高 岭
（美术学博士、批评家、策展人）
2007年3月5—7日
对世界的认识方式有许多种，但是绝大多数方式都是建立在人的眼睛的直接观察之上的。
在这个只有科学和医学人士才经常光顾的微观世界里，细菌、病毒、微生物与各种物质的微观结构并存，是一个完全不同于人的肉眼视觉普通观察的另一个天地——在这里，这些蠕动的微生物等竟然有着千姿百态的形象结构，或椭圆或长方，或细长或扭曲，时而膨胀时而缩小；其每一种又都有色彩和形体上的差异和变化，有些通体长着无数的纤毛，有些则如花蕊般混沌一团．．．高风在感叹这些神奇之物的同时，用手中的画笔描绘出它们的形态，记录下对它们的理解和艺术化的想象。
高风的这些日常生活行为，首先是个人非常私密的喜好，问题在于他从这种喜好中发现了另外一个视觉世界，而且透过这个世界他获得了一种新的观察普通世界的方式或者说手段。而在绝大部分情况下，人们的个人化和私密化的喜好，并没有转换为自己的工作经验和生活行为。这就意味着高风在随后的创作中，开始用一种不同于以往的“另类”眼光来观察周围的一切，包括已经发生过的作为间接经验的历史和正在发生着的当下现实。这种独特的眼光使他获得了一种迥然别样的话语阐释方式，即千百年来我们用肉眼所获得的经验和知识，原本是有很大的限制性，超过了这个限制，知识和经验还有另样的存在方式和形象。这就使得我们不得不怀疑人类长期形成的世界观和艺术表现的真实性，因为事物原本还有另外一种微观的存在方式和形式。由此看来，知识和艺术的真实性只能是相对的，或者说，还有它们的另外一种全然不被人知的一面。
于是，高风手中的显微镜犹如魔镜一样，解蔽了长期以来围绕着我们、控制着我们的关于世界和艺术表现的一切既得观念，使社会历史和日常生活，还有艺术表现，统统改变了其各自原有的形象、位置和角色，彼此之间的界限开始模糊甚至充满了魔幻的色彩。毫无疑问，传统的视觉中心主义价值观念在高风的魔镜里荡然无存，而全新的视觉形象语言和想象力却从魔镜里释放出来——一切当下的现实都是可以怀疑的，一切以往的艺术形象都是可以重新阐释的。
“前世”系列，是高风对传统文化的重新理解。宋代马远、夏珪的一角山水和半边树木，吕文英的货郎图，都成为艺术家重新阐释的对象。马远的《踏歌图》描写阳春时节农民在田陇溪桥间的歌舞欢娱场面，人物刻画简练生动，富于生活情趣。构图上远近分明，远山和近石以大斧劈皴擦，试图在传统纸本和绢本材料上，营造出具有坚实的质感和立体感的山石形象。而高风笔下的人物却变成了带有长须的细菌微生物，画面上方的题跋字样也被改造为某种微生物的形状。当然，高风并不是用原样的微生物来代替古画的某些情节，毋宁说，他是受到了魔镜中另一世界奇幻景象的启发，以自己大胆的想象来重新构造一种传统的文化景象，因为画面中的蓝靛色和金黄色，都是他的一种主观臆造。高风还大量使用饱和度高的颜料来描绘人物，以造成画面的戏剧感和魔幻感。从材料本身的属性分析，在布面上使用丙稀颜料这本身就具有传统绘画的矿物质和水性颜料所难以达到的视觉效果。再如，吕文英的《货郎图》，反映了明代社会儿童被货郎担中琳琅满目的玩具逗得欢欣雀跃的喜剧场面。而高风在描摹时，却大量加进了自己发现的各种细菌、病毒和微生物，它们替换了原画中的玩具而成为面无五官的变异儿童们的新宠。这种对传统文化艺术经典之作的置换，其目的在于艺术家试图唤起人们对既往历史的大胆设想和另类思考，历史不仅是由可见的文字和图像建构起来的，而且也可以被看成是由古已有之的各种微生物所构成的，只不过这些只有到了现代自然科学和医学发展时期才能够找到证明罢了。
同样的，反映当代现实生活的“今生”系列，也难逃细菌的侵扰和渗透。在高风的都市题材的作品中，无论是单个的人物肖像还是群像，画面中总是出现艺术家自己的影子。但这种影子却没有什么五官特征，有的只是犹如吸盘般的洞穴，从它们之中释放出各种细菌、病毒或者其他什么微生物，播散、弥漫在城市的空气中，侵蚀着城市的各个角落以及生活在其中的人群。而艺术家自己的影子在画面里也早已病入膏肓了，他的头发、他的面部筋络和血脉，已经成为微生物最好的宿主。
也许有人会认为艺术家在作品中的这种做法是恶作剧，然而艺术家花费大量心血所做的手稿，以及两个系列通体所弥漫的明快色彩和扎实造型，都向我们传递出这样强烈的信息——艺术家在传统符号和现实生活的真实之中，巧妙地加入了一种鲜为人知的新的真实，即我们的历史和我们的现实本身，原本就有隐匿着的看不见的另一种真相。
我们虽然没有意识到这一种真相，但是我们却每时每刻都处在它的包围之中。
高风的艺术创作既借助于已有的传统视觉图像，也表现现实的生活世界，富有重要学术价值的是，无论是对前者的重新复写（创造），还是对后者的（借助于病菌、病毒等微生物的）主观表现，他都超越了作为间接经验的图像来源和作为直接经验的亲身观察的自足性和唯一性。从方法论的层面上讲，他顺应了源自西方的反视觉中心主义的潮流，也吻合中国当代艺术走出传统视觉表现模式的需要，他以自己的方式告诉人们这样一个重要的信息：视觉的真实并不仅仅只有一种呈现方式，视觉的真实还有待于每一个有心人去发现，而在这个不断发现的过程中，世界原本的面貌（包括人们关于世界的直接经验和间接经验），也许有别样的可能性，充满了魔幻的魅力和神奇的色彩。艺术的价值之一就在于能够揭示出世界的丰富多彩的各个方面，能够唤起人们对世界的想象力，从这一点说，高风的作品让我们受到了很大的启发。对于被统称为“前世”的历代传统绘画图像的重新阐释，将是高风未尽的事业，而对于当代社会现实微观真相的揭示，也将是他大有可为的工作，我期待着他在这条“博古通今”的艺术道路上，创作出更加令人耳目一新的作品。
Preexistence and Present Life: The magical world of Gao Feng
Gaolin
(Doctor in History of Arts, Critic and Curator)
March 5, 2007
Human beings have many ways to understand the world, but most are filtered through the eyes. The boundless universe of talent and splendor, the numerous expressions of society, all of these pass through the naked human eye. That is why individuals value their eyes with their own life; vision is regarded as the most important tool to perceive the world. For ancient Greek and Hebrew civilizations, the visual and the auditory senses were the major resources to approach the prototype form of truth. Moreover, both the former and the latter were understood as the way to handle the sacred metaphysical world of the real. Subsequently, for Western traditional culture, the way things are viewed and experienced is imperative to understanding the archetype of truth. The apprenticeship to Plato and Aristotle established the Western philosophy of visual centralism, along with the discoveries of Renaissance artists about the laws of perspective, and Descartes’: "I think therefore I am", a binary philosophical model. All these cultural propensities are fundamentals for Western classical art as a connection to the real world, and for artists as the main way to access the outside world. In keeping with the past, Western modern art conforms to the tradition of visual centrism and, at the same time, to the needs of a developed capitalist society.
In China, avant-garde and contemporary art, took shape along with the policy, of an open market economy and with the development of international cultural exchange. During the process of taking, absorbing, studying, creating, and fusing the artistic Western culture and our own art tradition, we became a new personality in the field of art, on the world stage. Therefore, changes in line with the traditional view in Western art inevitably and deeply influenced the transformation and development of Chinese art. This has already become an undisputable fact.
In this context, Chinese artists have a deep understanding of perceptual experience as an imperative issue within artistic creation, and thus open up an abundant, colorful scope in different themes and topics, showing a variety of styles and patterns. To avoid a simplistic method or just because there is no way to directly observe and express the microcosmic world, young contemporary artists get rid of the traditional centered vision, to expand their visual language.
Gao Feng’s art work is created, and can be understood within this kind of cultural background. When he graduated from college in the nineties, Chinese contemporary art began to present diverse mediums and styles. Then he came to the capital city of Beijing. In this center of Chinese artistic culture, he felt the strong breath of contemporary art; and started to question how to walk his own path of artistic creation. All of the young artists born in the seventies had to face these matters and make choices. Gao Feng, as other artists from this generation, directed his eyes to what lay within his own life experiences and personal feelings; art is germane to his own life, rather than to the outside world of social and political affairs. In other words, art is based on personal life, personal ways of viewing the world, and then on interpretation of this experience, even of some very trivial and insignificant details. It was the love for his pets and his concern about their living habits and emotions that led Gao Feng to study microbes, bacteria, and the microscopic world. This huge and marvelous microcosm has changed the way he views and experiences the world.
The microscopic world (germs, viruses, and many micro structures) usually just experienced by doctors and scientists, displays a completely different universe, where microorganisms unexpectedly have thousands of ovals or rectangles; they grow or distort, inflate or contract. Each type with different shapes and colors, some have long bodies and numerous segments, and others a dense flower at their center. At the same as Gao Feng sights the magic around the microorganisms, he uses the brush to give them shape, makes notes of their scientific behavior and releases his artistic imagination. The great number of sketches and drawings certifies the number of days and nights he indulges in this infinitesimal world.
He visualizes things around him in an alternative way, including what has already occurred, direct or indirect behaviors, empirical history, as well as what takes place in the present reality. In the beginning and for many years he used only his bare eyes to acknowledge and experience; but now (through the microscope) he offers a special language to reveal his own understanding. This enables us to think about long-term human configuration, to view the world and the authenticity of art expression, because originally, and at a deeper level, all things also have another micro dimension of shape and way of existence.
Thus, Gao Feng’s microscope is like a magical mirror, in control of our world and of artistic expression of all acquired concepts. History and the daily life of the community have changed their original image, position and role. Beyond all doubt the centralized traditional vision does not exist inside Gao Feng’s magical mirror, and instead a completely new visual language and creative power is released from within; every existence can be doubted, and every image of art can be re-explained.
“Preexistence” Series is Gao Feng´s re-understanding of traditional culture. Every corner in the landscapes of Xia Wa, or every tree branch from the paintings of Song Dynasty Ma Yuan, or from Lu Wenyin’s Itinerant peddler, have all become the artist’s re-interpretations. Gao Feng’s version of Ma Yuan’s Tap Song describes the peasant, standing on a bridge during the spring season; the character expresses vivid, curious aspects of life. The representation of depth and breadth in a landscape composition, the distance between a rock and a mountain far away, are produced with lines that seem to have been cut by an ax, resulting in a solid texture and a three dimensional feeling. Even the words written on the surface have evolved into long-bearded microorganisms. Of course Gao Feng is not replacing some details of the traditional paintings with microorganisms, but rather, through his magical mirror, he stands in another world, inspired by fantastic scenes; his brave imagination re-structures a traditional scene into blue and golden yellow creations of his subjectivity. He saturates the surface with oil and acrylic paint to describe rocks, mountains and characters and in order to portray a sense of drama and magical flow in colored images. The sense of volume and space in the scenery is emphasized by the spectrum of light and shade of the same color, an attribute or visual effect difficult to achieve with traditional water color and mineral materials on traditional paper or silk. Turning again to Lu Wenyin’s Itinerant Peddler, where children from the Ming Dynasty are portrayed as excited and amused by the toy peddler, Gao Feng adds substantial quantities of bacteria, viruses and microorganisms, to displace the original toys in the painting, which become the new treasure of these children who, in Gao Feng’s rendering, lack facial features.
In this replacement of traditional art work and culture, it seems that the artist is trying to arouse people's past history and stimulate an alternative thinking about it. History is not only built up through the visible text and image, it can also be regarded as a composition by ancient microorganisms, which can only be certified through the development of modern science and medicine.
Reflecting on contemporary realist life, the series “Present life”, also encounters difficulties in escaping the harassment and infiltration of bacteria. In Gao Feng’s urban work, no matter if it is a portrait of a single character or a group image, the artist’s silhouette is always present on the surface of the painting. His figure, however, does not have any facial features; there is only a kind of cavity which releases bacteria, virus or other kinds of microbes that disseminate and penetrate the city’s atmosphere, corroding each corner of the city, living within the crowd. The artist’s own silhouette inside the painting is also not curable; his hair, his face, his muscles and his blood pressure, had already become the best shelter for the microorganisms.
Possibly someone will assert that the artist’s modus operandi is a prank; however, the artist spends a great deal of painstaking effort on his sketches and paintings. In both series the vivid colors and the solid shapes, want to transmit to us strong, intense information – an artist of reality in the traditional sense- skillfully making people aware of a new reality, that is our history and our own existence from an original, hidden point of view, invisible to others.
Gao Feng’s artistic creation, through the use of both traditional visual images and real life representations, is full of important academic values. Neither the “Preexistence” artwork nor the “Present Life “work is a subjective performance. He has gone beyond experience as indirect source of images and beyond first-hand experience, as a direct observation of self sufficiency and uniqueness.
Speaking from the level of methodology, he accepts the anti-Western vision of centralism, and he corresponds to contemporary Chinese art’s task to diversify the needs of traditional representations. In his own way he delivers an important message: the true vision is not only a mere presentation; rather, we must make every effort still to find it, and in this process of discovery, the original look of the world (including direct and indirect experience), might have different possibilities, full of magical charm and supernatural color. One of the values of art lies in the revelation of the colorful world in all aspects, to stimulate people’s imagination; Gao Feng’s work is inspired by the great ancient artwork. For those works, collectively referred to as "Preexistence," ancient traditional paintings and the re-interpretation of them is not an exhausted project, since for contemporary social reality a micro truth is revealed. I look forward to Gao Feng’s "erudite and informed" road in the future as he continues to create fresh and inspirational work.
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