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Preface

Wang Qin

For the Everyday Images series presented at this exhibition, He Wenjue has persisted with the cinematic painting approach seen in his series Watching Movies, but this time, life is the film, a film with no spatial or temporal limits. He Wenhue has extracted various scenes from real life, producing a powerful blur effect through an intentional scraping technique. The blank spaces, sometimes intentional and sometimes not, the piles of paint along the edges, and the scraped body of the painting, successfully bestow the painting with randomness, power, melancholy and beauty. The artist has depicted various ordinary sights from modern city life such as stages, tourist sites and night-lit streets, and all appear so real and powerful, but when we stand in those same places, we often feel nothing.

These surging fragments of everyday life have washed out the meaning of reality, dissolved the drama of life, and purified our senses. Life seems to have been stripped of its timeless value by the triviality of the everyday, and nihilism has seeped into every pore. The comprehensiveness of Everyday Images as a whole serves to mend this sense of fragmented triviality in everyday life. As for the age-old topic of emptiness, He Wenjue has dragged the viewer back before reality. Perhaps it is just as Michel Foucault said, that everything is but discourse, all of our own making, including nothingness.

 

 


 

Born in the 1970s, He Wenjue lacks the profound memories of political change experienced by artists who lived through the first half of the 20th century. Instead, he was deeply influenced by the changes in lifestyles and values brought by economic revolution. With the reform and opening policy, China passed from agrarian society through industrial society and into postindustrial society in a mere few decades. Against the backdrop of information and globalization, varying artistic concepts such as classical, modern and postmodern have been squeezed together to constitute contemporary art. He Wenjue is living in this era of constant change, and this has made his art complex and dynamic. For instance, He Wenjue’s focus on the selection of subject matter and oil painting language expression through color, composition and texture are the result of the separation of content and form in modern art. His utilization of the reproduction technologies of film and photography are undoubtedly postmodern artistic techniques. But whether it is modernity, postmodernity or contemporaneity, these are but surface traits in He Wenjue’s art. What matters is not what techniques or languages he employs, but the issues in reality upon which his art touches—people prefer to care about the world far away from them, while they are numb to the things and expressions of those around them. Conceptual paralysis and lack of emotion have become the unavoidable reality of contemporary culture.

The arrival of the age of mechanical reproduction gave birth to the Pop art of Andy Warhol, subverted the age-old elitist thinking of art and catalyzed the development of mass culture. With the gradual opening and increasing material wealth, consumer culture, hedonism and base enjoyment have come to permeate every facet of Chinese social life. In the postmodern context, the “aesthetization of everyday life” is bridging the distance between art and life. He Wenjue’s Everyday Images takes on this stance of art approaching secular life to remind us that in the information age, reality and its image have begun to blend together, and that the inundation of everyday culture has become unstoppable.

 


Written in Songzhuang, Tongzhou, on October 21, 2014

 

 

Preface

Wang Qin

For the Everyday Images series presented at this exhibition, He Wenjue has persisted with the cinematic painting approach seen in his series Watching Movies, but this time, life is the film, a film with no spatial or temporal limits. He Wenhue has extracted various scenes from real life, producing a powerful blur effect through an intentional scraping technique. The blank spaces, sometimes intentional and sometimes not, the piles of paint along the edges, and the scraped body of the painting, successfully bestow the painting with randomness, power, melancholy and beauty. The artist has depicted various ordinary sights from modern city life such as stages, tourist sites and night-lit streets, and all appear so real and powerful, but when we stand in those same places, we often feel nothing.

These surging fragments of everyday life have washed out the meaning of reality, dissolved the drama of life, and purified our senses. Life seems to have been stripped of its timeless value by the triviality of the everyday, and nihilism has seeped into every pore. The comprehensiveness of Everyday Images as a whole serves to mend this sense of fragmented triviality in everyday life. As for the age-old topic of emptiness, He Wenjue has dragged the viewer back before reality. Perhaps it is just as Michel Foucault said, that everything is but discourse, all of our own making, including nothingness.

 

 


 

Born in the 1970s, He Wenjue lacks the profound memories of political change experienced by artists who lived through the first half of the 20th century. Instead, he was deeply influenced by the changes in lifestyles and values brought by economic revolution. With the reform and opening policy, China passed from agrarian society through industrial society and into postindustrial society in a mere few decades. Against the backdrop of information and globalization, varying artistic concepts such as classical, modern and postmodern have been squeezed together to constitute contemporary art. He Wenjue is living in this era of constant change, and this has made his art complex and dynamic. For instance, He Wenjue’s focus on the selection of subject matter and oil painting language expression through color, composition and texture are the result of the separation of content and form in modern art. His utilization of the reproduction technologies of film and photography are undoubtedly postmodern artistic techniques. But whether it is modernity, postmodernity or contemporaneity, these are but surface traits in He Wenjue’s art. What matters is not what techniques or languages he employs, but the issues in reality upon which his art touches—people prefer to care about the world far away from them, while they are numb to the things and expressions of those around them. Conceptual paralysis and lack of emotion have become the unavoidable reality of contemporary culture.

The arrival of the age of mechanical reproduction gave birth to the Pop art of Andy Warhol, subverted the age-old elitist thinking of art and catalyzed the development of mass culture. With the gradual opening and increasing material wealth, consumer culture, hedonism and base enjoyment have come to permeate every facet of Chinese social life. In the postmodern context, the “aesthetization of everyday life” is bridging the distance between art and life. He Wenjue’s Everyday Images takes on this stance of art approaching secular life to remind us that in the information age, reality and its image have begun to blend together, and that the inundation of everyday culture has become unstoppable.

 


Written in Songzhuang, Tongzhou, on October 21, 2014