| 2008年1月
我十分热衷艺术创作，美术史及当代艺术评论，他们在我的审美观和智慧的培养上起到了至关重要的作用。为了能够更好的了解这个领域，我积攒了一些资金周游世界。我曾在巴西，哥伦比亚，西非，土耳其，日本和中国学习工作。在这些国家的经历给了我全身投入到美术史，艺术创作和评论中的机会。这个过程充满智慧，令人兴奋，我总是将他们带回我的国家与我的学生分享。
我的追求不仅仅是艺术创作，更重要的是理解美术史，艺术评论，和社会的内涵，所以我将哲学作为我创作的本质部分，并义无反顾的投身其中。在授课过程中，我往往不采取布置项目作业，演讲和阅读的方式，而是通过讨论和交换意见来激发学生的新思路。我的创作植根于加勒比文化，我鼓励我的学生去思考第三世界国家的艺术家和评论家对国际当代艺术和评论所做的贡献。
这样的探究使得我的学生和助手开始思考殖民地国家独立之后的民族文化重建问题。后殖民地时期的文化重建运动在上个世纪后半叶影响颇深。它不仅仅体现在年轻的国家，那些大国强国的艺术家们对种族和文化边缘问题的关注，以及在此过程中形成的强烈的艺术词汇也是这一运动的重要组成。
我现在旅居中国，并且创作了两组作品—“自行车之旅”和“金字塔与蛋—— O的旅程”。尽管鸡蛋和自行车的形象在我之前的作品中已经出现，但这两组作品的灵感主要还是来自我在北京的生活经历。北京总是让我想起我在牙买加的成长历程，在那里生活着很多中国同胞。我在牙买加时也有很多中国朋友，他们已经融入了当地的经济，政治和文化环境。
所以，与中国人一起生活对我来讲并不陌生。我还发现了两个国家的另一个相似点。中国曾经向世界关上了自己的国门，之后又重回世界舞台，这个过程同牙买加在经历过痛苦的殖民地时期后又在文化艺术方面得到国际的认可有几分相似。事实上，在国际当代艺术背景下，我们是并肩而行的。中国正在以惊人的速度建设自己，一个有着几千年历史的文明古国，正在向世界人民展现自己的新貌，没有人不会被他所吸引。这个重建过程却又充满矛盾，一方面，对肯定了埃及的金字塔这样的古老文明的重要性，另一方面又在建造新的摩天大厦。这样悖论让我想到要将金字塔和鸡蛋并置。
当我看到我和我的同胞的作品能够在中国当代艺术的萌芽阶段占有一席之地时，我感到很兴奋。巴西，柏林，伦敦和纽约是传统意义上世界艺术的中心，我们难以摆脱这些国家对我们的影响和束缚。但是原来的“第三世界”国家正在向世界展示最优秀的艺术作品，我们似乎正处在一个新的繁荣的前夕。纯粹的浪漫主义，经济振兴，和广大人民的智慧使得殖民主义过后的黑人世界和新兴的亚洲国家逐渐摆脱西方意识形态的束缚，创造21世纪艺术新秩序。我想中国在这一进程中起着重要的作用。不论何时，我们都要大胆的抓住在艺术创作，评论及美术史中和新世纪带给我们在国际社会中崭露头角的机会。
Bryan McFarlane
Artist Statement
January, 2008
The intersection of the practice of art making, art history and contemporary criticism is of great interest to me. For many years, this area has been at the center of my own aesthetic and intellectual growth. In an effort to better understand the issues and opportunities presented by my interest, I secured several grants that allowed me to travel extensively. I worked and studied in Brazil, Columbia, West Africa, Turkey, Japan, France and China. Each place offered opportunities for me to engage in discussions regarding art history, art production and criticism. The discourse was intellectually stimulating, and gave me insights that I could bring back and share through my classes. Because I seek not simply to create art, but to understand its implications for art history, criticism and society, I embrace philosophy as an intrinsic part of my practice. In my classes, for example, I strive to mix special projects, lectures, and assigned reading in ways that encourage discussion and exchanges that often provoke students to think in fresh ways. Drawing on my own roots in the Caribbean, I have urged students to weigh the contributions of artists and critics from that region and from throughout the “third world” to international contemporary art and criticism. Such explorations have introduced my students and associates to issues related to the formation of national cultural identities in a post colonial world. The project of post colonial cultural reconstruction is widely acknowledged to be among the most pressing issues of the last half century. Its impact is felt not just in young nations, but also in major capitols around the world where artists are struggling against racial and cultural marginalization, and in the process evolving new artistic vocabularies of great power.
My most recent travels have taken me to China, and led to the creation of two series of works entitled Bicyclical Journeys and Pyramids and Eggs—A circular Journey.
Both were principally inspired by my experiences living in Beijing, although I had already begun to use egg and bicycle motif earlier. Beijing in some ways recalled for me my formative years in Jamaica where large and long established Chinese communities are part of the fabric of the nation. I had numerous Chinese friends in Jamaica where their integration into the economic, political and cultural environment is foregone
So living amid the Chinese in China was not an altogether new experience for me. I also shared a second commonality. The dynamics at play as China emerges from a period of relative cultural isolation and asserts itself on the global stage, have a great deal in common with those of us who emerged from colonial experiences and have also had to struggle for cultural and artistic recognition. In a very real way, our experiences are parallel ones within the context of international contemporary art. And finally, as I looked around China, I was struck by the speed with which the country is rebuilding itself. It is impossible to not be amazed by how a civilization thousands of years old, is reinventing itself before your eyes. This rebuilding simultaneously leaps backward and forward, reaffirming fundamentals as ancient as the pyramids of Egypt while daring to build new towers that pierce the sky. This paradox suggested to me the juxtaposition of pyramids and eggs.
It was excited to see how my work and that of other colleagues from the Caribbean found a place in the emerging cultural awareness of China’s 1.3 billion people. With the inevitable waning dominance of older traditional centers of art such as Paris, Berlin, London and New York, we seem on the eve of a great new flourish that will bring to the fro the finest artists from what used to be the “third world.”
With fresh optimism, economic revitalization, and the genius of enormous populations to draw upon, the post colonial black world and the emerging Asian nations may yet establish a 21st century cultural world order that escapes the arrogance of the West and the ideological strait jacket that so long constricted aspects of Soviet era thinking about the arts. I think that the Chinese have a big role to play in such a future. In any case, we all need to think boldly about that the opportunities in art production, criticism and history as well as the realignments within the international community brought to us by the century that we have just entered.
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