Unconfirmed Prospect
HangZhou
19 Aug. 2023 - 17 Sep. 2023
Unconfirmed Prospect
Curator: Mei Cuo、Liu Chengzhen
The exhibition will focus on the curator's long-standing concern with the "ink and wash" theme.
To this day, "ink and wash" is no longer primarily understood as a symbol of epochal changes, and the debates surrounding its historical legitimacy and its involvement in discussions on modernity have long faded. The intrinsic Daoist tradition and the writing and depiction that transcend ritual and propriety, which have existed since ancient times, often appear merely as an "ideal type." Within limited boundaries, randomness, formlessness, and uncertainty prevail. As a result, the search for "ink and wash" is considered a security measure for lost visions, seen as a faultless cultivation and choice.
When it is described or even stylized as a form or type, it reveals its normative nature of being observed and governed. The "ink and wash" that remains unfulfilled in its historical mission is still endowed with the ability to construct order: everyday use is transformed into academic training, perception is replaced by documents, and "visions" are crafted into "sceneries" - where does its future lead? There seems to exist an envisioned "vision," a vague "blueprint" collectively anticipated. We are entranced by the imagined direction of this "blueprint."
When all external things cannot prove, represent, or realize the ideal inner self, people no longer seek a constant ultimate judgment. Faced with the invasion of reality, one must reclaim reliance on the ultimate source with strong self-confidence and attempt to resist external pressures through self-expression and inner expansion. Thus, the "blueprint" becomes something unconfirmed and still awaited. The viewer of the "blueprint" always strives to gain an experience and grasp of the future, while the planner of the "blueprint" can only shape the desire for the "infinite" into a capture of the "limited."
Hence, the "vision" is transformed into specific questions and further demoted to a performative posture in the practice of artists: history becomes a sacrifice and formation, imagery fades through discourse, the heavens and the earth work through the daily, and the self restarts through trauma. It opens up and explores how subjective feelings transform into objective knowledge, a continuous alternation of restrictions and excitement between external things and the subject.
In this exhibition, "ink and wash" may serve as a transparent medium, a tool for transformation and indexing, or even a concept, artistic conception, and even a mentality. It guides the viewer's attention towards the creator's institutional imagination, unifying into the perception of the self's radiating trajectory towards external subjects. Yao Jiahe's "My Bones, My Home" (2023) approaches the geographical identity produced through county chronicles from the perspective of an editor. Using ink lines, she constructs an imagination of hometown land and places the self in an ideal dwelling within a structured system. " Language Landscape" (2021) uses newspapers as carriers of scenes, combining the ephemerality of actions with the obsolescence of the everyday. The act of printing is frozen in the present moment, and the rearranged images and temporal sequences generate accumulated energy within the discourse. Xu Jiachen's "Community" (2023) captures the "autonomous" state of resettlement houses and the surveillance system of grid-like anti-theft windows, aiming to apply them to the construction of an ideal community. The landscape is divided by infrastructure, and the "limited" nature of each cut fragment reshapes the mode of perception. Dong Yiyou's "Solitude" (2023) disperses the symbolic red thread representing blood ties and connections, as well as the stick representing cooperation, into an inaccessible thorny territory, depicting the anxiety and limitations of ink and wash puppets in social relationships. Contradictions and conflicts sometimes arise precisely from the inevitable connection and cooperation, countering the path of "vision" being constructed and regulated in a standardized manner. Lv Fanhe's "Grand Mansion Series" (2022-23) narrates through the eyes of a tiger witnessing executions and instrumentalized female labels, decoding the underlying causes behind the production of public opinion on historical events. Each fabricated story must endure scrutiny from the corners, driven by intense desire to recount what it believes to be the true circumstances.
"As the traces of kings fade, so does poetry; when poetry dies, the annals of spring and autumn are written." Huang Yinye's "Classic of Poetry · Shang Songs (Selection)" (2023) retraces the songs, heritage, and rituals of the Song state's ancestor worship, revisiting the primitive song and dance and the state of writing hidden under the cover of rituals, with an almost austere decree. If the ancient times were filled with a pursuit of belief in a natural state, then in the place of Qu Yuan, it embodies the loss of faith and a turn towards the expansion of inner emotions. Huang Ji's "Inquiry of Heaven" (2023) writes with the force of an overwhelming question, responding to reflections on origins, and endows the present, incomprehensible plane with an attitude. "Non-action and formlessness, can be passed down but not received, can be acquired but not seen, originating from self and root, before heaven and earth, exist since antiquity." Lou Senhua's "Tiantai Hidden Valley Diagram" (2023) and "Yandang Distant Clouds Diagram" (2023), faced with the complete set of historical languages encompassed by landscapes, attempt to comprehend the profundity and vastness carried by the "infinite" in the symbolic order of landscape as heaven and earth, as well as the enduring ideal relationship between self and world. Arriving at the final destination of the exhibition, Chen Chuer's video "Syndrome of the Night" (2023) shifts the source of trauma from the human realm to the realm of nature, where the landscape, unchanging under the gaze, bears witness to the enduring resilience and gentleness from beginning to end. People find healing in comprehending the object as the subject's self-generation and understand the itching that accompanies the initial healing of scars in the final chapter. At this point, self-narration and the imagined "blueprint" gain a positive external direction. Mao Zehao will create on-site works based on the narrative and exhibition venue, transforming and deviating from the established meaning of the exhibition, which also echoes the instability of the unconfirmed prospect.
In today's context, employing "ink and wash" as a method connects one dimension of thought sensitivity with the organization of the everyday and behavior on the other - not only to prevent history and memory from becoming mere fields of replication and nostalgia, but also to prevent landscapes from remaining wild and untamed. "Ink and wash" can only free itself from the excessive burden of value, eliminate the guidance of the "revelation" type, and change the situation where the path of ideal forms is continuously monopolized or delegated. Doubt, trauma, and the burden of memory can also be transformed into a decisive critical point in their encounter, where the ideal has not yet been achieved, but perhaps has already gained fulfillment and liberation in unverified visions.
As Samuel Beckett once wrote, "You must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
Acknowledgement：Liu Tian
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