但没有比这更糟糕的错误了。跨过起始与蒙昧时期的冲撞，你会发现浦捷的作品超越了它的形式，并探讨着人性的弱点、不安、渴求与遗忘。作为一名艺术家，浦捷保持着孜孜不倦、诚实而深度的研究，他与其所在的时代精神进行着沟通，时而戏谑，时而着迷。期间，他先观察，紧随其后的便是检验。浦捷的作品有着强烈的连贯性，不追逐虚无。他不信奉上帝，也没有宗教信仰，更没有膜拜的偶像。他抛弃了一切，义无反顾地投入到艺术创作的研究中去。

浦捷的艺术就象老子名言所说，“曲则全”；他的作品都由两层画面拼叠：历史性的画面和当代的画面，合二为一，成为记忆中完整的视觉经验。

浦捷的作品，探讨着个人的感情矛盾：尚未麻木和分离的状态，但绝对接纳生活的现状。意识和潜意识的置换并不是矛盾，相比之下，超意识视觉图像却显露了更多的原生状态，并以此来摧毁潜意识。

浦捷转换了禅宗的基本原则：“修悟见自心”而转为“修悟见自我之历史”，这仿佛拓宽了时间的纬度；它类似于普遍的情感伤痕，却不同于人们早已习惯的状态。至此，不可否认，这种扩展的本身所含有的优越感，却又回归到了秩序或自然。这是取别于狂喜与迷乱的状态。浦捷花费了大量的精力去发现、并占有了他自己的自然——历史：持续的紧张感，来自于对着灯光摘录得漠视与潜意识的深刻现实，他一直是这样，并且永不停止，无论状况有多么复杂。

这种努力，造就了一个真正原生态的世界观和人生观，它好比现实中添加了一个新的层面，并已完全改变其意义和价值。

禅宗大师们认为：经验的基本特征就是重复——它克服了所有的二元论，于自我与非自我之间，于有限与无限之间，于存在与非存在之间，于外形与事实之间，于虚无与盈满之间，于物质与机会之间。浦捷在自身中央找到了一个转变，试图以此替代惯常的含义，这是极其反演变化与唯智主义的(dualizing and intellectualistic)，无需再确认图像中自我与非自我之间的对抗——它会超越和重现每个对立层面，只是为了享受一个完美的自由和不可胁迫性(incoercibility)，就像风一样无拘无束。

像浦捷这样极少数艺术家的作品，视觉语言替代了推理公式，并通过象征性图像来加以识别。如同文艺复兴时期的艺术家，浦捷以他睿智的好奇心，放弃口述，而是在视觉图像中表述他的思想。因此，由于缺乏欣赏要领，观众可能会难以理解，甚至误读他的作品。尽管乍看之下，浦捷的视觉思维容易制造谎言，但事实毕竟不是这样。人物形象的含意和情景的表述，相比之下，可定为具体的条理，并准确地表达出正式主观化(subjectivization)的过程，却不是理性的或示范性的。

我们还得补充，当真正的形象，被概念化的关系或功能性所压制的时候，形象已经不再具有实质性内容，它只是一个关系和功能性的领域。在第一种情况中是一个有限的不动结构，第二种情况则是一个辩证的过程，被表现冲动所驱使。那些只懂得如何观看表面形象的人，他们只会看到一个广义的表象——它不过仅仅是一种支持的意义。那些关注特征形式的人，注定会去摸索浦捷绘画中的特殊形象，也会去领悟一种由意义扩展到精神象征的过程——达到主观化。换句话说，在夹杂于其它的内容时，这种表现形式也能区分形式的转折点。

于是我们必然会想起波德莱尔和他的名言：“诗，纯净无瑕，却很少有人试着去深入探索，并扪心自问，诗歌，即使经历了死亡与失败之痛，也不被科学或道德所融。它没有真理目标。它就是它。证明真理的方法在别的地方。”与其类似的，在泰奥菲勒•戈蒂埃(Thèophile Gautier)激进的《论艺术之美》一文中提到：艺术，不同于科学，每个艺术家的工作都得从自己开始，这里没有进展，不能被无限完善。确切地说，浦捷的作品，就像诗歌那样新颖。艺术家就是如镜子一般看世界的诗人，试图反映每个人的经验，通过每天画布上的战斗，来领悟普遍规律，无论尺寸大小，都考虑着人的激情、痛苦、愚蠢和创造，也可能诠释着在我们看来似乎没有的意义。然而历史、源头、源泉等不可或缺的重要的参考根源，为我们奠定了时间，以及不久前还有意识的影响性，仍留有无法消除或否定的痕迹。

浦捷同时兼顾了绘画纵横各向的尺度，统一，却又涉及隔阂，色彩，动画，振动和反差，并由此而形成了一种立场，赋予了塑造一种感觉或动态。他把时间因素作为敏感的塑造媒介，所以，他的作品便不再是一种“重叠”或“固定”的图像，却像影视一样地展开。这演绎了康德对时空状态的学说和人们每个活动的基本认识。在浦捷的作品中，艺术的构思里，暂时性是确确存在的，即附加的时间段，因此，就四维空间对他的作品来说，是至关重要的。

保罗•克利曾严厉而非激进地写下如此格言：绘画应该“让人看” ，而不是“让人看见”，他补充说，绘画要让人去看那些并不存在的力量。浦捷的画面富有与生俱来的动感：运动的层面，电影感的跳跃，内部和外部间的转移与改变。他的画按照正规的戏剧法则来完成，这样，首先得理解他作品，并做出假设。过去的情感、心理、艺术经验和世俗经验被点燃，即便这些代表元素会在浦捷所开启的叙述性历史中得到释放和成长，但是，它们的原点和终结都归于其作品的本身。

浦捷1959年出生，在上海生活和工作，也在当地的美术学院授课。

他的工作室就在莫干山路。那里，过去是旧的纺织工厂，这批年岁已旧的仓库，现已被香格纳画廊与当时默默无闻但如今名声鹊起的艺术家们用作艺术空间和工作室，如周铁海，王兴伟和浦捷等。如今这里已经成为一个拥有各种画廊、大小酒吧与艺术家工作室的熔炉。这里已经成为收藏家、评论家和美术馆馆长和越来越多对中国当代艺术有浓厚兴趣的人必赴之地。

浦捷艺术风格的形成具有强烈的时间对比：早年，他接受无产阶级革命理想的教育，随后，在大学里又学习了中国市场经济的观念。事实上，他所亲历的两种截然不同的时代，使他感到格外的矛盾：“我的左手牵着过去，右手则是现在。” 因此，被他称为“双重视角”的影像叠加技术，第一次呈现了他所有的生活体验，而不是刻意去寻找原始的形态特征。今天，在艺术与生活如此密切的关系中，这种情况是显而易见的，并触手可得。

重要的是，浦捷对当下中国文化中的社会现象与形态十分敏感。通过“双重视角”，他成功地影射了近几十年在中国社会发生的巨大变化。

因为“记忆”的存在，我们总会去憧憬将来，并回忆过去，我们总是努力去思考，去回忆，抓住一点一滴，并且想以此来重新评定过去，以矛盾来对抗“镇压”与“否定”——这两个可怕的东西经常被禁锢，并扭曲我们自己。这就是浦捷的作品首先要告诫我们的东西。这种微妙的、非暴力的气氛，由生动的色彩——红、黄、蓝、绿所带来的冲击开始。由此，我们不得不想起歌德，他抗拒着让他难以想象且无法容忍的数学与光学的暴敛。根据他的观察方法，将色彩仅仅作为纯粹的物理现象是无法接受的；他认为这是对牛顿学说的无视，并指责这是埋没数世纪以来的杰作。相反，这位伟大的浪漫主义的诗人认为，色彩是与人性有关的东西，是与生俱来的自然表现，但经过理性地观察，与观者内心灵魂的交流，却可变得完整和完美。歌德坚持认为：色彩无法通过机械而单一的理论来做出解释，它必须用政治、美学、心理学、生理学和象征主义来解释。浦捷证明并拥有了伟大的德国自然主义者的理论：利用色彩语言，并将这种可能性提升到了最大程度。确实，浦捷作品中的色彩建立起了一个基本的道德立场，对于我们的世界，对于当代的基本层面，这是每件伟大的幻想的作品所拥有的基本要素。浦捷的艺术始终呈现出斗争的精神，这是他作品坚定的道德立场。

我们不会忘记今天中国艺术家面向世界开始的创作，一面是肉体与魔鬼，另一面则是西方的艺术实验——冠冕堂皇的批评和伪造的喜好流派。于是出现了两种现象：那些紧跟时代的脚步、并以“主义”制造“廉价”艺术，从而满足他们的银行账户；或者通过严格创作“好的艺术”， 来满足良心的人。由于评判标准并未严格确立，对两者的区分变得越来越困难。结果，除了那些缪斯女神特别眷顾的人，大部分艺术家都试图同时骑上这两匹马，或至少交替地骑。这种努力以及随后的失败，将会造成道德与智力及其可怕的混淆。浦捷，不像很多其他的艺术家，他十分了解没有永恒的作品，他只为徒劳重复和属于这个时代的艺术而工作，从而获得了作为艺术家的重要意义。能够引起共鸣的每件作品，都需要一个人投入所有的思考与真诚。浦捷的作品就是这样，他继续严谨地做研究，抛弃了对艺术的终极展望，他首先在揭示艺术家本人的状况，然后置观众于一个能够更深刻体会的现实中去，或许人们不能明确地发现，但会产生一种预感，它们的存在，就像罗盘一样，可以对自己的良心、精神以及自我的时间做出定位。

The Wind Blows Where It Likes: the art of Pu Jie

Lorenzo 2008.12.

“The work of art is a living being,” the great late Italian critic Carlo L. Ragghianti wrote with conviction.

At first glance this might seem like an astonishing statement but upon careful consideration it is impossible not to include art as a fundamental human existence among others. In fact art is part of the history that is present with the power of its perennial life, and thus it is always current and indelible.

The work of art can represent an intellectual problem and its related solution, it can assume the guise of definition or logical demonstration, and it can be an esthetic signature, commitment or a tool of culture, as well as other things. It can tend toward form rather than figure, or vice versa, or toward function rather than form. What is certain is that the work of art does not speak to all indiscriminately, but rather often remains silent for the uninitiated or sometimes closes itself off, disdainful toward those who would treat it like a “whore.” It opens up and communicates its content only to those who are committed to understanding its language and to interpreting the significant acts that have been carried out in the process of its elaboration.

The problem of understanding visual art becomes more stringent today, at a moment when it has received ever greater space in the everyday life of society, assuming various forms, some unexpected and made possible by technology. Unfortunately there is also the inveterate vice of adopting vision as communication without making any further effort to clarify the specific nature of vision as human production. Too often it is only communicative modalities that are assumed; clearly these keep the creative factor in power, but it remains latent and unrecognized, exhausting fruition in mere perception, without recognizing or looking for its agent.

And so when considering the work of Pu Jie there is an immediate risk that one might classify it in the context of popular art, with references to American pop art from the 1960s. This observation stems from the presence of strong colors and an apparently graphic and elementary sign.

Nothing could be more mistaken. Moving past an initial and uninformed impact, one will discover that Pu Jie’s work, beyond its appearance, has something to do with human beings’ state of frailty, agitation, thirst and oblivion. Pu Jie is an artist in touch with the spirit of his time, a time that he first of all observes and only subsequently experiences, sometimes dramatically and sometimes obsessively, through his incessant, honest and intense research. It is work that possesses great consistency because he is not a hunter of echoes or a pursuer of shadows. Pu Jie has neither gods nor faith, nor does he venerate idols. He abandons everything, leans on nothing and proceeds in his research with only painting.

And this is painting where, as one of Lao-tze’s maxims says, “the whole is in the fragment”; in fact the two levels on which the work is developed – the historical and the contemporary – become a single body where the visual experience of the whole is achieved.

Pu Jie’s works communicate a sense of the individual’s irrelevance, which does not paralyze but ensures that detachment that allows an absolute acceptance of life. And it is not a question of contraposition between conscious and unconscious, but rather of a super-conscious vision that implements original nature and, in so doing, destroys the unconscious.

Pu Jie transposes the fundamental Zen formula: “seeing into the nature of one’s own being” into “seeing into the nature of one’s own history,” like a timeless opening up wide; it is something akin to a catastrophic trauma of ordinary consciousness, something radically different from all the states to which men are accustomed. At the same time, however, this opening is what leads back to what, in a superior sense, should be considered as normal or natural. Thus it is the opposite of ecstasy or a trance. Pu Jie makes a great effort to go in the direction of discovery and to take possession of his own nature-history: a constant tension toward the light that extracts from ignorance or from the subconscious the profound reality of what has always been and will never cease to be, whatever the specific condition.

The consequence of this effort is a truly original view of the world and of life, as if a new dimension had been added to reality and had completely transformed its meaning and value.

According to Zen masters, the essential trait of experience that repeats is the overcoming of all dualism: dualism between inside and outside, between ego and non-ego, between finite and infinite, between being and non-being, between appearance and reality, between emptiness and fullness, between substance and chance. Pu Jie seeks a shift of the center of the self, he tries to replace usual meanings, which are dualizing and intellectualistic, with an image that no longer recognizes an ego opposed to a non-ego, that transcends and recaptures the terms of every antithesis, just to enjoy a perfect freedom and incoercibility, like that of the wind when it blows where it likes.

In the work of only a few artists, like Pu Jie, visual language replaces discursive formulation, language that moreover is not identifiable with symbolic image. Like Italian Renaissance artists, Pu Jie, with his intelligent curiosity, expresses his ideas not in words but in visual images that, as such, are understood by few or sometimes misunderstood, since the viewer does not have the key for interpreting them. Indeed Pu Jie’s visual thought does not lie, as it might appear to at first glance, in the meanings of figures, in the description of situations, but rather in the processes of formal subjectivization that are defined in their specific terms precisely as expressive rather than as rational or demonstrative.

We might also add that the substantiality of the figure is overcome by the concept of relationship or function between phenomena; the image is no longer an object having substance, but a field of functions and relationships. In the first case it would be a finite and immobile structure, in the second case it is a dialectical process in progress, charged with the expressive impulse that has placed it in motion. Those who only know how to see the figure, see a generalized appearance that counts only as a support for significance. Those who seek in Pu Jie’s figures the specific manner of their appearance, determined by the investment of the form that is specific to them, can also grasp the process that has unfolded to begin from a meaning or from a mental symbol, to arrive at its subjectivization. In other words it is the expressive form that, with the remaining content, also distinguishes the inflection of the figures.

Here Baudelaire inevitably comes to mind, with his statement that “Poetry, however little one seeks to delve inward, to interrogate one’s own soul, has no other aim than itself… Poetry cannot, under pain of death or of failure, assimilate itself to science or morals. It does not have Truth as its goal. It only has itself. The methods of demonstrating truth are elsewhere.” And almost analogously, Thèophile Gautier, in his polemic “On the Beautiful in Art,” states that “art, unlike science, begins again with every artist, in art there is no progress… it is not additionally perfectible.” Pu Jie’s painting is, precisely, new, as poetry. The artist is a poet who looks out at the world like a mirror, wanting to reflect every human experience, seeking to understand a universal law through a daily battle with canvases, large and small, contemplating the human passions, suffering and follies of our days and creating and also giving meaning to what might seem to us to be lacking in meaning. However without ever forgetting the history, the source, the fount, the indispensable and vital reference to the roots, to the foundation of our time, to the recent past that still affects consciousness, leaving traces that would be criminal to remove or negate.

Pu Jie paints in simultaneous unity between depth and extension; this integration involves gaps, colors, animations, vibrations and contrasts. A field of forces and actions ensues, capable of giving plastic form to a feeling or movement. He integrates the time factor as a plastic and sensitive medium; thus the work is no longer a simultaneous or fixed image, but unfolds as if it were a film. It is the expression of Immanuel Kant’s fundamental recognition of space and time as conditions of knowledge and of every activity of man. In Pu Jie’s work the temporal agent in artistic elaboration is revealed to be substantial, namely the addition of time, and therefore four-dimensionality becomes essential to his art.

Paul Klee, in a drastic although non-polemical aphorism, wrote that painting should not “render the visible” but “renders visible,” and he added that painting renders visible those forces that do not exist. Pu Jie’s painting is made up of movements that are felt through intuition: movements of dimension, cinematic jumps, shifts and alternations between inside and outside. His painting is complete in this formal dramaturgy, and it is in this way, first of all, that it should be understood and assumed. Precedents in terms of sensibility, psyche, artistic experience and worldly experience burn through, even if they represent elements that unleash and nurture the moment in which Pu Jie initiates an expressive history, which, however, has its original and ultimate reason only in itself.

Pu Jie was born in 1959, lives and works in Shanghai, where he teaches at the Art Academy.

His studio is located on Mogashan Road. Previously an old textile factory, it was for years the warehouse for the Shanghart Gallery and a studio for then-unknown but now extremely renowned artists, such as Zhou Thiehai, Wang Xingwei and Pu Jie. Today the space is a crucible of art galleries of every type, bars of various sizes and artists’ studios. It is an obligatory destination for a growing number of people, collectors, critics and museum directors who are interested in contemporary Chinese art.

Pu Jie’s formative years were characterized by a strong dichotomy: from an early age, he was educated according to the ideals of proletarian revolution, but later, at university, he learned about the Chinese view of market economy. The fact that he personally lived through two such different eras led him to feel paradoxical: “my left hand encloses the past, my right the present.” And so the technique of superimposing images, which he calls “dual visual angle,” emerged first of all from his life experience, rather than from the search for an original stylistic characteristic. And in this case the close relationship between art and life is extremely evident and palpable.

Pu Jie is interested, above all, in investigating the social phenomena and forms that contemporary Chinese culture assumes. And it is precisely through “dual visual angle” that he manages to suggest to us the flow of changes that have occurred in Chinese society during recent decades.

In order to know where we are going we cannot help but consider our past, we cannot live “without memory,” and we must make a continuous effort to remember, to recall, to not skip over passages, to not leave black holes in the past, to retrieve what was good, to criticize everything terrible and negative that occurred, to take on contradictions, and to not yield to repression or negation, the two diabolical mechanisms that too often imprison and dehumanize us. This is the admonition that, before anything else, emerges from Pu Jie’s work. And this occurs in subtle, never violent fashion, beginning with an initial impact that is always captivating and characterized by vivid colors – yellows, blues, greens, reds. Here we cannot help but recall Wolfgang Goethe, who rebelled against the inconceivable and to him intolerable tyranny of mathematics and optics. According to his way of seeing it was inadmissible for colors to be merely a purely physical phenomenon; he considered this to be the arrogance of the Newtonians, accusing them of having buried the work of centuries. The great romantic poet thought that colors, on the contrary, were something human, that they undoubtedly had their origin in various natural manifestations, but found their composition and perfection in the eye in the mechanics of vision, in the spirituality of the observer’s soul. Colors, Goethe insisted, cannot be explained through a solely mechanistic theory, but must also be explained by poetics, esthetics, psychology, physiology and symbolism. Pu Jie demonstrates and shares the theory of the great German naturalist and utilizes the language of color to the greatest extent possible. Indeed the colors of Pu Jie’s canvases establish an essential moral stance toward the world in which we live and toward the average contemporary level that is the fundamental basis for every potent work of imagination. A firmly anchored ethical level is something for which Pu Jie has fought from the beginning.

We must never forget that every Chinese artist who sets out to create a work today is facing the world, with flesh and the devil on the one hand and, on the other, western artistic experimentation with its high-sounding pages of criticism and the spurious sectarian preferences of experts. A fork in the road is reached: to follow the erratic aspirations of those who, adhering to the fashions of the time, thrive on “isms” and as a consequence make “cheap” art to satisfy their bank accounts; or to rigorously apply oneself to creating “good art” that has the merit of satisfying one’s conscience. Since the criterion has never been firmly established, it becomes ever-difficult to distinguish. As a result many artists, except the most fervent disciples of the muse, attempt to sit astride both horses simultaneously, or at least alternately. This effort and the subsequent failure to succeed in both attempts has produced horrible paroxysms of moral and intellectual obfuscation. Pu Jie, unlike so many others, knows full well that no enduring work, destined both for the rubbish heap and for the centuries, has ever been achieved by an artist with twofold intentions. The invention of every work that has resonance demands the integrated effort of one’s entire mind and entire heart. This occurs in the work of Pu Jie, who continues his research with rigor, without ever losing sight of the ultimate purpose of art, to first of all reveal the artist to himself, and to then place viewers in a position to intuit more profound realities, perhaps without perceiving them clearly, but to have a presentiment of their presence, thereby finding a compass to orient themselves toward their own conscience and in relationship with this toward the spirit of their own time.