罗颖：叠山纪
艺术家出席酒会：2018年7月12日（周四）下午6至8时
展期：2018年7月12日 至8月25日
汉雅轩：香港 中环 毕打街十二号 毕打行四零一室

　　世界如果忽然停下来，大概就是罗颖画里的样子。但她的世界又在哪里呢?山外，湖心，寺院，或许就在围墙下，松竹间，抑或在两宋——从古画里借来的山水，还有明清园林——层层叠叠的太湖石，不知所起不见所终的曲径，然而没有人——他们都离席了。古代也好，现代也罢，现在，世界是一个人的。

　　一个人的世界并不一定孤单、暗淡，反而可能近于无限透明，或竟是喜悦的，纯真的，甚至是阔大的。如果在园林中，一个人的喜悦是树丛中忽然望见的亭台，是不想走出去的迷石阵，是太湖石下忽隐忽现的小路，是池水里的碧云天。有时喜悦又在人事之外，属于事物数之不尽的面向，属于初夏雨后的清凉空气，属于峰回路转后映入眼帘的空阔寂寥的云天。

　　山外，墙角，草木间，让我想起年少时逃学的时光，而离枝回旋的鹤，又令人心生天外之想，太湖石景观是乌有的国度，是重复的时间，人们在曲径通幽中心醉神迷。无论在学生时代，还是长大成人，逃遁仍是我们每个人的潜伏冲动。哪怕是暂时离开，暂时和时代脱节，却在一切定义之外，在时间之外，在云外。

　　云中如果有树，有路，有亭台楼阁，大概也是罗颖画中的样子。没有故事，没有过度的悲喜，那是天地初始的清洁明净，古今上下都云淡风清，何似在人间。

　　除了仙鹤，蝴蝶，不知她还会允许什么样的动物进入自己的世界，想必是吉祥的，可亲的，一定是美的，或者是警幻的。云中草长，莺飞，鹤舞，回廊阁楼，像宋代的画境，又像苏绣里杜撰的世界，美，有时又荒芜，像《聊斋》里的场景，然而并不可怕。毕竟是云山云海，毕竟在云游，毕竟是一个人的世界，万物彷彿皆由心生，然而触处皆真，况且有路，有树，有雪一样的白梅花，不是人间，胜似人间。

　　郭熙的山岳造型，宋徽宗的岩石肌理，夏圭拖泥带水的痕迹，明清园林的角落，她是喜欢就拿来，而非概念意义上的后现代挪用。山岳与太湖石混为一体，冰山般冷静的山岩没有温度，置入抒情而优雅的古典植物，而两宋和明清悉皆归化为现代感，亦真亦幻的营造方法来自对时间的感受。时间没有温度，绵绵不绝，是可以折叠的，自动衍生的，时而节外生枝，时而交相辉映。山水，千岩万壑;时间，在折叠中展开;我们在折叠的时间中，走向不同的维度。

　　在这里，追忆是过于伤感的词，故园梦寻不是没有，但并不执着。她无意重建消失的历史，也不执着文明的冲突，引用古代美学，却无意召唤古代，而是为了进入一段亦古亦今的时光，这才是属于自己的世界，并向每一个观者开放。

　　太湖石，无尽的山岳，是可以折叠的时空，是随意变形的魔方，被拿来制造一个独立的世界，虚设在空茫之中，像世界尽头的独乐园。而水天一色，又增添了乐园的幻象感，彷彿那是世外。罗颖杜撰的乐园，过于浩大而寂寞了，那是太初的鸿蒙，所以要有树，有似古似今的房子，似乎可居;有路，似乎可游，可以徘徊。有鸟，似乎可听，可以相伴，可以相舞。

　　画法在这里成了可信度的考量。工笔，还是写意，或者兼工带写，都是为了再现一个从未存在，然而却又可信的古代，或者，延绵在被架空的时代之中的折叠的山水。她的谱系，从两宋山水渡入当代水墨，向外则从印象派、纳比派延伸到新艺术，倘若非要说民族的就是世界的，那么我要加上一句：西方的就是今天的。罗颖生在今天，而与古代、与西方，都无隔膜，她在宋画情景里置入西方语汇，在士人心象中透进现代观念，因而亦古亦今。

　　水墨的幽远与淡雅的着色，还有大青绿的美好装饰，奇异地混合在一起，而我们所谓理想世界，古人所谓仙境，大抵如此。虽然融合西洋的技术，依旧是水墨之味，她在温润绢素上，用古典的方式虚设一人独享的时光，一个可以流连忘返的时空。

　　二零一八年，春末，盛夏

A Tale of Layered Mountains:Interpreting Luo Ying’s Shanshui Painting

Wei Xi

　　If the spinning world were to come to a sudden stop, the effect might be similar to the world in Luo Ying’s paintings. But where exactly is her world to be found? Outside of a mountain, in the heart of a lake, inside a temple; or perhaps behind a garden wall, or amidst groves of pine and bamboo. Or it could be found somewhere in Song painting—among their ancient shanshui[ The term shanshui refers to traditional ink landscape painting, and literally means’ mountains and water’—Trans.] forms, from Ming and Qing scholar’s gardens—within the folds and layers of Taihu rocks, or the small winding paths that seem to have no beginning and no end. There is no human figure in this world—everyone seems to have left the scene. This world, at once ancient and modern, belongs to one person alone.

　　An individual’s solitary world does not need to be lonely or dull; to the contrary, it can be unlimited and open, it can be a world of pleasure, of innocence, of expansiveness. Personal pleasure might be found in the sight of a pavilion suddenly glimpsed through the woods, in a charming rockery that invites lingering, in the small pathways that are now hidden, now revealed amidst the Taihu stones, or in the jade-green clouds reflected in the still waters of a pond. Sometimes this pleasure may be found beyond the human realm, in the myriad changing aspects of the ‘ten thousand things’; in the freshness of the air after an early summer rain; or in the way the sky opens up in all its vastness and quiet grandeur at the top of a mountain peak.

　　On the mountain, in the nook of a garden wall, among the trees and meadows—these images bring me back to my childhood and the carefree days when I used to skip school. The sight of a wild crane taking flight from a tree branch and circling back can be a transcendent experience, expanding the heart. The scenes revealed inside of a Taihu rock are like some fantastic kingdom in which time folds back on itself, while the heart is captivated by the mysterious stillness encountered on a winding forest path. Whether during our school days or in our adulthood, all of us have experienced the secret urge to escape and disappear, even if it is only for a momentary departure from our world: we seek a place that exists beyond definitions, beyond time, beyond the clouds.

　　Indeed, if woodlands, paths and pavilions existed in a world inside the clouds, than they would probably resemble those in Luo Ying’s paintings. Hers is a world without stories or history, where there is no excess of tragedy or joy. It is a realm as pure and clear as the dawn of time; and where considerations of ancient or modern, past or present, are as insubstantial as the clouds.

　　Apart from cranes and butterflies, I’m not sure what other kinds of creatures Luo Ying might welcome into her world, but I do believe that they would have to be auspicious and wholesome; they most certainly would have to be beautiful. The grasses flourishing amidst the clouds, the flying orioles, the dancing cranes, the garden pavilions with corridors and chambers—these bring to mind Song dynasty shanshui paintings, or scenes portrayed in Suzhou embroidery: beautiful, and at times wild and uncanny, like scenes from the classic novel Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, but never frightening. After all, this a world where one roams amidst cloudy mountains; it is the personal world of the artist, and all living things here seem to have sprung from her own heart-mind, and through her have become material and real. So here is a road, here is a tree, here a snowy plum blossom, but these are not of the physical human world—they are better and purer than that world.

　　Whether it is the configurations of Guo Xi’s lofty mountains, the texture of Emperor Huizong’s rocks, Xia Gui’s inky mists, or the nooks and corners of Ming and Qing gardens—as long as an element is pleasing to her, Luo Ying will bring it into her paintings; and yet this is not done in the contemporary sense of appropriation. Lofty mountains and Taihu stones are blended into one entity, and into the cold, glacial peaks the artist infuses emotional colour, adding elegant plants and greenery referencing ancient works. In this way she transposes the aesthetic sensibility of the Song, Ming and Qing into a modern tone. Luo Ying’s compositional approach blends the real with the fantastical: it derives from her own sense-perception of time. Time has no climate, it goes on indefinitely, and can be folded in on itself; it self-generates, occasionally producing an offshoot, and in other times it reflects back. Shanshui is a world of myriad cliffs and ravines, and time opens up within its folds and layers. It is from within these folds that we travel forth to other dimensions.

　　Here, the term nostalgia is inappropriate when referring to the past. Certainly one dreams of one’s homeland, but for Luo Ying it is not an inexorable attachment. One could say that on the one hand Luo Ying unconsciously reconstructs a vanished history, and on the other she navigates past civilizational conflicts. While she makes use of classical aesthetics, yet she has no intention of returning back to the classical past. Rather, her purpose is to create a moment which is neither wholly past nor present, ancient nor modern. She is constructing a private world that opens up for us to enter.

　　Taihu rocks are like infinite mountains in which time can be folded and layered; they are as malleable as a Rubik’s cube, whose configuration can be altered at any time; and they can be taken as material to create a unique universe, constructed in a boundless space, like a singular playground at the edge of the world. In Luo Ying’s works, sky and water are of a single hue, enhancing the sense that this is a pleasure garden made of illusions. The gardens she constructs are vast and solitary, they inhabit a primordial space which she populates with trees and dwellings that feel both ancient and modern and invite lingering, just as her roads and pathways invite one to roam at will. There are birds whose songs we seem to hear, whom we could befriend and with whom we might dance.

　　The validation of Luo Ying’s works lies in her ink painting technique: she shows mastery of both gongbi (fine line) and xieyi (free-style) techniques, and brings together both techniques to construct a credible past that certainly never existed before; or perhaps they are past periods suspended in time and folded between indeterminate shanshui spaces. Stylistically speaking, her painting lineage embraces both Song-period shanshui and modern shuimo, even as it extends outward to Impressionism and eventually to contemporary art. If Luo Ying’s art is not defined by national style, but rather transcends those parameters and enters into the larger world, then I must add another observation: that the ‘western’ belongs to the modern. Luo Ying was born in modern times; thus to her both the ancient Chinese past and the modern West are equally accessible. As such, she is able to enter into an engagement with a western painting vocabulary from within a context of Song aesthetics, so that—enabled by a contemporary sensibility—she may infuse traditional literati imagination with a modern spirit, yet not be limited or defined by either.

　　In Luo Ying’s paintings we encounter the quiet, restrained elegance of ink and brush, together with the decorative lushness of greens and blues, all uncannily melded together into what we might think of as an idealized world, and what the ancients called the realm of the Immortals. Yet Luo Ying’s sensibility is clearly that of ink and brush, even as she incorporates western techniques. With a gentle hand and understated elegance, through a classical approach she constructs a solitary moment that is wholly her own, a time and place to linger and, for a moment, to leave all attachments behind.

　　Late spring, mid-summer, 2018

　　(Translation by Valerie C. Doran)

　　Wei Xi is a painter and author. His most recent book is Night-shining White (Zhao yebai), published in 2017.