Abstract Woven Spiritual Web I Postscript to the Cross-Boundary Talk
Writing & Typesetting｜Yuki
Seminar guest｜Wang Zheng
Artist｜Ma Fumin Gao Weiyang Gao Shujie
In today's era of globalisation, how does art weave a macroscopic web of meaning that transcends culture and identity? "Abstract", an extremely inclusive and purified artistic language, may be a way to achieve this goal. With the help of "abstraction", it may be easier for us to touch and reflect on spiritual issues, and even reach a certain degree of consensus.
In the "Cross-Boundary Talk" activity in May, scholar Wang Zheng sat around a table with artists Ma Fumin/Desmond Mah, Gao Weiyang, and Gao Shujie, sharing and discussing key words such as "abstraction", "identity", "collective unconsciousness", and "time and memory". discuss. This talk presents to the audience how abstraction is a method of inward exploration, and how artists start from their own experience and cognition to explore the common issues faced by human beings outward .
Wang Zheng
Moham Wang
Yao nationality, from Wuhan. Young curators, artists, art critics and writers. Graduated from Rice University with a bachelor degree in Art History and Fine Art, a master degree in Art Criticism from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, and a PhD in Art History from the Art Design Department of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, focusing on Asian contemporary art .
The development of Western modern art history is generally centered on abstraction, a process of continuous evolution and subdivision of schools. Taking three pioneers of abstract art—Wassily Kandinsky, Pierre Mondrian and Kasmir Malevich—as clues, Wang Zheng led the audience to review the early forms of abstract art.
In Kandinsky's iconic "Composition" series, irregular lines and other geometric figures are combined and interlaced, supplemented by various colors. Kandinsky conveyed the rhythm of music through painting, expressing his inner spirit and emotion.
Moham Wang
Yao nationality, from Wuhan. Young curators, artists, art critics and writers. Graduated from Rice University with a bachelor degree in Art History and Fine Art, a master degree in Art Criticism from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, and a PhD in Art History from the Art Design Department of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, focusing on Asian contemporary art .
The development of Western modern art history is generally centered on abstraction, a process of continuous evolution and subdivision of schools. Taking three pioneers of abstract art—Wassily Kandinsky, Pierre Mondrian and Kasmir Malevich—as clues, Wang Zheng led the audience to review the early forms of abstract art.
In Kandinsky's iconic "Composition" series, irregular lines and other geometric figures are combined and interlaced, supplemented by various colors. Kandinsky conveyed the rhythm of music through painting, expressing his inner spirit and emotion.
Mondrian's three-primary-color grid work and the "new plasticism" it represents try to achieve a purer spiritual creation by restoring the most essential picture structure and color. In his later creations, he replaced the black lines and large rectangles in the picture with rhythmic colour blocks and lines, intending to show the fast-paced rhythm of life in a modern metropolis.
Malevich's "suprematism" abstraction of pure geometric form also emphasizes getting rid of plastic realism in order to pursue a "non-figurative absolute creation".
Focusing on the word "abstract", it can be regarded as a thinking process - approaching the essence of things in a way of refining commonality. This is mutually confirmed with the views advocated by the "abstract" artists, who believe that the spiritual and conceptual core under the appearance should be paid more attention to and captured.
Looking beyond the field of art, today's "abstract" is not only an avant-garde genre in modern art, but has penetrated into our daily life in the form of various abstract symbols and has become a way for us to understand the world. Therefore, starting from "abstraction", we may be able to obtain clues to explore the visual culture and spiritual culture of contemporary society .
Ma Fumin
Desmond Mah
Chinese-Australian artist, who received a BA (Honours) degree in Painting from Loughborough University in the UK, and has been worked in art education.
As a third-generation Singaporean, his ancestry can be traced back to Hui and Kinmen, Taiwan. In his childhood, he was influenced by the Taoist culture respected by his grandmother, came into contact with grotesque and gloomy temple art, and became obsessed with the dark side of art, which influenced his later artistic creation.
As a second-generation Australian immigrant and an Asian minority in a Western cultural environment, he often explores themes of identity, culture and belonging in his works. His recent art practice uses the potential of his own neurodivergent mind to create hybrid forms. Combining the forms of painting and sculpture, his works also involve technologies such as new media, with interactive, moving and auditory components that embody the human form, through which he explores the complexity of the inner self.
Ma Fumin was born in Singapore in the 1970s and lived in a "kampung" [1] where diverse ethnic groups such as China, Malaysia, and India were integrated . Such a childhood environment, coupled with his family background—his grandfather and maternal grandfather were (possibly) Hui people and Kinmen people in Taiwan, contributed to his early understanding of the fluidity and complexity of identity, and also paved the way for him to continue through artistic practice. Exploring identity issues foreshadowed.
Later, Ma Fumin immigrated to Perth, Australia with his parents, but because of his Chinese identity, he was discriminated against and rejected by some locals. These experiences made him question his own identity. Therefore, he used white and yellow paint to symbolize different races, painted himself in white paint, painted the Australian animal koala in yellow, and covered himself with rice. In these performances and installations, he fought back against the local groups that discriminate against Chinese Americans, and at the same time asked himself-- with his complicated identity, "Where is my hometown?"
[1] Kampong, the transliteration of Malay kampung , generally refers to the countryside. Before Singapore's urbanization and the implementation of the HDB policy, the countryside was actually a living environment familiar to most residents. Most of the kampongs have disappeared since the 1980s.
Desmond Mah
Chinese-Australian artist, who received a BA (Honours) degree in Painting from Loughborough University in the UK, and has been worked in art education.
As a third-generation Singaporean, his ancestry can be traced back to Hui and Kinmen, Taiwan. In his childhood, he was influenced by the Taoist culture respected by his grandmother, came into contact with grotesque and gloomy temple art, and became obsessed with the dark side of art, which influenced his later artistic creation.
As a second-generation Australian immigrant and an Asian minority in a Western cultural environment, he often explores themes of identity, culture and belonging in his works. His recent art practice uses the potential of his own neurodivergent mind to create hybrid forms. Combining the forms of painting and sculpture, his works also involve technologies such as new media, with interactive, moving and auditory components that embody the human form, through which he explores the complexity of the inner self.
Ma Fumin was born in Singapore in the 1970s and lived in a "kampung" [1] where diverse ethnic groups such as China, Malaysia, and India were integrated . Such a childhood environment, coupled with his family background—his grandfather and maternal grandfather were (possibly) Hui people and Kinmen people in Taiwan, contributed to his early understanding of the fluidity and complexity of identity, and also paved the way for him to continue through artistic practice. Exploring identity issues foreshadowed.
Later, Ma Fumin immigrated to Perth, Australia with his parents, but because of his Chinese identity, he was discriminated against and rejected by some locals. These experiences made him question his own identity. Therefore, he used white and yellow paint to symbolize different races, painted himself in white paint, painted the Australian animal koala in yellow, and covered himself with rice. In these performances and installations, he fought back against the local groups that discriminate against Chinese Americans, and at the same time asked himself-- with his complicated identity, "Where is my hometown?"
[1] Kampong, the transliteration of Malay kampung , generally refers to the countryside. Before Singapore's urbanization and the implementation of the HDB policy, the countryside was actually a living environment familiar to most residents. Most of the kampongs have disappeared since the 1980s.
In 2019, during Ma Fumin's residency in Beijing, the temples in Beijing reminded him of the small Taoist temples in his grandmother's house in his childhood. The imprint left by the incense on the sense of smell seems to suggest some kind of clue related to one's own origin. Therefore, he began to extract materials from his cross-cultural memory for creation, introducing odor elements into his works (such as the smell of burning incense, using synthetic polymers to simulate the smell of soda water, etc.), and using media with Chinese characteristics (such as ink, soy sauce, etc.). In the cross-border circulation of these things, the unique representation of Chinese culture seems to be gradually fading. Therefore, the artist tries to ask questions through his works: Does the communication and integration between different cultures lead to the blurring of the concept of "cultural authenticity" to some extent?
In Ma Fumin's two-dimensional works during this period, colorful and irregular curves have begun to appear frequently. In the next creation, he further added mechanical devices. The piece Now M Carries That Stone Too was created during a pandemic when anti-Asian racism was on the rise and the artist’s daughter M was verbally demonized locally as a virus carrier who ate her own pets. In the work, the mechanical device of the monster representing M "breathes" for 2 minutes every 45 minutes. This value is converted according to the proportion of the epidemic caused by the racial discrimination suffered by Asian Australians .
Ma Fumin's recent creations do away with backgrounds and canvases, making his works between painting and sculpture. Adjusted acrylic paint forms distorted bodies, three-dimensional versions of Francis Bacon's alienated human figures. He takes words from his own memory and half-exposes them in lines. The text content in these mixed-form works is either the rude words of racial discriminators, or the strong protest in his heart, and also has his own Chinese name-this is his few remaining memories of Chinese characters, most of which are already in forgotten in Australian life. Some of the works involve mechanical installations that the viewer can interact with. Through these works, the artist tries to explore: who is "he"; for "he" to identify with Chinese culture, is it "blessing" or "curse"?
Gao Weiyang
Weiyang Gao
Chinese contemporary artist, currently working in Chicago, USA. He received his BA in Fine Arts from Boston University in 2018 and his MFA in Painting and Drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021.
His work presents a harmonious balance between figurative and abstract, exploring the complex relationship between pattern, space and light and the human body. Taking a meditative and logical approach to his work, he believes that in modern times of turmoil, solutions can be found in balancing order and freedom. His work is composed of two distinct visual languages: vibrant backgrounds, which contain organic and amorphous shapes of color, and surfaces composed of repetitive, abstract patterns of the human body. By combining these two elements, he is creating a vision imbued with optimism, a quiet home away from the frenzy, where one can find harmony and spiritual understanding.
Driven by his own interests and the influence of the Christian teachers he met, Gao Weiyang came into contact with different religions from the East and the West when he was a child, and read a lot of philosophical books, and later studied some philosophical topics systematically. These spiritual accumulations can be traced in his subsequent creations.
Gao Weiyang was originally obsessed with the more traditional painting methods in Western art history. But a long-distance ride in 2017 allowed him to objectively and deeply observe the various human conditions in the United States from the perspective of an outsider. He realized that even though there are many differences among people, such as believing in different religions or supporting different political parties, what they have more in common is the commonality of "people". Based on this, looking back at the works of modern abstract masters, he found that they were more touching than classical figurative art, and thus changed his creative form from figurative to abstract.
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has shaken his original optimistic vision of human society. Obviously, in the face of viruses, the common natural enemy of mankind, racial and class conflicts have intensified instead. Therefore, during this period, Gao Weiyang darkened the overall tone of the picture, creating with black as the background color. These are works of natural landscape or architectural structure from a distance, while stacked, entangled or neatly arranged repetitive patterns can be seen from a closer look. In Systematic Failure, the thin tubular lines are actually distorted and piled up human bodies, referring to the artist's imagination and understanding of the concept of hell in Christianity and the concept of the Saha world in Buddhism. In Summer Mortuary, the corpses piled up in the center of the painting are abstracted into wavy lines, like rolling mountains, while the repeated symbols on the left and right represent two people embracing. Between concrete meaning and abstract form, rather than categorizing works, the artist pays more attention to his own thinking and understanding of the relationship with society contained in the picture. As audiences, we may also focus on the present world and return to ourselves under the guidance of the artist .
At the end of 2020, Gao Weiyang tried to get rid of the confinement of the overall landscape or religious architectural form of the picture, and instead organized the picture in a more open and free way. In the repetition of endless patterns, he constructed a set of meaning system that belongs to him alone. When the human figure is abstracted into tiny symbols, the uniqueness of the individual and the differences between individuals are gradually eliminated, and individualism is gradually blurred under the cover of collectivism. He tries to use this to criticize the artificially constructed differentiated belief system, and tries to break the boundaries between different groups shaped by history or culture, and finally achieve a spiritual connection and resonance with the audience.
In 2022, as the social turmoil caused by the epidemic finally subsided, the artist also began to add bright colors to the picture. He devised a new motif depicting people with their backs to the viewer, looking into the distance. Gao Weiyang's creations in the past two years have increasingly abandoned the shackles of certain established frameworks, and on the contrary, he has come closer to a state of integration that transcends race and culture, as well as spiritual and emotional commonality that he pursues.
Gao Shujie
Shujie Gao
Born in Rizhao, Shandong in 1984, received a bachelor's degree from the Mural Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2008, and now lives and works in Beijing.
He uses acrylic materials in his creation, and creatively uses multiple tools to present works in different states. His works knead time and the memory algorithm hidden behind the image, forming a "time positioning form" that opposes high-tech amnesia. Slowing down the production time rhythm of works, slowing down the audience's appreciation process, giving us time to contemplate and resist collective amnesia.
Contemporary cultural theorist Andreas Huyssen once commented on the impact of the current state of information overload on our memory process: "The more memories are stored in databases and image tracks, the less our culture is. I can’t remember it even if I wish.” This is the common dilemma faced by mankind at present, and Hu Yisen’s point of view and Gao Shujie’s creation can also confirm each other.
The series of works "Time Editing" originated from the changes of hometown. Gao Shujie's hometown is a county town in Rizhao, Shandong Province. It was demolished and rebuilt seven years ago due to the development and construction of tourism projects. The streets and houses he used to be familiar with collapsed into abandoned steel bars and rubble. Originally, Gao Shujie was alienated from his hometown due to being away from home for many years, but when he witnessed the destruction of those places that carried memories, he suddenly realized the close relationship between himself and his hometown. Every plant and tree there seemed to be closely related to him. But at the same time, he also noticed that his memory was blurred, and only some out-of-focus images could emerge in his mind, such as a clear blue sky in a certain year and a certain month, or some unique elements, such as the smell of toon trees in spring .
Shujie Gao
Born in Rizhao, Shandong in 1984, received a bachelor's degree from the Mural Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2008, and now lives and works in Beijing.
He uses acrylic materials in his creation, and creatively uses multiple tools to present works in different states. His works knead time and the memory algorithm hidden behind the image, forming a "time positioning form" that opposes high-tech amnesia. Slowing down the production time rhythm of works, slowing down the audience's appreciation process, giving us time to contemplate and resist collective amnesia.
Contemporary cultural theorist Andreas Huyssen once commented on the impact of the current state of information overload on our memory process: "The more memories are stored in databases and image tracks, the less our culture is. I can’t remember it even if I wish.” This is the common dilemma faced by mankind at present, and Hu Yisen’s point of view and Gao Shujie’s creation can also confirm each other.
The series of works "Time Editing" originated from the changes of hometown. Gao Shujie's hometown is a county town in Rizhao, Shandong Province. It was demolished and rebuilt seven years ago due to the development and construction of tourism projects. The streets and houses he used to be familiar with collapsed into abandoned steel bars and rubble. Originally, Gao Shujie was alienated from his hometown due to being away from home for many years, but when he witnessed the destruction of those places that carried memories, he suddenly realized the close relationship between himself and his hometown. Every plant and tree there seemed to be closely related to him. But at the same time, he also noticed that his memory was blurred, and only some out-of-focus images could emerge in his mind, such as a clear blue sky in a certain year and a certain month, or some unique elements, such as the smell of toon trees in spring .
Gao Shujie returned to his studio in Beijing with a sense of loss. He abstracts each piece of memory into a color, brushes different colors on the drawing board, and continuously superimposes them. During this process, the artist's subjective emotion dissolves into the thickness of time represented by the paint coating, serving as a storage of his own memory.
After completing the above process, Gao Shujie began to think about the "editing" method based on it. He thought of when he was a child, his father, who was a carpenter, used a planer to thin the wood, and he used the leftover scraps to do handwork. Therefore, he first used a printmaking knife to draw the warp and weft grids on the drawing board, and then tried to use a planer and a thinning knife to scrape out the lines and layers of the superimposed paint. After completing this whole set of delicate craftsmanship, he felt a kind of physical and mental pleasure and satisfaction because he realized the transfer of his hometown memories through his works. In the final work, the horizontally and vertically staggered squares are like binary codes of 0 and 1, but the color layers of each square are different.
"Time Editing--NO94" comes from an almost drowning experience in childhood. The contrasting colors of blue and orange represent the choppy water and the glare of sunlight that he sees through the water as he struggles in the water.
In "Time Editing--NO82", the artist chooses to deliberately and randomly leave blank, that is to say, some squares are left unopened. This represents those fragments that cannot be recalled anyway, and they may exist in some way unknown to us.
The three artists either leave their hometowns or seek their hometowns. In the process of positioning themselves, observing human beings and looking back to the past, they have developed deeper insights. Their works all give the viewer an intuitive feeling of "abstract", but the expressions are in different forms, and they are not limited to "abstract". Compared with the presentation form, the concept and essence contained in the works are the meaning of their artistic creation.
Looking back at these works with the artist's explanations, your thoughts may become heavier, because they carry a lot of thinking about macro-propositions such as race, belief, and time, and may become lighter, floating in the air, and blending with the artist's thoughts .
This article ©CAAN and the original artist all rights reserved
Any reprinting or publication requires the permission of the author and artist
Any reprinting or publication requires the permission of the author and artist