NEVER BREAK
Never Break
There is no doubt that the mood in Huaqiang North is tense. The noisy crowd mixes with the wanton chirping of battery bikes. Grey market traders carrying black bags are in a tearing hurry. Walking in it is like encountering an efficient assembly line where no stopping is allowed. Once, through a small door, I accidentally entered a building, and a world of cyberpunk burst into my view. There are mounting piles of AirPods cases that could possibly be more than that sold around the world, making this place a “paradise village” for those grey market traders. Known as a jargon of the trade, the “fruit brand”, is a gift supporting many “backpackers”, but also a curse hindering creativity. Hence, it was as if Apple had returned to its original symbolic meaning: lure and lust.
Cézanne’s Apples
The subjective world described by Cézanne is broken and uneasy. The form and colour of his paintings cannot be separated. Through constant generalization and selection, the structure of the object became stable, just like the apples on the table, trembling but steady. In my series Tablescape NO.3, I connected the fruit “apple” in Cézanne’s still life paintings with the brand “Apple” in Huaqiang North, with graft and imagination nonsensically. The anxiety underlying in Cézanne’s paintings stands in stark contrast to the precision of industrial products. Like the current predicament we are in, everything is vivid and disordered, not subject to human will. Cézanne rebuilt our experience towards the time of traditional still life paintings, “there is no such thing called the present—only a constant flow between the past and the future.” When this new way of looking was stretched to infinity, another theme that Cézanne used to repeatedly depict presented itself—the skulls, symbol of death. In the East, mentioning and thinking about death is considered a taboo. However, Mexicans inherited the view of life from ancient Indian philosophy that skulls are used to celebrate festivals, and that the worship of death is also a worship of life and a promise for resurrection. The three skulls in Tablescape NO.5 are from Cézanne, as well as from Titian’s An Allegory of Prudence, indicating the past, the present, and the future. In the foreground of the painting, figures in the style of those on ancient Greek jars are outlined in gold. The two people pitting against each other reflect the internal mental friction that will never stop among human beings. I love the motifs that have been depicted repeatedly in art history. They have not only divorced from the painting itself, becoming icons, but also reflect the inner chaos of human beings and the constant struggle between the sacred and the profane that everybody has.
Weak Correlation
The way I work is to make the familiar classics regress to a pre-iconographic state, which preserves physical and visual facts. Afterwards, I place it in the current space-time coordinate, covering the depth of space, and projecting new symbols. This iconological drawing method is not painting language itself. As Panofsky said, the interpretation of iconology starts from language outside painting, and is a test of intelligence or symbol creation. I found a new trend in this style through my work Katharsis. The image takes the perfect outline of two Vitruvian men as subjects where one is upstanding and the other one is upside down. In the background, there are pyramids and pottery pots representing primitivism. The black lines shape hard, well-defined, sharp, and clear casings, which is affected by the vast history of human civilization. How we view classical culture is indeed how we view our history. Paintings, originally functioned as scripts to store history, has become simulacra of the simulacra during a visual consumption fever. The electronic screen has locked my vision in a flat interface, where I cannot see or feel reality, and thus the so-called depth can only be a lie generated by multiple simulacra. Against this background, it seems that we are losing our ability to empathize with history. So, I boldly “appropriated” ambiguous symbols such as snake, tennis ball, and isolation pillar for a weak correlation.
Stupid AI
These story-telling pots followed in the footsteps of the handicraft technique of the Yellow River basin during the Yangshao era. I painted some textspeak and emoticons on the pot. Through these unreadable symbols, I tried to express my confusion and stress brought by bullet screen culture that the traditional knowledge system became impotent here. In the Renaissance, there was a custom in Germany where the deranged were herded onto a vessel, sailing from town to town. It is a metaphor for the rejection from rationality and order towards irrationality and chaos. But there is another explanation that the highly symbolic mad passengers were actually on a pilgrimage to find their own rationality. I used “Narrenschiff”, a symbol from the legend of Argonauts, to describe the newborn “Stupid AI”. When emojis and emoticons are mixed into the programming language and inserted in the word order during communication, these Stupid AI gossip about the birth of humankind, mentioning Flint Man, Adam and Eve, and Purusha. This information became new energy for the ship that was constantly provided. Another creation about Stupid AI of mine, Regeneration Gap, uses Google real-time translation to translate real-world scenes.
On the one hand, it finds text hidden in everyday images; on the other hand, it reflects the challenge of tradition and identity we face today from between visual and conceptual gap when in a non-native language environment.
However, which is more convincing, that between vision and thought, or image and text? I have read a book called Shenzhen Vertigo, and I found the title extremely appropriate, which reminded me of anti-counterfeit labels that used to be affixed on digital products specially sold by some stalls in Huaqiang North. On the labels, the words “the frame will never break; decuple penalty for one broken” were printed. The assured sentence is more credible with laser marks on the labels which represent authority. “The product is original and authentic”, if only this is idealism; “the frame will never break”, if only this is talking about the soul.
Zhang Xinyi
