Behind The Barrier

        The working style of artists is usually divided into two kinds. Relatively speaking, one kind of style is more open, the other is more independent. The first style of artists can finish their own works with the help of various possible relations in the society which they can find. The second style of artists are used to finishing their own special works in their studios independentIy, just like the ancient sorcerers, who secretly made some rare folk prescription. Obviously, Cheng Yong belongs to the second.

        Cheng Yong's recent painting works look like the unfolded and huge braille illustrations and easily attract the attention of the people who are appreciating them. The moving dots with almost endless repetition on his paintings look so simple and beautiful that you can't help wanting to touch them and feel them.

        Cheng Yong is a diligent, strict, and thoughtful artist. In his early works, he painted on his paintings the sign language of the deaf, the braille on CD, and the corpse of the disabled foetus in the medical lab, etc. From his works, I find that he seems to be especially interested in the special group with communication barriers.

        Perhaps it is because of his profession of a teacher in a college of special education. In fact, the communication barriers exist not only between the normal people and abnormal people, but also between normal people and normal people. With the fast development of economy, science and technology, advanced network and telecommunication in our society, the proceeding of the integration of global economy is striding along. It seems that the whole earth will really become a village and it cannot hide some kind of communication barriers still existing among the people, human races and nations.

        The comunication barrier is an important part of cultural elements. For the reason of different languages and ethnic customs, misrrerading between two different kinds of culture factually is a kind of communication barrier. Based on the imagination and misreading of western modernity, western cultural concept is used for reference in the constrction of Chinese cultural modernity. The people who are appreciating Cheng Yong's painting works may be only infatuated with the colour comparison of his paintings and the structure of his illustration, but they cannot learn the real meanings of the shapes of dots in the braille. In fact, the process of appreciating Cheng Yong's paintings is just the process of misreading. Our comprehension achieved from his works is that the east is reconstructing its own cultural concept through the misreading of the oriental conception from the west, just like Shaid' s Orientalism, which is the result of the mutual misreading between eastern culture and western culture. After all, it gives birth to Orientalism, a new special cultural formation. It is because of the existence of the "barrier" that the new culture continuously emerges and develops.