Fresh and New – Wu Mingzhong’s Painting
    Interview with Huang Du, Zou Cao and Wu Mingzhong

    Date: June 5, 2009
    Location: Wu Mingzhong studio

    Huang Du (hereinafter Huang as shortened form): Let’s talk about your motivations for painting. Why do you work like this? How did you come across way of painting?

    Wu Mingzhong (hereinafter Wu as shortened form): It came from an early crisis of love.

    Huang: Why?

    Wu: Love, for me, was shattered. I felt an emotional vulnerability and began to doubt the truths about love. At that time, I thought that art might express this vulnerability as I had experienced pain, and that might be an explosive source of inspiration. If that is the case, how can I deliver my idea? I was using an inflatable balloon at the very beginning but it was really so fragile. Since the figure was not legible after the balloon was enlarged, I needed to find a more concrete image. Later, I thought of the essence of glass: hard but fragile. With that on mind, I began to produce some small-size paintings. The works definitely surpassed my expectation, so I started enlarging the work until I had found the beginnings of a glass portrait.

    Huang: Why do you introduce political issues into your paintings?

    Wu: I had plenty of art practice before the glass portrait paintings. That included political themes as in the Egg series, showing an attitude of mistrust. People’s bodies are real in the painting but their head are shaped as "eggs". The first piece of glass portrait painting entitled Shoot! has political innuendos. It’s about the negotiation between two countries. They are supposed to reach an agreement, but the agreement might change, or they might break the agreement. Then I began to consider the vulnerable connections between people, nations and parties. Another reason for the glass portraits actually is the buildings that had collapsed in just seconds on "9-11" in the United States. In 2002, I produced a painting in which a group of people chat in a big cardboard box, just like we are now, but they have not noticed the danger outside. The painting entitled Handle with Care, Buddy! reminds people of that danger.

    Huang: That is to say, your work implies “care”. 

    Wu: Yes, I just want to remind people that fragile matters actually exist. Do not crush it, like relationships between people.

    Huang: In fact, in your work, you draw a connection between transparency and fragility, right?

    Wu: Exactly. The visual impact would be weakened if I only drew a transparent glass portrait, so I added hues to it – like orange juice and XO. In 2005, I replaced the hues with wine, because the wine has a meaningful color and also makes a striking visual impact.

    Zou Cao (hereinafter shortened as Zou): Does the wine have any implications besides its striking visual impact?

    Wu: From a visual point of view, I thought the wine’s color was stronger than the previous materials, and it also implies desire, seduction. The material, the color of wine, also looks beautiful.

    Huang: Red wine contains a lot of meaning: it might suggest the luxury and desire of today's social elites. Perhaps it does not have a specific meaning, but might create something in the imagination.

    Wu: The wine and XO in my painting both have a realistic significance: we live in a wonderful material world; people are chasing after a luxurious vanity. We need to reconsider and question the material life, and its relationship to people.

    Huang: Wu Mingzhong’s work seems to stress that everything is transparent, and transparency has in fact become a necessary condition in contemporary society and cultural development. The glass transparency has more implications beyond the physical character of the glass; in other words, it has associations with democracy, freedom, supervision, openness, commonality and affiliation, and the critical transparency that has become a form of “social surgery”: it discloses and eliminates the infectious roots of dictatorship, manipulation, conspiracy, crime, concealment and corruption. Based upon an awareness of this contradiction, Wu Mingzhong has expanded the meaning of transparency as a way of contrasting hardness and fragility, fakeness and authenticity. His paintings convey a controversial message. The glassware, for example, suggests the upper classes, just as the glass portraiture in your work lives in this atmosphere of extravagance and with a keen sense of exposure. You are very concerned with some rather entangling political issues. Besides analyzing the extravagance of daily life, your works such as “Six Party Talks” allude to the hardness and fragility of international ties. This fact seems to be confirmed since“Six-party Talks" results in the absence of North Korea. It can be said that the previous efforts to the “Six-party Talks" were all in vain.

    Wu: Yes, the use of caution is extremely important! I produced two paintings on the theme of the "Six-party Talks." One is a six-party roundtable talks, entitled “Let’s discuss!”. The second depicts the scene of a handshake, entitled “Shake Tight, Buddy!”. I was worried about the absence of North Korea in the peace talks. In fact, this is just a psychological demand, but in actuality there’s nothing we can do, since it’s all determined by the texture and the nature of the glass.

    Huang: The subject is not a crucial factor in contemporary art. Any depicted object can serve as the subject matter, while what’s really critical are the methodological issues currently employed in painting.

    Wu: I think creating art should always begin with expression. If the expression is your own, you know there is no referential language or methodology in use. At the same time, an artistic creation is likely to emerge. What I want to express here is a certain brittleness and fragility, something no one has done before in art history.

    Huang: Even though art history provides us with a wide range of experiences, we could not mechanically apply it to each artist's personal experience. Looking back at art history, it is not difficult to find that some artists’ methods and concepts have changed the evolutionary process of the arts. Take Fontana (born in Argentina in 1899, moved to Milan, Italy, 1905). He was not glued to realistic approaches in creating a work, but he preferred rather to explore the movement and changing conditions of the paint. Fontana had changed the painting space with his random knife-cuts on the canvas. That "sporadic" outcome had broken through painting’s spatial concept in the Western tradition. Since then, Western traditional painting has adopted perspective in the plane as well as color changes to shape a visual effect that includes three-dimensional space. In a sense, Fontana went beyond logic and practice in art history. Therefore, we may not judge art practice with experience, but rather, it’s just like you said. You had an erupting fragile emotional experience because of a crisis involving love. Transferring this experience to your art brought you a new artistic method.

    Zou: Fontana’s knife cuts originally might have been a sporadic happening or an occasional impulse. But his persistent artistic cut proved that he had fully understood the impulse, and this cognition or understanding evolved into his artistic creation. 

    Huang: In China, most people can only focus on the linear logic in Western modern art. In fact, the development of Western modern art is mixed with some very complex factors. In addition to the individual experiments by the artists, it also includes economic and commercial factors, in addition to the most important factors such as cultural movements, politics, philosophy, and other ideologies. However, so-called “popularity” often gets combined with a number of other factors. For instance, a number of galleries or exhibitions promote the artist's self-confidence or some sort of Pop Art. The cultural logic of capitalism underlies this phenomenon. Commerce underlies art, especially in the US.

    Wu: I started this series of works in 2002, and I was further inspired after participating in two exhibitions in 2003. Then by the end of 2005, a few people started collecting my works.

    Huang: Your art creation has stabilized since then. I think art today is inevitably involved in the commercial.

    Wu: The commercial achievement did bring me a kind self-confidence; people bought my works because they liked them.

    Huang: This series of works depict daily consumer items, yet the painting belongs to the style of still life. But beyond that, you have also revealed contemporary political issues as they are related to the objects you depict. That is, an artifact has been charged with consumption, entertainment, emotion, and even political and religious topics. By doing so, the artistic language is more ingenious and full of tension.

    Wu: Actually it is a metaphor, a metaphor – in glassware – for people.

    Zou: I think Wu Mingzhong has created a unique language, and he was not intending to create a language by doing so but simply to express his language.

    Huang: Wu Mingzhong has created a new painting style. Well, what is that style like? It is obvious that his painting is neither in a realistic style, nor the language of Pop Art. It’s not “Cynical Realism” or “Gaudy Art” either. However, we can see that his painting has a clear element of synthesis. It is worth noting his painterly language is deeply intuitive. The strokes are bold and not detailed, but from a distance, the paintings are both integrated and detailed – at once, they are simple and rich. Even the playful daily life, and the politics become segments of a new game, so unlike the former grand narrative. It’s really hard to tell exactly what the style is. This is perhaps an important feature and the essence of Wu Mingzhong’ painting!

    Wu: Knowing that my work is not like others has sometimes been a source of confusion for me. I cannot tell what it is. Actually, it is something like this.

    Huang: In fact, the concept and language in Wu Mingzhong's painting represents a changing character for this period – a mood of new [21st] century painting after "Political Pop" and "Cynical Realism". With further examination, the painting is significantly different from the other styles. It is both low profile and unassuming, relatively restrained and relaxed. It does not pursue a kind of grand narrative, but stresses the intuitive sense of design and daily experience. In other words, if we say that "Political Pop", "Cynical Realism" and "Gaudy Art" expressed the consciousness of political criticism and also served as a moral satire of China's elites, the conceptual language in Wu Mingzhong’s paintings illustrates people’s psychological vulnerability, conveying his suspicion of the historical value of social events by contrasting the fake and the authentic. Although not overtly stated, the paintings have further implications.

    Wu: Yes.

    Huang: The glass in your painting is reminiscent of something else. Many artists in China’s contemporary art scene are similarly oriented. It’s a very interesting artistic phenomenon.

    Zou: I know Wu Mingzhong rather well since we often talk to each other. I think his art practice has pushed contemporary art a step forward. Aesthetically, the ideology is sort of like Plato in reverse. Its significance lies in the fact that he has created an object, then realizes, explores and observes the world by using this object. Although he had many series of works drawing on a complex ideology, I personally think that there are two more important issues or breakthroughs. One breakthrough is the form, the other is the content. In terms of form: Wu has created and employed a vitreous (or glass-like) form of language. In his recent painting “Jesus Christ”, he has depicted faith as a glass container filled with red wine. Since faith is both extravagant and fragile, Wu has perfectly united form with content. The content of his work does not present certain objective facts, but shows some sort of realistic images in combination with rational psychology. So I think it is hard to define him. The reason is that previous art theory and practice could not explain and verify his work. Therefore, comprehending his works is a new subject altogether. In other words, we should define him with a new knowledge of the arts, because his painting has already broken through the conventional ideologies of Chinese contemporary art. On that point, his work is postmodern first, then modern. 

    Huang: It’s just like Lyotard's narrative sentence on the postmodern.

    Zou: Yes. At this point, he has made more of a critical breakthrough than others. But defining the breakthrough too early would lead to inaccuracies.

    Huang: Wu Mingzhong’s painting has certain hybrid characteristics, and such an uniqueness is difficult to define, generalize or express in any style or manner.

    Wu: Many of the works in this century are synthesized – they are comprised of a lot of elements. This is a new tendency that is constantly evolving. But it would be quite a strain to actually capture this new tendency in a nutshell, to describe it in a single word.

    Huang: A group of artists has a common mood, and the mood reflects a phenomenon that does not relate to stylistic language. Moreover, the painting is unlike the previous ones that had a specific image or a portrait-style.

    Zou: Yes.

    Huang: Wu Mingzhong’s painting is indeed a special case. His art language is unique, that is to say that we can hardly find an artistic language or style similar to his, since his painting was created with a reverse way of thinking - that is why his artistic language, style and concept cannot be clearly stated. This is a very interesting story. If you look at the genealogy of Chinese contemporary art, we want to know what new painting comes after "Political Pop" and "Cynical Realism". If a "New" painting does exist, what is it? What is the "New"? What is the connection between the new and the old?

    Zou: It is both a rupture and a continuity.

    Huang: I think Wu Mingzhong’s painting is a sort of mutation, because there are no works comparable to his. From the perspective of art criticism, this case might allow us to reconsider some core issues in painting. Wu Mingzhong’ s work might actually be a chance, that is, a path to a new topic.

    Zou: We can only look forward to the in-depth research of critics.

    Huang: What distinguishes Wu Mingzhong is that he subtly observes the changes in the world with a globally-informed political vision that not only goes beyond the issue of China, but also brings China into an analysis of international relations. His painting "The Six-party Talks", for example, probes North Korea's "nuclear" program – regional political relations that include China, North Korea, the United States, Japan, South Korea and Russia. He seems to use that vulnerability to reproduce and demonstrate the game of national interests in all its complexity and uncertainty. He also observes the experience, problems and changes in daily life from a new perspective, Wu Mingzhong’s paintings, Chen Wenling’s sculptures, Qiu Zhijie’s installations, video art by Miao Xiaochun and Qiu Anxiong, paintings by Qiu Xiaofei – their methods and narratives are different from other artists. They have a completely different language system from former successful artists. Now it’s hard to describe it accurately with theories, but I can feel this distinction deeply.

    Zou: This phenomenon probably exemplifies heterogeneous aesthetics in Chinese contemporary art. Wu Mingzhong’s recent works are about the relationships between couples, intimate contact with daily life, or our lives per se. 

    Huang: These works actually represent a sense of apathy among people in current society.

    Zou: And that sense of alienation, people had it 1000 years ago and 1000 years later. This is an eternal topic in our life, a kind of psychological confusion with the experience of living.

    Wu: Couple’s relationships should be the most intimate, but they’re not. Why?

    Huang: Matters in daily life appear to be simple, but in fact the images imply a lot of underlying meanings. The painting’s subtle subjective depictions convey loneliness, isolation, contradiction, conflict and an inner, psychological alienation. Therefore, Wu’s new paintings have delivered something more than just images, but the charm of paintings that provoke people’s ideas. The charm I’m speaking of not only refers to visual pleasure, but also to a form of meditation – this is painting’s higher state.

    Wu: To strike a chord with people’s hearts.

    Huang: We discovered that your recent works have been concerned with some changing issues. Why are you concerned about couple’s relationships? Why all the faith and politics? This is not just about the images. More important, it also includes the analysis and dissection of the real world. Especially the analysis of "Fake Authenticity" – so that seemingly fake glass figures have reproduced social and cultural relations in a real world of conflicts, contradictions, uncertainty, fragility and vulnerability.

    Zou: From a certain perspective, there is a cultural force that underlies art, one that responds with people who can solve factual problems. 

    Wu: This culture force does not refer to a country or a nation, but it is a global cultural force. Artists need to make artistic works out of a global vision. At present, the demands placed on contemporary Chinese artists are even higher than before. The previous imitations and variations that mixed up the subject matter in Chinese contemporary art are already out of date.


 

编辑：霍春常