高岭
2009年9月15-16日
陈蔚的绘画给人最初的印象非常深刻，因为作为一个八零年代出生的年轻人，她所使用的油画表现方式在色彩上沉郁内敛，在技法上疏松畅快，在题材上不拘一格，与这些年深受日韩动漫和卡通风潮影响又被国内一些批评家所鼓噪的艳丽化、平涂化和幼稚化的创作风气截然不同。油画以丰富的色彩表现见长，特别是当下五光十色、光怪陆离的商业化现实生存环境景观，更带给近年来许多年轻艺术家色彩表现上强烈的心理影响，于是明度高、纯度大的原色成为他（她）们的最爱，似乎这样的色彩表现最能够接近和突出现实世界的媚惑。而陈蔚笔下流露出的色彩却总是以灰褐色调为主，即便是表现古树新枝和石榴花果，也难见翠嫩与鲜红，更多的是调和出的墨绿和黑红。这种色彩上的沉郁和保守，似乎在有意识地回避现实世界鲜亮和夸张的色彩招徕。这位年轻的女性，为何把周围世界的表面光芒表现得这般灰暗？这种困惑从她疏松涂抹的笔法得到了一种解释。陈蔚喜欢用稀薄的颜料在各种绘画基底上涂划，说她是涂划而不是涂画，是因为她的用笔方式不是由浅入深地一层层、一遍遍通过敷色来营造明暗块面关系和形体结构，而是类似书写那样追求笔势本身的造型能力。于是，画面中的形象，摆脱了学院油画训练中那种严整、规范和庄严的几大面和几种明暗调子，变得成为身体的延伸，成为身体动作的书写。这是一种拒绝观念介入的自动绘画或者准确地说自动书写，现实世界的物体景观的块面和明暗光泽因为这种时而畅快，时而纠结，时而迟疑，变得不再光鲜和严整，一种打磨、过滤和风干的伤蚀，笼罩在她涂划出的形象上。这正像中国传统书画的用笔飞白，于似断非断，欲断还连中，保持着书写者的精神意念，早已超越了现实事物原型的物理真实与否。
陈蔚最为喜爱的画家是杜马斯，我想原因在于后者用直抒胸臆的简练笔划和幽暗沉郁的色调，勾画出了人物对象的内心忧郁和神经质。而当我们仔细阅读和品味陈蔚的艺术笔记和随感文字时，我们能够发现，在她近乎才情四溢的字里行间，其实表述的不是那些植物们、动物们的现实形态，而是它们在经年更事的时间流逝过程中的所呈现出来的“剥落”与“荒废”。在《樊笼之味》一文中，她写下了这样的字句：“我是以视觉来触碰世界的，而过分的视觉也把另一个‘我’淹没了。打捞出另一个‘自己’，便仍可以继续用单纯的态度坦然面对人生。”所谓“过分的视觉”应该是指画面形象再现现实形象时的准确性、样式性和风格化，这正是她有意回避或者说放弃的。如果不是通过视觉形象来真实地再现和还原现实世界的景物，那么绘画的意义究竟在哪里呢？绘画的意义在于通过视觉“打捞出另一个‘自己’”，这个自己是一个能够透过人生的岁月感受时间痕迹的知性体，它能够仰观星云替转，俯察些微凡物，能够深入到事物的生命脉动之中，和它们同生同死。正因为如此，陈蔚会格外推崇杜马斯这样的画出人物内心巨大变化和岁月沧桑的艺术家，也正因为如此，她会在自己的油画创作中另辟蹊径，从中国传统文化的谴词造境和书写形意中，寻求字面与画面形象之外的另一种真实，哪怕这种真实展现的是侵蚀、剥落和残败，而生命原本就是脆弱和短暂的。
生命的无常和短暂，就陈蔚的视觉表现而言，不仅体现在植物们和动物们的飘摇凋零和毛发丛生，而且体现在它们的残枝短叶和伤残截肢。构图的大胆截取似乎还保存着传统花鸟画小中见大的画意，可突兀的截肢和干尸，则宣告了艺术家题材为我所用的本意——生命的脆弱和短暂不仅缘自生命本身，而且还缘自生命之外的其它力量和意图。这恰恰表明，陈蔚的艺术创作并非全然是画室里的自我解剖，并非全然不食时代烟火，倒是她宁愿将自己感受到各种外界压力转换成眼前的这些花草和动物，她要用自己的视觉形式，去触碰周围的世界，而这些树木花草和飞禽走兽，正是她触碰外界的媒介。
她像一个炼金术师那样，通过独到的色彩、用笔和构图，对这些与个人的成长记忆和内心想象有关的对象展开追问，更将这种追问从平面的画布画纸，推进到拼贴、装置和实物雕塑。她的新近作品《鹤与蛇》，则直接选用了大量的白色皮纸。纸的丰富肌理和撕、拉、揉、扯的高塑性，同样可以传递出生命的内在感觉，它“层层迭迭，细密交织，好似流逝中人剥落的记忆”（陈蔚《纸》）。对陈蔚艺术重内心生命体验而轻表面真实逼真的判断，在她最新的综合材料绘画《出口与尽头》中，得到了又一次的证明。这一次，她从可辨形体的外界自然世界抽身而出，进入到一个完全属于微观心理的世界里。这里的一切不再具有物理世界的等级分类和社会属性，不再传递出植物或动物的生命体征，也不再充满着可见世界各种事物的横向比较和此长彼消的争斗与伤害，却形成了纵向穿越层层包裹的幽暗材料的羁绊，向深处寻找微观世界精神出口的冲动和压抑之间的一种较量。这时，画面上各种材料所形成的视觉形式，不再是用来体现某个具体的生命类型的脆弱和短暂，而是象征着所有生命形态的内在共同的压力与冲突——生命本身如果想持久甚至永恒，那么它的出口在哪里？
用视觉去触碰世界，年轻的女艺术家陈蔚，用她自己独特的方式，从具体的景物出发，开始进入到景物的深处和背后，发出了自己的提问，在今天快餐化和卡通化的艺术界，的确是难能可贵的。
Touching the World with Vision——On Chen Wei’s Art
Gao Ling
September 15 – 16, 2009
Chen Wei ’s paintings give a very deep first impression because, as a young person born in the 80s, she employs a method of oil painting that is subdued and reserved in color, light and easy in technique, and unrestricted in subject matter, which is a far cry from the glamorized, flat-colored and childish creative trend influenced by Japanese and Korean animations and much bolstered by local critics in recent years. Oil paintings are appreciated for their richness in colors. The vibrant and bizarre contemporary society with its commercialized landscape further strongly influences young artists’ use of colors. Primary colors with their brightness and purity become favored hues as they are most illustrative of the bewitchments of the real world. However Chen Wei’s colors always appear to be on a gray scale. Crisp green for fresh tree branches and bright red for pomegranates are replaced with dark green and red hues. This subdued and conservative choice seems to consciously avoid the vibrancy and colorfulness of the world.
Why does this young woman portray the world in such somber manner? We find an explanation in her loosely applied brushstrokes. Chen Wei likes to apply a thin coat of paint on the base of any painting. That is, she does not aim to create light/dark areas and structures by repeatedly applying layers of paint, but rather seeks the sculptural quality of the brushstroke as if she was writing. Therefore the image in the painting is free from the disciplined and standard norm of academic training, and becomes an extension of the human body, and the output of the body movement.
This is a type of automatic painting, or more precisely automatic writing, that defies the involvement of a specific concept. Because of the sometimes delightful, sometimes entangled, and sometimes hesitant quality of this method, the appearance and brightness of real objects are no longer vibrant and neat. A damaging process of burnishing, filtering and air-drying hovers above the image she creates. It is much like the feibai technique (blank/dry spaces within each brushstroke) in traditional Chinese painting, which maintains the consciousness of the painter despite its seemingly broken yet connected appearance, transcending the physical reality of the object.
Chen Wei’s favorite artist is Marlene Dumas. I think it’s because the latter illustrates the sadness and neuroticism of her characters with simple, telling brushstrokes and a gloomy, subdued palette. And when we read Chen Wei’s writings on her art, her brilliant words do not convey the realistic shapes of plants and animals, but their “flaking off” and “idling” as a result of time passing. In “Dancing in the Castle,” she wrote, “I touch the world with vision, and the over-laden vision drowns me. If I fish out another ‘me,’ then I can go on facing life openly, with simplicity.” This so-called “over-laden vision” supposedly refers to the accuracy, form and stylization required for portraying a real object, which is something she purposely avoids or perhaps abandons. What is the meaning of painting if it is not to truthfully reconstruct and restore something in the real world? The purpose of painting is to “fish out another ‘self’” through visual image, a conscious being which can feel the traces of time through living, one that observes things great and small to deeply embody itself in their inner workings, and to live and die with them. And so Chen Wei particularly praises artists like Dumas who can paint characters of such emotions and hardships marked by time. It is also because of this that she creates a path in her oil paintings, and seeks another type of truth from the rhetoric and visual image of traditional Chinese culture, regardless of whether this truth depicts corrosion and destruction, as life in essence is fragile and transient.
In Chen Wei’s visual representation, the impermanence and transience of life is not only seen in the withering of plants and the lush growth of hair in animals, but also in their broken branches and amputated limbs. The daring composition seems to preserve the quality of “seeing something great in small things” in traditional paintings of flowers and birds, and the abrupt amputation and dried corpse serve to inform of the artist’s choice of subject matter—that the fragility and transience of life does not result from life itself, but also from other forces and intensions outside of life. It precisely demonstrates that Chen Wei’s art is not entirely a self-analysis in the studio nor is it entirely transcendent of the real world. Rather it is her inclination to transform the external pressures she feels into the plants and animals she portrays, through which she touches the surrounding world with her own chosen visual method.
Like an alchemist, she begins a query on objects from her life memories and her own imagination, and further takes this query from canvas and paper to collages, installations and sculptures, through unique use of color, pen, and composition. For her recent piece “Crane and Snake,” she employs large amount of white paper. The rich texture of the paper and its malleability for tearing, pulling, and kneading similarly convey the inner feelings of life, which is “layered and interwoven, just like fading memories” (Chen Wei, Paper). That Chen Wei places emphasis on life experience rather than accurate depiction is again manifested in her newest multi-media painting “Exit and Extremity.” This time she extracts herself from a world of nature and identifiable objects, and enters into one that is entirely of microcosmic psyche. Everything here no longer carries a classification or social attribute of the physical world, or conveys vital signs of plants or animals, nor is it filled with horizontal comparisons and the wax and wane of struggles among things in the visible world. It does, however, form a vertical force that passes through the layered bondage of dark materials and seeks an emotional exit out of the microcosmic world. At this time, all the visual forms created by various media on the image are no longer meant to portray the fragility and transience of a certain physical life form, but to symbolize the internal pressure and conflict shared by all life forms--if life itself wishes to endure or even stays permanent, then where is its exit?
Touching the world with vision, young artist Chen Wei begins with real objects and reaches into and beyond them to raise her own questions, in her own unique way, making her a true rarity to treasure in today’s “fast food” and cartoonized world of art.