时间：2008年3月28日

地点：北京丽都附近意大利农场餐厅（Il Casale Italian Restaurant）

 

 

黄笃（以下简称黄）：在中国当代艺术发展中，你被认为是新的观念性的绘画重要艺术家之一。然而，你几乎有点神秘，或让人捉摸不透你的变化，这显然与你的性格有关。但对美术界来说，大家总是对你有种期待。正是因为这个原因，这个对话就很有必要。我想你最好先介绍一下自己的艺术经历。

 

陈文波（以下简称陈）：1986年我进入四川美术学院，1990年毕业分配到重庆市教师进修学校，1992年第一次参加广州艺术双年展，作为21岁的年轻人来说，获得提名奖就是一个鼓励。1994年我兴奋地意识到实验艺术才是作为年轻人应该努力的方向，当年我做了一些装置作品：《旗帜》《宠物遗传学》《摊位》《鲜肉的表情》。1995年在西南交通大学做了我的第一个个展：《水分》（录象装置），这几年的实验状态让我的工作室墙上贴满了方案，但是由于资金的缺乏，机会的缺少，我开始想一个问题，什么样的工作媒介可以既简便又快捷的实现我那些方案？。。。。。。

 

黄：的确，这个时期的中国前卫艺术中绘画（政治波普、玩世现实主义）仍是占主导性地位，几乎受到西方的青睐，几乎占据所有的国际艺术展览，而装置艺术则是边缘化的，甚至被人嘲笑。那么，你为什么会选择在重庆做“切片艺术展”？

 

陈：1994年，我作为重庆市市中区教师进修学院的老师，我利用职权用两间教室展出了何森，杜峡等六人的作品——《切片艺术展》。我的三组装置作品：《宠物遗传学》和《旗帜》

作为年轻艺术家最早的装置作品备受争议，与会者有两种意见：1，肯定我的实验状态。2，栗宪庭：“我认为你的《鲜肉的表情》有分析哲学的方法，但是受到了达米恩赫斯特的影响。”作为年轻的艺术家，这就是一个问题摆在我面前。我应该怎么做？

 

黄：但是，大约1996年，你放弃了装置实验，而转向对绘画新语言的探索，你创作了一组油画“维他命Z”，作品在语言上抛弃了那种历史、社会、政治的叙事，而集中关注和表现青春期的自我塑造，形成了一种新波普的绘画风格。你的新波普绘画风格显然与之前的政治波普不同，更强调了对青春和自我的迷恋。我想知道是什么原因使你终止了装置？是什么原因又使你再次选择了绘画呢？

 

陈：谁能说安迪 沃霍尔仅仅是版画家呢？所以作为观念艺术家，我不怕使用最古老的绘画媒体，1996年每个星期六的晚上我都在重庆的迪士高俱乐部里面，寻找那些时髦的年轻人，那些男孩和女孩剃掉了自己的眉毛，用最新的化妆品重新装饰自己，她们按照流行的化妆方式，穿着方式，语言当方式，重新塑造自己。看见她们的这一刻，我问自己：“什么是真的？什么是假的？”于是我决定为青春期的自我塑造做一组作品——《维他命Z》。当我开始这组作品的时候，我首先把她们的皮肤换成了塑料品，然后用各种彩色药丸去分解这些脸，后来我在画面中剃掉她们的头发，把她们变成没有性别的工业品。

 

黄：你的“维他命Z”系列持续了有四年之久，大约在2000年，当艺术市场对你的作品有很大兴趣和更多期待的时候，不知何故你却突然终止了这一风格的绘画，开始关注都市，你的作品与别人不同，更多从非常细小的视角分析了都市的冷漠与无情，以及日常生活的不确定性。这种微观政治学的态度和方法正超越了那种宏大叙事原则，它恰恰真实地揭示生活的复杂性和政治处境。

 

陈：2000年《维他命Z》在巴黎的个展中，销售一空，一帮收藏家围着我，让我为他们订做更多的《维他命Z》，那一刻，我真的慌了，我想：“我要不要把艺术变成一个符号，一个品牌，去满足他们的需要。”一年以后，我的回答是不。2001年我徘徊在北京的夜总会中，回家的路上我看到了很多景象，突然我意识到现实的形式可以重新编码，这样我开始进入到“社会身体”的再现工作中。

 

黄：在“都市诗学”系列中，你的作品涉及到社会生活的方方面面，如作品“88号”到底探讨是什么问题？

 

陈：《88号》是一个 俱乐部，中外时尚友人 欢聚一堂，喝酒，嗑药……某夜，中国某跳水皇后也乐在其中，突然警察来了，停止音乐，打开所有灯。他们围着她问各种问题，她说：“自己的头摇一摇犯法吗？”第二天，新闻一片哗然。《88号》查封了。为了纪念那些泪水，汗水和欢乐。我画了《88号》。

 

黄：在这之后，我发现你的作品蕴涵了对权力解析，把权力看作是无处不在的东西，人的语言方式和行为方式都受到权力的支配，具体探讨的是权力如何渗透到我们的日常生活之中，如“席位”和“使用权”这样的作品。

 

陈：《席位》是2003年两会期间做的。我们都有很多开会的经验，于是我选择了会议的坐席，他们空无一人，闪着光芒，什么是民主？你有哪些权利？

   《使用权》是三把钥匙组成的。工薪阶层劳累一生，买下了自己的房子，但是这是“使用权”，只有70年，国有土地制下的“使用权”。

 

黄：除了与社会学相关的问题之外，我们还应关注艺术语言的问题，任何在艺术史上有革命性的语言，总是经得起推敲的，包含了新的东西，如众所周知的丰塔纳（）在画布上用刀子划破几下，就创造了新的绘画维度。2006年，作为上海双年展的策展人，我发现你绘画的新的潜能，就选择了“正版·盗版”，因为它不仅对现实政治的剖析上有新的角度，而且在绘画语言和呈现方式上有新的实验——以电脑分色系统、平涂技术消除了绘画性。这种语言也正符合当时上海双年展《超设计》的主题。

 

陈：与其说《正版·盗版》是中美知识产权的争端，还不如说它是绘画语言的一次尝试：我模仿正确的方式切断那些光盘的同时，也切断了绘画，异形的画框为我打开一扇形式的窗户。

 

黄：继续探讨你绘画的内涵，尤其是你的绘画实验已超出了绘画范畴，也就是你把行为、装置引入绘画，使绘画发生根本性变化，拓展了绘画的内涵与外延，这就使人难以对绘画进行界定。这种特征在你的作品“绿社会”、“好运”和“标语”中得到充分体现。

 

陈：《好运》是给买家的一个玩笑，当我不厌其烦的扔出这把筛子的时候，我真的希望大家都好运，但我说了不算，这得由买家来决定。

《绿社会》是那些热爱人工草坪的新贵们的工作场所：挥杆打向利益，漫步拉拢关系。于是我在画好的高尔夫风景上，自由地挥杆，击穿这个二维的平面才是我的欲望。

 《标语》是小区的生活规模和道德方向，我剪开这些标语，让只言片语相互矛盾，从而疑问制造这些标语的体制。

 

黄：自2000年以来，你从“都市模型”到“正版·盗版”再到“绿社会”、“好运”、“标语”

可以感觉到你似乎在建立一种个人化的绘画系统，这就好像词典一样你不断给其中添加新的东西，这个过程既有联系又有区别，既有对政治经济的分析，也有对日常生活的解读，在各种图像的重新编码过程中，呈现出新的语言，这都依赖于你对生活洞察与分析，也依赖于你不断对绘画界限的突破。

 

陈：我喜欢“卧底”这个单词，象所有警匪片一样，这个“卧底”用密码记录下当时的状况，在追杀中“躲藏”，不同之处，在于他把密码献给未来。密码不仅是信息，它也是形式，同时献给历史。

 

黄：你对未来自己的艺术有何展望呢？

 

陈：没有未来，只有现在，我做“现在时”的艺术。

 

 

Date: March 28 2008

Location: Il Casale Italian Restaurant, near the Lido Hotel, Beijing.

 

 

Huang Du: In the development of Chinese contemporary art, you’re seen as one of the most important artists working in new conceptual painting. But you’re almost a little mysterious or there’s something about the way you’ve changed that is quite hard to put one’s finger on. It seems like it’s something to do with your personality. But in the world of fine arts everyone has a certain expectation of you. That’s the reason that this dialog is so necessary. I’d like if I may to ask you first to talk about your own personal history with art.

 

Chen Wenbo: I graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1986 and in 1990 was assigned to a teacher training college in Chongqing. In 1992 I was chosen to take part in the Guangzhou Biennale for the first time. For a young man of 21, getting a nomination like that was enormously encouraging. In 1994 I had the exciting realization that experimental art was the direction a young person ought to be putting their energies in to and that year I made a number of installations: “Banner”, “Pet Genetics”, “Market Stall” and “Expressions in Fresh Meat”. In 1995 I had my first individual exhibition at South West Communications University, the video installation “Water Content”. Those years of experimental work left the walls of my studio covered in plans, but a lack of money and opportunities set me thinking on the question of what kind of working medium would best allow me to realize these plans in the most quick and simple way.

 

H: It’s true that during that period in Chinese avant-garde art painting Political Pop Art and Playful Realism was still dominant. It seemed popular in Western markets and filled all the international exhibitions, while installation art was marginalized and even mocked. That being so, why did you choose to do your “Cut-up Art Exhibition” in Chongqing?

 

C: In 1994 I was a teacher at a teacher training college in downtown Chongqing. I took advantage of my staff privileges to use two of the classrooms to put on an exhibition by six artists, including He Sen and Du Xia, which I called “Cut-up Art Exhibition”. My three works, “Pet Genetics”, “Banner” [and “Expressions in Fresh Meat”??], being the first installations by a young artist were the subject of some dispute, with two views prevailing among those who came to the show. One view approved of my experimental attitude but the other [was exemplified by] Li Xianting, who said, “I think your “Expressions in Fresh Meat” makes use of analytical philosophical methods but shows the influence of Damien Hurst.” As a young artist this was the problem I was facing. How should I go about my art?

 

H: But then around 1996 you gave up on experimenting with installation and turned to exploring a new language for painting. You created the series of paintings ‘Vitamin Z”. The language of these works abandoned any attempt to give an account of history, society or politics, focusing attention on and showing the creation of self by the young. It created a kind of new Pop Art style. Your new Pop Art style was markedly different from the Political Pop Art that had come before, emphasizing more an infatuation with youth and the self. I would like to know why you stopped doing installation and what were the reasons that made you choose to paint?

 

C: Who would call Andy Warhol a mere print-maker? So, as a conceptual artist, I’m not afraid to use the very oldest painting media. In 1996 in Chongqing every Saturday night I’d go out to the clubs looking for the most fashionable young people – these young men and women would shave off their eyebrows and use the latest cosmetics to remake the way they looked. The girls were following the latest modes in make-up and clothing to recreate themselves, and even making language a method for this too. As I looked at them I’d ask myself what was real and what was false. That’s when I decided to do the series on youth re-fashioning of the self – “Vitamin Z”. When I first started working on the series I was turning the girls’ skin into plastic, then later I’d used various different colored pills to break up the faces, afterwards in the paintings I’d shave off their hair, turning them into genderless industrial products.

 

H: You continued your “Vitamin Z” series for about four years then around 2000, just when the art market was so very interested in your work and expecting great things from you, for some reason you suddenly stopped making this style of painting and began instead to concentrate on the metropolis. You work wasn’t like others’; you were more engaged in analyzing the indifference and coldness of the city from a minute perspective and also the uncertainty of everyday life. This micro-political approach and methodology went beyond that kind of grand narrative principle and adeptly and faithfully exposed the complexity of the way we’re living and the situation we are in politically.

 

C: At the individual exhibition of “Vitamin Z” in Paris in 2000 everything on show was sold. I was surrounded by a bunch of collectors trying to get me to make more of this series for them to order. I was panicked at that moment. I was thinking, do I want to turn art in a symbol, a brand, meet these people’s demands? A year later the answer I came up with was “no”. In 2001 I’d been hanging around the clubs in Beijing. On the way back home I saw lots of different scenes and I came to the sudden realization that is was possible to re-encode the form reality takes. That’s how I started getting into this work reproducing the “social body.”

 

H: In your “Metropolitan Poetics” series your work touches on every aspect of social life. What exactly is the issue being explored in works like “Club 88”?

 

C: “Club 88” shows a nightclub, where various trendy Chinese and foreigners got together; they would drink and take drugs…one night, a star from the Chinese national diving team was partying at the club when the police turned up. They cut the music and turned all the lights on. They surrounded this woman and asked her all sorts of questions. She said, “It’s my head! Is it a crime to shake it a bit?” [A play on the Chinese name for Ecstasy, yaotouwan, which could be literally rendered “shakey-head-pills.”] The papers were full of it the next day. Club 88 was shut down. So I painted “Club 88” as a memorial to all those tears, sweat and good times.

 

H: It became apparent to me after this that your work contains a lot of analysis of power, treating power as something omnipresent. The way people speak and the way the act are both determined by power. Specifically you explored how power imbues our everyday lives, in works like “Seats” and “Use-rights.”

 

C: I did “Seats” during the “Two Meetings” [of the central Party Committee and national NPC] in 2003. We’re all very familiar with the experience of being at a political meeting which is why I chose the seating you see at these events. They’re empty and glowing with a radiance; what is democracy? What rights do you have? “Use-rights” is made using three keys. Salaried workers toil all their lives to buy their own homes but what they get is only “use-rights” for just 70 years, it’s “use-rights” in a system where the State owns all the land.

 

H: As well as these sociological questions, we ought to talk a bit about questions of artistic language. Any revolutionary language in the history of art will have had to stand up to inquiry and appraisal, including new things; we’re all familiar with things like Domenica Fontana slashing the canvas and taking art into a new dimension. In 2006 when I was serving as one of the curators of the Shanghai Biennale I found there were new potentialities in your work. I selected “Pirate Copy, Legit Copy” [for the show] because not only did it embody a new perspective in the deconstruction of politics, it was also experimenting with new things in terms of the language of paint and ways of showing – using computer color separation techniques and smudging tools to remove the painterly aspects of the work. It was a kind of language that fitted very well with the theme of the Biennale, which was “Beyond Design”.

 

C: It would be better to see “Pirate Copy, Legit Copy” not as being about intellectual property rights disputes between China and the US but as an experiment in the language of painting. I emulated the actual way [customs] cuts up those discs and also cut up the painting. The deforming of the frame opened up a window into form for me.

 

H: To continue this exploration of the content of your painting, particularly the way your experiments in technique have moved beyond the category of painting, it’s the way you have brought things from performance art and installation into painting, creating a fundamental change in the nature of the painted work, expanding and extending its content. It makes it very hard to offer a definition of painting. This is a characteristic of your work that is fully realized in works like “Green Society”, “Lucky” and “Slogans”.

 

C: “Lucky” was a joke I played on the buyers. As I patiently [made that throw of the dice] I really was hoping everyone could be lucky but my view wasn’t the one that counted; it was up to the buyers. “Green Society” shows the place of work of those nouveau riche types who love man-made fairways: the place where they swing their clubs to aim for the green of personal benefit and work hard at pulling strings. So when I painted the golfing scene I was keen to let my club swing free too and break the two-dimensional plane. “Slogans” is about the scale and moral direction of life in the new housing developments. I cut up the slogans and set the different words and phrases in conflict, casting doubt on the system that creates these kinds of slogans.

 

H: Since 2000, from your ‘Urban Model” through “Pirate Copy, Legit Copy” to “Green Society”, “Lucky” and “Slogans” you get the sense you are almost in the business of establishing a kind of individualized system of painting. It’s like a dictionary that you are continually adding new entries to, a process of both making connections and differentiation; it’s both a political-economic analysis and a reading of everyday life. In the process of re-encoding various images a new language becomes evident. This depends on both your observation and analysis of everyday life and also your continual pushing at the limits of painting.

 

C: I like the words “undercover agent.” It’s like in a cops-and-robbers movie; the “undercover agent” uses a code to record the situation, then “hides out” when they come to get him. What’s different is he offers up the code to the future. A code is not just information it’s also form and is offered up to history as well.

 

H: What do you see as the future prospects for your art?

 

C: There is no future, there’s only the now; I’m creating art for the “present time.”

 

【编辑：张晓】