意间联结到这样的时刻：例如，和庄学本镜头下的面孔对视，或者，奥古斯特·桑德（August Sander）镜头下的三个年轻人向我们回望[4]。又或者，如波兰戏剧家格洛托夫斯基 (Jerzy Grotowski) 1960年代探索的“质朴戏剧”，默斯·坎宁汉(Merce Cunningham)由时空中运动中的人体生发出来的舞蹈。尽管今天的文化情境已经发生了巨大的变化，但回溯也许并非没有现实意义：这样的减除和剥离，并没有将当代戏剧和舞蹈导向彻底的观念和形式意义上的抽象，反而向着更为内在和原初的生命感回归。
也许，并非偶然，这样的联想会和一些看似最为质朴、直接，同时也是二十世纪中最具生命关怀意识的摄影和形体表演艺术有关，正是这些探索的出现，极大地拓展了绘画反映人类境况的方式，直至今日，仍可让我们不断怀想：人的体态、眼神、所置身的情境，是如何超越着时空和媒材，而成为人类生存意识共有的叠层？
我感到，在王音的绘画中，即使人物的情态在亲密中流露些许疏离，也并不减少他在绘画中“纪实性”地回应特定文化经验的工作倾向，从而呈现出经由艺术家特有的经验而转化、生成的人类境遇。这种无法重复的呈现，让我们同时体验到矛盾的两极：一方面，是属于这个艺术家的表达的独特性；另一方面，是属于作品本身的超然和中立性——这使得作品不从属于艺术家的意图，不受制于（道德、概念、美学趣味意义上的）评判，我们被深深吸引，同时感到些许不安，因为我们尚不能确定作品所揭示的不可言传之力量究竟会把我们带向何处。
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事实上，生命的数据化正驱使人的感知适应整个生活系统的日益抽象化，在过去的一百年，人类的感知刚刚和现代工业技术——那未来主义者曾欢庆的机械之美——达成某种协调，现在，人类必须尽可能加速地要与数码物产生“共感”，正面临着与AI的共生，这也许可以用来体会为什么曾经反映阶层的“肖像”在当代加速解体，成为一种更具中性意义的、不知名的“具象”，进而，有可能演化成像当代舞者Xavier Le Roy在《未完成的自我（Self Unfinished）》中所揭示的那个混生、易变的“异形”。所幸这一切均在过程，而非终结。至少目前，绘画的历史，以及人类在艺术实践中所积累的经验和认知，还是AI图像生成逻辑和模型计算背后的主要营养源之一[5]，人还没有习惯于被智能图像所喂养。
母与子：凡有生命传承之处，必有身世和身世的传奇，而奇妙之处在于：我们可能永远无法追溯生命的真正源头，却能亲身感受在这个星球上不同生命相互联结的真实性。人类曾将生命的源头视为神圣，而尘世和神圣性相互交汇的境况，恰恰集于肉身，由此，在人类肉身所承载的生命信息中，总有超越肉身的感受。
如果说，人类是在神圣家族（圣母与子）的陨落中进入现代生活，那么，今天的生命关系，正处于这样的重新配置过程中：碎片化的情感，正在进一步寻求在人工智能和生命技术演进中的慰藉。在这样的时刻和王音的绘画相遇，犹如经历着一场对生命历程“起承转合”的思辨，内中的温润和冷峻来自淬炼后的情感，让我们隐隐追寻着生命感受和意象形体生成之间应该如何相互关照。也许，我们可以进一步追问，在“临行密密缝，意恐迟迟归”的意象中，王音笔下的“母与子”是否也经历了一种出走？我们是否还在等待着生命意义的某种回归？它总是比绘画中的形体来得更晚，或许，忠实地陪伴着我们始终是“绘画性形体”[6]，她在我们的意念所及之处静立着，不以物喜，不以己悲[7]。
(文章：胡昉)
Mother and Child: Body, Time, and Traces
From life
The vocabulary of survival
Please sit with it once again
For awhile
——Samuel Beckett
1
Mother and child: anyone facing these words inevitably feels a subtle palpitation of the heart. We are all deeply aware of the inexpressible feelings that lie within these words, those moments of untrammeled emotion within our personal histories – we humans are led by these words back to our origins. No matter who we are now, we were all once a naked infant, borne forth into this world.
Mother and child: our heritage, our destiny. When an artist attempts to depict such aspects of human experience, they usually express an extraordinarily complex relationship with their subject material. The more universal the theme, the more the artist may seek to explore its role in their own life, and their personal stories become the medium in which the artwork is born. But beyond hinting at the basic relationships of human life, Wang Yin’s paintings reveal no further story; they only portray human figures “nestled” into each other, giving uncanny shape to the most fundamental and familiar of human feelings.
2
The origin stories of the figures in these paintings remain untold (just as the final chapters of our lives remain obscure to us). The lines and colors that compose them give us no clues about their lives and times. Their bright, pale, and neutral colors evoke a certain modern, optimistic atmosphere. Their postures remind us of youthful innocence, the germs of wisdom and self-awareness, the familiar and slightly embarrassing memories of quotidian intimacy. In the first moments of encountering Wang Yin’s paintings, the canvases seem to transform into vessels of emotions and memories: one shape produces another; one brushstroke leads to another; one swatch of color overlaps with another; one action summons the next.
This leads me to examine the marks made by each of Wang Yin’s brushstrokes, how they play together in space to resonantly express human feelings and implications of growth. I ponder the bend of an arm, the angle of a gaze, the drape of a garment, the fluctuations of light and shadow on skin, the intersection of adjacent bodies, and it is as if I’m waiting for a moment of epiphany: transcending the joys and sorrows of literature, escaping the perpetual reenactment of the “mother and child” motif[1] throughout art history, we finally emerge from the perceptual inertia of the mother-child relationship, once and for all. The life experiences condensed in Wang Yin’s paintings gradually permeate the relationship between the figures in the painting and the space-time in which I view them. In such a moment, I become able to directly face and comprehend long-dormant feelings that may be less familiar and certain than I once thought.
3
In this context of an abstract space-time, removed from reality, the colors of the artist’s brush form a void-like space. The figures in the painting emerge within this space to create a contrast of substance and void, offering the viewer a palpable mood that quietly expresses authentic emotion. The undulating colors, shapes, and lines evoke the ebb and flow of life itself. It seems that the artist is exploring not some finite aspect of human life, but rather, the hidden elements of the mutually engendering relationships between substance and void, life and time: in other words, the “source of all we see.”[2]
Based from this premise, the artist must adopt the principles of life as his principles for painting: all essential elements of painting are presented in a seemingly equal relation. In this way, conflicting or contrasting elements somehow seem to complement one another. For example, the lines and colors in this painting have separate shapes and boundaries, overlapping and bleeding into one another just as blood runs through the flesh of the body. The visual space of the canvases is devoid of perspectives lent by distance and light sources, thereby presenting all images in an equal plane: an inclusive acceptance of life’s conflicting and contradictory values. It takes time to grasp just how radical Wang Yin’s painting method truly is, because his rhetorical strategy[3] is addition by subtraction. By removing elements of context and perspective from his forms, he imbues them with richer emotional content, creating an effect that is both poignant and concise.
The “Mother and Child” series does not express a dramatic narrative, but the different combinations and overlappings of bodies in these paintings provoke our imaginations about diverse human relationships, just as the various components of Chinese characters combine to create associations of meaning and significance. Ultimately, these are images that belong to life’s various phases, and when I look at these paintings, I am reminded of stirring images conjured by certain simple poetic verses: “as she sewed his clothes before his departure, the mother feared her son wouldn’t soon return.” Motherly love is expressed in the sewing of clothes; the son’s body and the sewed clothes merge into one like a synecdoche, embodying parental longing. One intriguing aspect of the “Mother and Child” paintings is that the actions of the figures and the furrows of their overlapping garments also correspond, creating a layered space of internal and external images.
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Sometimes, when I look at these paintings, my mind wanders to a moment like this: locking eyes with a face in a portrait by Zhuang Xueben, or the three youths in August Sander’s seminal photograph looking back at me.[4] I am also reminded of the Polish theater director Jerzy Grotowski’s “Poor Theatre” movement of the 1960s, as well as Merce Cunningham’s groundbreaking choreography rooted in body movements as an independent functions. Though today’s culture is greatly changed, looking back still offers immediate significance: what can we learn from how this kind of subtraction and reduction did not ultimately lead theater and dance to complete abstraction in terms of concept and form, but rather helped these arts return to a more original and primeval vitality.
Perhaps it is no accident that I am reminded of these pioneering developments in photography, theater, and dance, because they dramatically expanded the capacity of painting to reflect human circumstances. To this day, these works still lead us to ponder: what about a person’s posture, gaze, and surroundings can transcend the specifics of time, place, and medium, and express the most profound aspects of human existence?
When I closely examine Wang Yin’s paintings, I detect a certain emotional remoteness in the characters’ bearing, but this does nothing to diminish the artist’s efforts to respond to and document specific cultural experiences in his paintings. Rather, in these paintings, the artist’s particular life experiences are expressed as universal human circumstances. This kind of inimitable expression allows us to simultaneously experience two sides of the same coin: one being the unique character of the artist’s expression, the other being the transcendent neutrality of the artwork itself. The paintings are not subordinate to the artist’s intent, nor are they limited by moral, conceptual, or aesthetic judgments. Instead, we are profoundly drawn into them, and simultaneously unsettled by them, for we cannot ascertain where we will ultimately be led by the ineffable forces that these paintings invoke.
5
In fact, the digitization of life is presently obliging people to adapt their perceptions to increasing abstraction on a systemic level. In the past century, human perceptions have been forcefully integrated with modern industrial technology: the mechanical beauty once celebrated by Futurists. Today, human beings have to learn to “resonate” with digital objects as quickly as possible. In different stages of history, we have variously given over our bodies to religion, enlightenment, revolution, and consumption. Now, as we face the prospect of symbiosis with artificial intelligence, it’s possible to see how portraiture, which once served to reflect social status, is becoming a neutral and unremarkable kind of “representational” imagery. Eventually, perhaps the medium will evolve to become the kind of alternative and mutable form expressed in works like “Self Unfinished” by the contemporary dancer Xavier Le Roy. Fortunately, all of this is an ongoing process, not a foregone conclusion. At least for now, the history of painting, as well as the experience and awareness that humankind has accumulated through the practices of art, are among the important source materials[5] for the algorithms that generate AI images, whereas humans have not yet become accustomed to being fed by computer-generated images.
Mother and child: wherever life continues, legends must be passed down from generation to generation. The marvelous thing is that although we may never be able to trace life back to its true source, we can personally experience the authenticity of mutual connection between different living beings on this planet. Humans once thought that life’s origins were divine and that the meeting point of the divine and the mortal world was the corporeal body. This is why information about life encoded in the body always includes feelings that transcend the corporeal.
If humankind fell into the modern era by exiting the divine family (Madonna and child), then the relations of modern life represent a process of reallocation: fragmented emotions seek further consolation within the evolution of artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. Encountering Wang Yin’s paintings at this juncture is like undergoing a contemplation of one’s life journey. The subtle and reserved content of these paintings comes from emotions that have been refined and distilled. They allow us to quietly explore the reciprocal concern between the emotional experience of life and the generation of images and forms. Perhaps we can explore even further: within the poetic image of “as she sewed his clothes before his departure, the mother feared her son wouldn’t soon return,” do Wang Yin’s “Mother and Child” paintings express a kind of departure? And are we still awaiting some return of significance to life? Meaning always arrives after form; perhaps our loyal companions on this journey are “paintingly bodies,”[6] standing quietly at the boundaries of our minds, deriving no joy from the external things, nor sorrow from life’s tragedies.[7]
(Essay by Hu Fang)
关于艺术家 | About the artist
___________________________
[1] 值得留意的是，在“现代性”降临之前，西方艺术史中以“母与子”为主题的杰出作品，绝大多数为“圣母与子”题材，例如，米开朗基罗的《圣母怜子》（Pieta），列昂纳多·达·芬奇的《圣母子与圣安娜》（The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne）。
[2] “子既好写云林山水，须明物象之源。”语出唐代荆浩《笔法记》。无论是“山水的形体”，还是“人的形体”，都涉及到形体的生机问题。
[3] 刘熙载在《游艺约言》中说：“修辞有‘修洁’之‘修’，有‘修饰’之‘修’。‘洁’者修之极，‘饰’ 者洁之贼也。” 刘熙载是王音欣赏的一位晚清学者。
[4] 桑德（August Sander）的这张照片为《年轻的农夫（Young Farmers）》（1914），作家和批评家约翰·伯格（John Berger）为此专门写了《套装和照片》(The Suite and the Photography)》（1979）这篇文章。
[5] 正如马里奥-卡普在《模仿游戏》一文中所论述的：“由AI驱动的图像制作的内在逻辑不仅远没有预示某种未来的后人类发展潮流，反而看上去正在复苏某些已沉睡多年的视觉策略，这些策略在过去曾一度主宰当时的艺术和艺术理论。”刊于ARTFORUM杂志，微信公号网络版：https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/5KxrvhGvLzdJ7Y9EO0ny6g
[6] “绘画性形体”，它的拗口，来自于遭遇绘画时的某种感受，在语词方面寻找对应物的困难。总的来说，它不是拟人的说法（仿佛绘画拥有人的身体一样），不是指“绘画中的形体”（即通常所指的题材或内容，例如，我们可以说，“山水的形体”，“人的形体”等），也不是指绘画媒材的物质性特征。我所寻找的这个词，是和绘画作为一种特有的存在物，在人类的历史浮沉中一直没有消失的某种特性有关，在这个意义上，“绘画性”可能藉其特有的“形体”得以不断“存世”和“转世”。
[7] 请允许我用以下来自苏珊·桑塔格的引文再次思考艺术作品作用于我们的方式，它也许和文中以“不以物喜，不以己悲”来描述的作品存在状态有些互文关系：“全身贯注于艺术作品，肯定会带来自我从世界疏离出来的体验。然而艺术作品自身也是一个生气盎然、充满魔力、堪称典范的物品，它使我们以某种更开阔、更丰富的方式重返世界。” 苏珊·桑塔格：《反对阐释》，程巍译，上海：上海译文出版社，2021，第38页。