Whose Impediments——Wu Hong

        Not long ago, I went to Yincbuan on business. My friend showed me around the famous rocky drawings on Helanshan Mountain. We could strongly feel some mysterious information on hidden things in the universe at the vague designs, which cannot be tested with so many years passing. As for the makers, with uncertain speculations, they can be sorted into two types. One is about intelligent creatures from some kind of advanced civilization once on the earth or from the alien planets; the other is from the present civilization existing at the pre-historic stage. Actually, these two completely different thinking ways reveal the fact that perhaps the civilized degree overpasses our present civilization ways all things in the universe contain their laws andrules. When they find how to express their understanding to the universal laws, this specific expressing means may be so similar to the first appearance of human intelligence shown at pre-historic stage by our present civilization. We now cannot testify the exact meanings of these drawings and symhols and the motivation of the makers, but when we do research about these pictures regarded as "art works", two kinds of speculations can be deduced from the logical relationship. One is "they" created art works consciously, the other is that we regarded them as art works according to our comprehension. No matter what results the fact has, I think they all reveal an interesting psychological phenomenon that the imagination about unknown things has played a decisive role in the course. Why need we imagine? This is because when our present abilities of comprehending the world cannot meet our cognitive demand of unknown field, we can build up a bridge between "known" and "unknown" with unusual human ability of "imagining". Thus, human beings may easily live in "the world constructed by our own understanding means." So we can find that imagination plays an important role when an impediment comes in our comprehension and objects of understanding. Imagination can satisfy buman vanity.，meanwhile, human beings can experience a spiritual pleasure brought by the satisfaction. This spiritual pleasure which gets beyond the material practical value, actually, is just the basis of aesthetic feeling. Therefore, Can we presume that initial art actually came from surmounting the human own mental impairment?

        Artists in Nanjing mostly have some makings of ancient scholars and like finding the sensation of using sublime words with profound meanings from minor details. This exhibition Cheng Yong plans also contains something of the meaning above. Besides the hidden profound meanings, the apparent so-called "boundary existing between the normal and the retarded" should be focused on, perhaps because this is related to his professional feature with wages. As we know, all kinds of perception of human beings can not be stopped completely because among them there is "common sense" that we call resuhing from all perceptive organs. For example, it seems as if we could smell the sea and feel the cool temperature wben we see the blue color. This is the comprehensive function of perceptive experience in the brain. So when we use the general experience to judge the differences between "the normal" and "the retarded", we will probably neglect the phenomenon of perceptive interaction based on common sense experience. For example, a blind person is likely to be extremely sensitive to sound while a deaf maybe has special visual experience different from a normal person. Perhaps all of these can be seen as the initial art. In fact, the reason why art can motivate viewers' and audience's interest is that common sense plays a role to the great extent. They can experience a kind of comprehensive perception from a certain simple perceptive medium and gain comprehensive satisfaction to some extent. Practically, throughout the ages, it is on the basis of common sense that art has given viewers and audience a changing perceptive concept. We can realize the change and transference of the concept either by imitating the shape of human body to make the cold marble look as if it had body temperature or by making perceptive experience exact and displaced. In the course, the art charm comes into being.

        The course of perceptive appearance is not only a physical phenomenon, but also a course of forming socialization. A specific perceptive experience is based on physical perception and it is also an outcome gradually forming in the experience of human socialized existence for a long run. That is to say, the physical phenomenon which seems purely physical actually includes in it a lot of elements which contains the experience of collective existence, such as, social regulations, social bans, etc. Therefore, when we study and explore collective perceptive experience at a certain historic stage, we have to analyze it by combining the social features in that period of bistory. For instance, the Chinese consider yellow color to be noble. I think it is not simple a physical visual experience. However, the result of long-run socialized experience suggests that the forming course of human physical perceptive experience is also a long-run reformed, distorted, regulated history. In this eourse, it is also the history with human initial perceptive experience impeded by the society constantly.

        Here, we can understand and pay attention to the art works on show expressing  physical  and social topic by the three outreaching, common and social descriptions on human perceptive. Here, we can understand and pay attention to the art works on  show expressing physical and social topic by the three outreaching, common and social descriptions on human perceptive experience and from them we can find out these significant topics on "What is an impedilnent?", "Who has impediments?", "Who has made impediments lmpedmlents?"

Written in Beijing on Nov. 30th. 2006