Beate Reifenscheid

"People will come to love their oppression,

to adore the new technologies - that will undo

their capacity of thinking."

(Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932)

　　Deng Guoyuan was already developing his painting method from Chinese ink painting during the early years of the millennium. Even then he was working from a different mode, with another way of thinking. Thematically, his entire oeuvre revolves around an engagement with nature, which he does not interpret against the context of its sublime aspect or its beauty, but rather against a background of its fragility, its fragmentation and a perpetual transformation towards an artificial existence. 

　　Over the last fifteen years and more it has been possible to witness this process up close and to see in it our own reflection on it, ranging between fascination and perturbation. It is a process that always moves within this tense duality, which refracts in a multitude of ways across the works, not unlike the light that offers up its many facets of possibility as a result of passing through a glass prism.

　　For a Western observer, the ink drawings, many of them large in format, retain an impression of traditional Chinese painting, even though it is at this level that Deng has already initiated his process of radical deconstruction. In his brief, staccato-like line drawings there develops a purely abstract image, which, in its rhythm and nuanced tones, graduates from black to light grey. Each on its own is an abstract entity, ultimately without any concrete reference to any identifiable or objectifiable substance. Instead, it is the context of his creation and a vision that is intimately acquainted with the natural that give rise to a unique interpretation of the image, an interpretation that positions it within a field of reference, associates it with grasses in the wind, invites floral memories. But instead of a sweeping, overview landscape, familiar to us as a near-trope in the art of the Renaissance through to that of the Romantic period, the artist here draws the viewer's gaze entirely into the close-up perspective: just a little patch of garden, nature bound. This is not another formulation of the concept of a divine power, an omnipotent influence, nor a feeling of grandeur or of all-encompassing isolation. Even in the ink drawing, Deng rejects the current understanding of art that pertains within the tradition of ink painting, which has passed down over centuries and which, viewed also from a spiritual perspective, in Shan Shui has assuredly attained the formulation of highest, purest unity between human and nature. In Deng's work, by contrast, nature appears tamed, subjugated by humans and thus - despite the beauty of his drawing and affinity for the rhythm of nature - fragmented. Everything that humans perceive of nature remains, ultimately, a segment, just a part of a larger whole. 

　　In the years that followed, Deng dedicated himself to a hugely diverse range of aspects of the natural, but always from the perspective of an increasing artificiality. Whether it is the fragments of nature that he seemingly grows in test tubes or the plants in aviaries, the dried palm fronds in plexiglass boxes or - his principle theme - Noah's Garden in a mirror maze. 

　　Here, Deng is testing new ways of translating the traditional subject of the landscape to a nature that has itself been rejected, that has long been unable to indulge its naturalness and has instead been translated into substitutes. The view over a landscape that sweeps far into the distance (as a sign of the sublime and the grandiose, of elemental forces) is trapped in reflective surfaces, which refract the gaze and reveal spatial depth to be an illusion. Occasionally disoriented, the users (viewers) of the new garden feel their way through it. Here, they encounter plants, marvellous and brightly coloured birds and equally colourfully painted Taihu stones, a unique topos in the literati garden. Noah's Garden appears as a memory of past traditions, of an uninterrupted relationship with nature. Even its title refers to the Old Testament story of Noah's Ark. The story tells of a vast deluge that covered the entire world because God was dissatisfied with humankind and decided to extinguish it. He had mercy on only Noah and his family, giving them the chance to select two of each animal species and save them from the floods in a huge ship. After the flood Noah sent out a dove to discover whether there was any land anywhere that could be settled. When the dove finally returned with an olive twig in its mouth, Noah knew that he could begin resettling the earth. This reads like a new beginning, almost right from scratch, or at any rate as a chance to do everything better and right this time. From this, on a symbolic and moral level, stems the knowledge that humans and their actions were considered imperfect, quite apart from any deeds that might be subject to moral opprobrium. Deng Guoyuan takes up this model from the Bible and binds it together with the Chinese philosophy of Daoism. While the Bible contains clear rules that humans are to follow, Daoism presents a considerably more liberal position, which allows for more decision making choices. Ultimately, the focus lies here on the development of one's own personality over the course of a life, without interfering directly in the flow of life. The Bible commands, among other things, humans to make the world subject to them - it is a model of thought that became an aspiration for many scholars and scientists. 

　　However, this no longer exists and it is precisely at this fissure, this rupture, which humans themselves have created in active nature, that Deng finds the starting point for his work. Over the years, he has comprehensively traced the transformation of nature and depicted the increasingly decisive stages of the loss of its own power to evolve. From the natural twigs in test tubes through to his Taihu stones made from automobile junk, he has traced a consistent path that has wound ever further from real nature, only to be entirely submerged in the world of artificial creations. Deng Guoyuan does not simply see the continual alterations, but simultaneously also the phenomenon of alienation that humans are engaged in with regard to "Mother Nature." No creature on earth is capable of so radically pursuing this process and yet simultaneously accepting that humankind is sawing through the proverbial branch on which it is sitting. 

　　This is the reason why Deng's works read not just as an ever accelerating history of evolution emerging from the laboratory of artificial insemination, in which an increasingly frequent number of gene mutations are carried out, but also as a history of humankind's alienation from itself. The gesture to tradition is to be seen as a reflex, the consequence of a recollection that nevertheless recedes ever further into the past and will, in its turn, soon be incomprehensible to many because its cultural roots will no longer have any meaning or anything to say. The extent to which Deng has been prophetic in this regard can be seen in a work now a decade old, in which he placed tree trunks on mirrored surfaces with test tubes. This work already emphasised that self-referentiality, revolving only around itself and finally flowed into Noah's Garden, when, around four years ago, Deng created his first mirror maze.

　　More than ever before, Deng now began to make every effort to transpose his ink drawings, even his oil paintings, into a three-dimensional context, but now he exaggerated the disruption of the original reality to the highest degree. Staged as a cabinet of curiosities, this physically accessible area is like a small enclave, is reminiscent of the Garden of Eden, of a new form of creation, but it simultaneously reveals its deceptive dimension, because it is incapable of creating itself. Not so much because no creator creates this world, but rather because nothing can arise out of itself. Instead, everything in Noah's Garden remains highly polished, indeed, so excessively glossy and colourful that no empathetic feeling for such a nature is conceivable. Mirror on mirror, all walls, all floors and the sky reflect and multiply only themselves, evoking a depth dimension that does not exist and simply enhancing everything in the room in apparent infinite repetition. The world, nature is a fallacy - caught up in itself and its perspectival replication.

　　Ultimately, the mirrors simply reflect everything back on itself, they are exclusively self-referential and, like Narcissus of Greek mythology, who fell in love with his own reflection and sought communication only with himself, they show only the self, but without ever reaching any further or deeper realisation. The sense of anyone who finds themselves in the mirror maze is there amplified until it reaches disorientation and confusion. For all the beauty that is present there and serves to remind us of the gardens of history by referencing the Taihu stones, imitating the flora and fauna, yet it is unmistakably clear that everything here created is an illusion of the natural landscape, that this is even emphasised in its multiplication through the mirrored surfaces (some of which also turn). The confusion of the observer is almost perfect, although ultimately they do find their way out of the labyrinth - contrary to the real world, in which humankind becomes more and more entangled in its own actions. 

　　Deng Guoyuan pushes other perspectives forward by implementing parts of his mirror garden in urban space and assimilating them to a large degree in their surroundings. Real space and its mirrored echo meld together. In an urban environment that barely knows or permits nature, the mirror makes an almost positive illusion possible, as when a single bush or tree extends to a multiplied body through the reflective effect. 

　　At the same time he also began a new work series in which nature would also be captured in the mirror: small animals and human creatures appear in faceted mirrors and form their own cosmos of artificial mutations. Having drifted away from nature long before, these are consequently thoroughly plasticised creatures stemming from the unendingly rich world of the toy industry. It is surely unnecessary to stress that China is internationally the largest producer of toys and that much of what is produced is mainly made of plastic materials. Deng does not leave the figurines as they are, he alters them imaginatively, as in a genetic laboratory, constantly creating new creatures which he releases into his world full of artificiality, into his mirror universe. At the start of this process he followed the precedent given by a history book, in which creatures, fantastical beings, are presented that populated wall paintings, drawings and paintings as early as the Tang Dynasty (The Classics of Mountains and Seas, Penguin Classics, 2000). Here, we see monkeys with human heads, horses with human legs and so forth. They play an important role in Chinese mythology, and of course such fantasy figures have always been a part of human cultures. Humans invented multitudes of these creatures, full of imagination and rather like pre-historic mutations. They were intended as guardian spirits or beings that would ward off others, part of the cultures of the shamans, of the aboriginal peoples of the world and even of the present: in the Bronze Age, in antiquity, in ancient Egypt, in the civilisations of of the Maya and the Incas, in the European middle ages as strange dragons and grimacing faces attached to the external walls of Gothic cathedrals to ward off evil, and in the historical paintings of the middle ages executed by artists from Grünewald to Breughel ? such strange and marvellous creatures are evidence of wild fantasies. Time and again, they appear in large numbers during times of terror and war ? right up to the modern period, in particular in the Surrealist art of Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy. The present continues to create its own fantasy beings and their origins in the realm of mutation seems only logical. The fantasy films produced by the Hollywood industry provide ample evidence of this, whether it is Spider-Man, Bat-Man or Cat-Woman - to name just a few of the classics. They all play with the idea that mutations, brought about by whatever cause, can lead to superhuman or extrasensory abilities. However, the positive fairytale elements cannot hide the fact that real laboratories are undertaking experiments that aim to optimise, clone and, most recently, even to replace humans with the technological possibilities of Artificial Intelligence. Once nature has been transposed into an artificial habitat, now humans, instead of ensuring their own survival, will consequently eliminate themselves. Ever since the first successful cloning experiments in the 1980s, the world's natural dimension of evolution has come to an end and humans have been trying to do it like, or in fact better than, nature. 

​　　For this reason Deng Guoyuan describes his museum-like presentation as a narrative in the spirit of the apocalypse. Once again, the biblical idea of the destruction of humankind and of the earth itself is already presaged in the Old Testament. It's an artistic vision that Deng mines for his own work, formulating mirror object after mirror object, as it were individual chapters. In separate sequences, Deng outlines this vision using his toy creatures, which have overtaken the old world order and thoroughly infiltrated it. These are the small, sometimes pesky insects, which, having found power through sheer numbers, are subjugating the world. The butterflies, which conquer the garden of dinosaurs, the ladybirds, which populate the pandas' garden, or the dragonflies who conquer the tigers' garden. In a real world, in which environmental influences have caused the oceans to be filled with rubbish, the earth to be poisoned by industrial waste, the air to be polluted and in which the protective ozone layer is disappearing, the polar ice caps are melting… there is no living environment left for wild animals, and certainly not for the large or rare species. The rate of extinction is in full swing and only a few new species are emerging to take their place. 

　　Deng Guoyuan has collected over 4000 small toy animals and figurines and carefully reconfigured them. They retain an air of playfulness, of the marvellous, together with the ugly and it is the small dimensions of his creatures in particular that provokes fascination and the desire to follow each individual idea. Their superabundance quickly makes this impossible, however. This, too, is in line with the credible argument presented by scientists that the large, apparently superior species will not survive. Instead, in their natural world, which will soon cease to exist, it will be the lower order animals, from the single-celled organisms to the insect, which will prevail and only these species will have a chance of survival. The Surrealists were already creating works in the period before the Second World War in which nature is shown left to its own devices, reclaiming lost terrain, and in which, of all the animal species, only insects continued to exist. Humans had, in this imagining, already been wiped out, were no longer extant. Even back then, this, at least in its outlines, was the apocalypse which conjured up a vision of the disaster of the Second World War.

　　In Deng's vision, these little mutants take on a life of their own and leave the narrow world of the mirrored box. They fly away, up and leave, emancipate themselves. Viewed from afar, his mirror works, with their scuttling creatures and mutants, appear rather like the oil paintings he created many years before. In these, he created a unique world of the natural and of the garden in an mode of abstract colour. They give the impression of, almost, a return to the image - to the notion of the composition in its pure form. 

　　Deng's artistic philosophy, deeply influenced by a pessimism towards the modern era, takes its cues from developments in his own country, from China's transformation from an agrarian culture to one of the leading world powers, which nevertheless all too often lost sight of a necessary consideration for the development and existence of the natural world. China is second to none in this regard among the industrial nations. Deng shares this pessimism with many of his contemporaries, and artists across the world are increasingly making the dramatic changes to our earth a subject of their work. However, Deng's artistic development as evidenced in his works over the past decade and more, as well as the ever new forms, in which he has experimented with materials from the environment, industry, throw-away society and even plastic toys, shows that he is not simply a unique artist in China, calling like a lone voice in the desert for a fundamental reconsideration of our relationship to nature. The playfulness of his work may deceive us at first glance, but Deng's message is deeply serious as he presents to us experiment designs, gene manipulation and the apparently ineluctable will of humankind to artificial creation. 

　　They may seem quite cute at first, these little mutants, but remember that even Goethe's "sorcerer's apprentice" was forced to the bitter realisation that he could not control the spirits that he himself had conjured up.