Reality as Prop

　　In 1987, Chen Wenji painted A Red Rope. The background to this painting is a field of deep red, almost entirely lacking the feeling of space; in the foreground a chair has been entirely obscured by a yellow cloth. An orange-red rope hangs from the space above onto a cloth replete with folds, curling on the seat of the chair, and continues to hang down to the floor. The end of the rope is similar to its beginning, and extends to a place off the canvas. The theatrical atmosphere draws us in, and it is unapparent if it is expressing a state of existence, or telling a story. From 1986 to 1987, Chen Wenji produced many similar compositions with similar treatment of color: bright wrinkly yellow linens, chairs, backpacks and other everyday objects, appear directly before the viewer against monochromatic backgrounds. In the space between the ordinary nature of the objects and the solemn way of presenting them, a peculiar contrast takes shape.

　　Thus, Chen Wenji left for Spain in the beginning of 1990. Among the works he produced after he returned home, The Red Scarf (1992) won a silver medal at the annual China National Oil Painting exhibition. The images in this painting, compared to his works before he studied abroad, reveal some obvious differences. First of all, the spatial relativity on the entire canvas is much more realistic than his works from the 1980s. The monochromatic and flat backgrounds have disappeared, and have been replaced by mottled walls and a floor entirely covered in cloth. The delicate relationship of light and shadow, the stains and erosion on the wall, the undulating folds of the cloth on the ground––they all indicate the concrete existence of a place, and are no longer just an imagined space. In addition, the objects here have all become more specific, personalized and expressive. An item of clothing has been twisted and piled in the center of a chair, it's so dirty that we can't even discern its original color. The artist uses meticulous brush strokes and fine color changes to paint out a corner of his own small world. The red scarf hanging on the back of the chair is rendered in a similar style: light reflects in its crinkled folds and it melts into the grey tones of the work. The most interesting thing here is the insufferably old chair itself. In a slightly tilted position facing the viewer, it reveals the generous portion of its side, and hints at shades of photorealism. In places, the brown rattan has been worn away to reveal a white bamboo frame; on the side where the scarf hangs, a large portion of the rattan has come loose, allowing for a tiny sliver of light which illuminates the scarf and then comes to rest on the rattan––the loosed weave, bright and then dark, makes the scarf appear all the more mysterious, as if it conceals the most crucial part of the chair. Finally, different images within the tableau establish a stronger narrative relationship, it is a meticulously placed theatrical scene. The white cloth placed on the floor gives it the effect of a traversing a ravine, all the objects in the scene are contrasted with the tired and old, but it seems that they have yet to begin letting their plot unfold.

　　According to Chen Wenji, the primary reasons for this transition are: firstly, he encountered master works while in Europe, his understanding of an oil painting vocabulary was deepened, and he also desired to paint more "authentically"; secondly, with regard to his artistic concepts, he began to consciously avoid the issue of direct involvement with society, even attempting to surpass the restraints of society, and search for a more humanized self.

　　The tradition of oil painting in Spain has distinctive characteristics of southern Europe and other regions, and the collections here are filled with master works over various centuries and regions. It's not difficult to imagine the numerous and moving art works that Chen Wenji encountered at the Prado or the Thyssen Museum, he has even noted the influence of realist artist Antonio López García (b.1936) on his works. In Chen's opinion, the works of this artist achieve a "fine, autistic, and melancholic attitude," that he consciously absorbed into his work. Garcia's 1967 painting The Poetry of the Mundane in Sink and Mirror uses extremely strict attention to detail. The work, from top to bottom, is a scene from a common tiled bathroom, a transparent glass shelf and a sink, these are all in the direct line of the audience, and its composition lends it a solemnity. However, the faint yellowing on the old porcelain, and the messy assortment of bath products on the shelf, lead us once again into believing that this is an ordinary, non-individualistic space, but we can also feel the unique sense of being in a personal space. Like Chen Wenji's paintings, Garcia has also chosen common household objects as its subject, but Garcia presents a more complete scene from life, rather than a thought-out assortment of painterly objects in the studio. Garcia more honestly, more frankly presents the troublesome details of everyday life, while Chen Wenji cautiously places the objects in still life scenes that could either be real, or imagined. In the paintings of Garcia, the sink, the mirror and the bath products represent the objects themselves, but in Chen Wenji's work, the scarf, the rattan chair and the wrinkled clothes become props that seem to be direct representations, but are not.

　　Similar to Red Rope, the painting The Red Scarf still inspires us to ask: are they telling a story, or expressing a state of existence? If we say they are telling a story, they are inclined to be expounding on a life experience of human consciousness, and if they are expressing a certain state, then they seem more likely to be entering into social or generational issues. Despite his extreme search for meticulous effects in his paintings, which endows the images of objects in his paintings with extremely individualized detail, Chen Wenji has never been "loyal to reality" or made the pursuit of reality his goal. Perhaps he has no particular story that he wants to tell, but is choosing an epic tale from among the multitude of stories available, expressing even more abstract sentiments, atmosphere and states. Even though Chen Wenji claims that he doesn't want to participate in society, his creations are far from being outside of the specific era or beyond our atmosphere of unspoken culture.

　　Even though from 1960 to 1970, no small number of European and American artists experimented with different styles of realism, overwhelmingly opting for everyday subject matter on their canvases, artists in Madrid generally ran counter to this world current; the lives and creative environments of that generation of artists in Madrid share something in common with Chinese artists at the beginning of reform and opening. Garcia underwent the process of making contact with the avant-garde, and then returned again to the artistic traditions of his own native land. Between 1950-55, he spent some time studying in San Francisco, after returning home, and until about 1964, he experimented with representational methods that had surrealist flavor, these were later called "magical realism." In addition, he traveled to Italy in 1955 to research works from the Renaissance, and came to a new understanding of the Spanish masters in the Prado, Velasco, for example, who was always an important reference for him, especially in how he represented real objects. Under the weight of the avant-garde's clash with native artistic traditions, Garcia forged the most unostentatious road to establishing his own experience of existence. He peacefully painted the most ordinary objects and encouraged viewers to re-inspect their most real form of existence. On this point, Chen Wenji's stylistic and technical transition shares some similarities with Garcia. In the 1980s, Chen was subject to various different Western modernist influences, and after studying in Europe up until the end of the 1990s, he began to consciously explore the tradition of ancient Chinese literati painting. The difference is, Chen did not choose the path to "exploring life," instead he used props in his composition, inviting the viewer to experience––even to guess––about the truth hiding behind these very tangible objects.

　　Inspiration from Classical and Modern Still Life Painting

　　Folding Bed (1993) depicts another kind of "private space": glinting shards of light brush past dirty walls, a folded iron wire bed and a pile of cloth in the foreground. These things have especially obvious characteristics of their era, and we can't help but think strange incredible thoughts when we behold this scene. A pile of soiled shoes are just about the same grayish color as the background, but suddenly a pair of red shoes appears, they provide a kind of color contrast similar to that in The Red Scarf. The triangular composition of the overall work approaches so much that of European classical formats, and a breath of academicized rationality controls the fierce generational clash lying under the tranquil surface to such an extent that we even begin to think of that brand of romantic atmosphere as found in Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa. Chen Wenji's treatment of light begins with Garcia's almost self-torturous technique of delineation, and attempts to endlessly trace back and renew the individual experience. He believes that the techniques of European oils have arrived at a "level where humans are sensitive, and fine, they are the wizened result of humanity itself." This is not only a cry in admiration for the consummate wonder and expressive results of technique itself, it is also an understanding of oil techniques as transmitting the demands for general human consciousness and an understanding of existence.

　　Since the establishment of the academic tradition in the 17th Century, there has always been still life painting. The methods of placing objects in one's studio or within a special space have likewise formulated its own traditions. These methods of carefully arranging different objects by size, distance and various hues, at side or forward facing angles, etc., were adopted in the Chinese academic world along with the entire art academic system. The education Chen Wenji received during his early years at the academy formed the essential rules of constructing still life. These foundational standards of striving for contrasting light and shadows and the relationship between colors endows the painting with tones of elegance and restraint. The Red Scarf still strictly follows the diagonal composition popular since the Baroque period, the chair's slightly tilted angle, the proportions with which the scarf splits the chair, and the size relationship of the red scarf to the entirely grey background, all of these reveal the refinement of and tastes of the academy. It is using precisely this point that Chen's paintings allow us to experience the cool-headed nature of rational thinking.

　　However, this series of paintings also inspires us to emotional experience. The clothes and metal-framed bed that appear in Folding Bed are common objects to the everyday experience of Chinese people. Even though the artist might not have intentionally thought out his choice of these props, in reality, their images in the painting have a certain significance that has just recently begun to emerge from poverty and the contrasts and confrontation between spiritual pursuits and an urgent need to discover self-worth. Chen Wenji wants to minimalize the social significance of objects in his paintings, allowing them to exist naturally, and not adding any sort of value statement or personal embellishment. It should be said, that through his nearly classical treatment of the canvas, he has achieved this goal to a significant degree. But from the viewer's perspective, the social information inherent to the viewer hasn't been deliberately withheld by the artist, all of the knowledgeable audiences in China of the early 1990s must surely have been able to read the thread of anxiety shared by that generation. In The Red Scarf, the relationship between the ordinary red scarf and the rattan chair isn't quite the natural state in which household objects exist, but seems a bit haphazard. The same ambiguous relationship also appears between the neon lamp tube and the newspaper in Fluorescent Lamp (1993)––these objects have a definite socio-political nuance, obscured by the common everyday nature of the objects, though they haven't concealed everything.

　　The German artist Gerhard Richter also has a series of interior still life paintings, most of which use photography as their original image. His trademark grey hues are actually the result of the repeated purification and simplification of the relationship between shadows and light. In Richter's 1965 oil painting Kitchen Chair, an ordinary kitchen table with no special characteristics is placed inside a room at an angle similar to the rattan chair in The Red Scarf; the background also is a one-third relationship of floor to wall. This composition is taken directly from the photograph, but the photo has already borrowed the visual tradition of still life painting, thus, these similarities can still be placed within the history of composition in western oil painting to be understood. In another respect, both of these paintings take the "chair" as subject, which in fact shares an incredibly interesting relationship with transitioning western art philosophy.

　　Plato used the bed as an example to explain the three-layered imitation concept of art, he believed that painting is but the shadow of the shadow of absolute truth. Richter's Kitchen Chair is not a material object directly replicating the shadow of absolute truth, but is replicating the projection of an material object onto a film negative. In that sense, he expands the relationship of truth to painting to a fourth layer, and according to Plato's theory, his painting becomes even further from reality. However, in the latter half of the 20th Century, the European artist's faith is no longer the artistic imitation of the truth, but the truth of art itself, and absolute truths no longer exist0. When Richter used flatly applied grey brush strokes to render the blurry profile of everyday household objects, he said that a virtual focus wouldn't cause us to see less. The truth of life exists here. All the information on reality that an ordinary kitchen chair can provide, is that when we behold the chair, the beholder will use his or her own experience to fill in the blanks. The rattan chair in Chen Wenji's painting has provided for us the image of a chair with realistic detail. Although neither his, nor Richter's kitchen chair can narrate a story, it uses an opposite method to provide an image that can be freely enhanced by the viewer. Each damaged portion implies countless stories, but these possibilities are similarly limited to a given historical period; in the end, only during this period as a whole can we look at it as a sole existing truth, and the chaos of the fact (the potential story plot) isn't as important as the imagined version. The image itself cannot speak, but it can influence the results of how the audience will look at and receive it.

　　Chen Wenji's dedicated rendering of the countless folds in the clothing, to a certain degree, adheres to the mantle of European academic oil techniques. Actually, the Chinese art academic system touches very little on this, and it should be understood as a product of Chen Wenji's studies in Europe and his personal explorations on canvas. Chen's Spanish experience allowed him the opportunity to hone his personal skills, actually; aside from the monochromatic flat style of A Red Rope, this is indeed his original character. But he has also revealed that, because of his frail health, he suffered psychological torment, and he truly did not have energy enough to continue with this extremely delicate work, so this style was never further developed. Looking back today, this is Chen Wenji's most important stage during his search for a personal style, and reflects a lack of self-confidence in Chinese oil painting of that era, despite the fact that he didn't belong to any mainstream style of the time.

　　Specific Content, Abstract Significance

　　During a 1993 interview when Chen Wenji was questioned on the placement of objects in his paintings, he said: "in the process of arranging [a still life] you must constantly use reality as a reference, this is entirely different from my previous abstract mode of thinking, reality seems to draw support from the content in concrete images, but together they compose an abstract meaning." In actuality, if we look exclusively at his paintings, his search for abstract meaning had already begun in the 1980s. A Red Rope is one example: even though each object in the tableau is concrete and specific, none have obvious symbolic or indicative significance, and their placement together also does not imply any actual or carefully arranged significance.

　　If we take this specific content, consider it as having abstract significance, and put it within a larger art historical context for consideration, we will discover the important surrealist Rene Magritte also used a similar mode of thought to compose his paintings. In his 1951 painting Personal Values, several personal grooming articles and furniture, as well as a wine glass, are arranged in strange positions and placed in a space that is simultaneously indoors and out. Their disorderly proportional relationship enhances the indeterminate nature of the painting's significance. Despite the fact that each object has been painted utmost realistically, they lead us to doubt if they really are the objects they are meant to represent, although the overall significance of the canvas is extremely abstract. We cannot achieve an interpretation of the canvas' significance through merely distinguishing these objects. Comparatively, Chen Wenji's The Red Scarf does not use this emphatic method to assault the viewer's imagination, instead it seems to use the most gentle possible method, to most objectively manifest a space that actually exists in reality. But, because this space is entirely man-made, some part of it will reflect unnatural, unrealistic elements, thereby constructing an image that cannot be patch worked together to form an integral significance. What is different is that Magritte's works still possess literary titles with abstract significance, such as Personal Values, indicating that at least the objects of personal grooming, furniture and wine glass appear in this composition in that they have the quality of possessing "personal value." However, the titles of Chen Wenji's works are essentially the same thing as we see on the canvas, and have not alerted us to whatever kind of significance we ought to place special emphasis upon or consider, which leaves a large space in which to interpret his works. However, this space is not capable of being endlessly expanded, because the images of the objects are concrete, and because they must exist within the scope of expression, an even more abstract significance can not exist outside of this scope.

　　Subjectively speaking, Chen Wenji hopes to dilute the specific meaning inherent in each specific object, and allow them to exist naturally on the canvas. However, in truth, because of the intervention necessary in his placement of the objects, his selection of these particular objects must not be neglected, even if it was only for their color, volume or shape or whatever other factor they were chosen for, they will influence the abstract meaning of the canvas. In The Red Scarf, the wrinkled folds of the large white canvas on the floor echoed in the mottled walls can be understood as purely a comprehensive view of the canvas, and we can also use an abstract means to experience their complex state. Chen Wenji has not explained exactly how abstract is his "abstract significance", but judging from the extremely detailed, controlled state of the canvas, he surely cares about using the canvas to express a psychological state. As for the repeated experience and expression of this psychological state, most of them come from the artistic tradition of the Chinese literati. On this point, his works from the late 1990s until today give a more full embodiment to this phenomenon; in this period, he hadn't consciously begun to make use of this association. However, in works such as Fluorescent Light, we can already begin to see his interest growing in the use of light as a fixed source. From light we earn a sense of time and space, as it becomes the perfect vehicle for carrying the notion of space. Later he uses this carrier, and from different aspects repeatedly conveys his interest and contemplation of various states of life.

　　Concluding remarks: Escaping into Life

　　The Jewish artist Avigdor Arikha was born in the Ukraine, in 1984 he created the realist oil painting Red and Blue, one of his important representative painting in post-war Europe. In the painting, from top to bottom there is an open red paper box, a brush, an open eyeglasses case and glasses and an envelope. At first glance, they look like items someone has just casually placed, but closer examination reveals that this painting is similar to Chen Wenji's "everyday" themes––they are all chosen via the artist's desire, and placed within a "scene." For example, in this painting, Arikha's objects are obviously placed with order, and every object is expressing itself to the audience in a special way. Intrestingly, in Chen Wenji's work Slippers, An Envelope, a similar envelope is depicted––similar to that of Arikha's, his envelope has blue and red stripes on the edges, and is an envelope that has been used before with traces of having been opened; but dissimilar to Arikha, whose envelope has vague marks of an address, which lead us to believe that it possibly contained a letter, while Chen Wenji's envelope is completely blank. It's as if he has intentionally erased the independent characteristics of the envelope, and as if he is emphasizing its ordinary nature. However, these two artists are creating extremely realistic scenes, each with specific difference from the tableau from any given moment in life. This is not like Magritte's extreme exaggeration of surreal everyday life, and the dream-like method of rendering different objects' proportions and their relation to space; it is also different from Richter's faithful snapshot of daily life and the simplified and blurred details of his compositions. Perhaps in this kind of painting disassociating between objective reality and subjective composition exists a contradictory "posed photo shoot" of form and content.

　　Why have Arikha and Chen Wenji both consciously created this kind of intentionally distant, but authentically emotionally moving canvas? Perhaps this is related to their personal experience and artistic backgrounds. In 1941, Arikha and his family were incarcerated in a Romanian concentration camp; his father died there. He personally relied on painting his environment, and was finally freed in 1944. Shortly after he entered the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design to study art. In 1948 he was injured in the Arab-Israeli war, a year later he was sent to the Paris Ecole des Beaux arts to study. It was not until 1954 when he was living in Paris, did his life begin to calm down. In April of 2010 he passed away there.

　　In the 1950s, Arikha once threw himself into the trend of abstract painting, and for eight years beginning in 1965 he abandoned the road to abstraction for a return to realism, using the most simplistic compositions to deal with themes from everyday life, primarily doing drawings and prints. Similar to Chen Wenji's experience at the academy, and in this stage of using sketches and prints to create realistic forms, each one established their own unique language for representation. In 1973, Arikha felt he must return to painting. Soon after he was praised by the Economist magazine as "perhaps among the best realistic painters of the latter half of the 20th Century." He focused on sketching real objects within naturally lit environments, but he never painted images from photographs or from his own memories. On a technical level, Arikha's Red and Blue is evidently of the European academic tradition, and this is similar to Chen Wenji's work in the academy--a classical technique learned from Spanish masters. There is a certain time gap that exists between learning the tradition of realist painting and the avant-garde of the contemporary art world, this is a common point for Arikha and Chen Wenji; and there is similarity in the suffering that Arikha sustained over the second world war and Arab-Israeli War, with the mental suffering and poverty Chen Wenji endured growing up during the Cultural Revolution. Interestingly, in Chen Wenji's works from the early 1990s he limited his painting subject to the realistic life unfolding before him, and not images from memories or fantasy.

　　The art critic Marco Livingstone believes that Arikha "links the purely abstract modern avant-garde with what can be traced to the renaissance or even earlier painting traditions." He belongs not to any school of "returning to reality," but is a "representative post-abstraction artist." It is true that his development takes off with western modern art, and earns him a positive appraisal, but leaping out of western-centric views, he truly is among the most important persons in the late 20th Century to fashion a new interpretation of realist painting in Europe. If we were to confine ourselves to the same period in the Chinese contemporary art environment, Chen Wenji is a rare artist who proactively links classical European oil traditions with contemporary Chinese pursuits. He uses his own painting skills to conceal the era's abstract expressions within a "posed life photograph." This truly isn't a kind of speech, but as John Cage has said, this is a state of both positive and negative, containing inherent contradictions, "I have nothing to say, but I'm telling." An escape into the trivial nature of life is an attempt to discover the most authentic peace and calm.

　　As Garcia's artwork of the 1990s is much more laconic than his oil paintings featuring the same themes from 20 years prior, such as his 1991 painting New Refrigerator, he is no longer caught up in the depiction of details, but spends more time on the relationship of light and shadow. It seems this also reflects an attitude of calm, and his direct confrontation of reality. During that same period Chen Wenji believed: "When comparing complicated social environments, the artist must still respect his personal feelings, and his or her unhindered development." Perhaps this is the real "abstract significance" in the series of paintings such as The Red Scarf. Furthermore, the connotations of this kind of hermit living in the city have achieved full development in his recent works.

　　Translation by Lee Ambrozy　

A Red Rope 1987

The Red Scarf 170X140cm 1992-2

Antonio López García, The poetry of the mundane in Sink and Mirror, 1967. Blake/Purnell Collection, MFA.

Folding Bed 140 cm x 160 cm 1993

Gerhard Richter, Kitchen Chair, 1965, 100 cm X 80 cm, Oil on canvas

Rene Magritte, Personal Values, 1951-52, oil on canvas, private collection

Avigdor Arikha: Slippers and undershirt, 81 x 65, 1979

Antonio López García, New Refrigerator, 1991-94. Collection of the artist.