摘要

　　自20世纪90年代末起，赵能智构建了一套极具个人特质的视觉语言，其创作以人脸为核心，将形象放大、模糊、解构直至呈现出陌生怪异的质感。当同期中国艺术家普遍运用政治反讽或叙事具象的创作范式时，他却深入纯粹的内在精神世界，构建了一场毫无退路的意识之画。

​　　正文

　　请诸位认真听好，你们这群艺术界的势利者：2000年前后，国际艺术市场向中国敞开大门，其挑选艺术偶像的标准如同算法一般冰冷刻板——讽刺的面孔、重构的伟人形象、易于解读的身份符号，这些符号化作品能轻松穿梭于各大艺术博览会。而1968年出生于四川南充的赵能智，从未迎合这一切。他的艺术始终秉持着执拗的先锋性，拒绝被简化为画面所呈现的浅层物象。但不可否认，他是中国当代艺术界最重要的艺术家之一;三十年来创作脉络始终连贯，其作品体系堪称当下亚洲艺术领域最具深度的创作之一。他在国际舞台上的缺席，并非作品本身的缺憾，而是观者视野的局限——西方世界依旧困在自身的认知框架里，无法接纳那些没有迎合其期待的艺术表达。

　　若艺术不是对精神关切的塑造，那它又是什么?还有什么关切，比聚焦于人类面孔更具现实意义?我们自以为每日都能读懂、理解人脸，可深究之下，这方天地始终充满着无法穿透的混沌。赵能智将职业生涯的大部分时光，都用于探索这种令人眩晕的未知。他标志性的《表情》系列自90年代末启动，延续至今，创作内核始终高度统一。画面描绘的并非普通的人脸，而是当我们长久凝视、近距离审视后，人脸所呈现的本真模样。那些膨胀、扭曲的巨型头颅，沉浸在暗沉的灰色调或病态的色彩之中，仿佛从日常意识刻意回避的精神体验中浮现而出。

　　这位艺术家的人生轨迹，本身就是一堂关于坚守与抵抗的课程。出身四川普通家庭的他，1986年考入四川美术学院，1990年毕业，曾师从张晓刚、叶永青。早年的他，与同时代年轻艺术家境遇相似：蜗居在狭小的公寓里忍受贫困，靠餐饮零工糊口，游走在重庆街头，目睹经济现代化浪潮中批量涌现的流浪者。1992-1993年的《徘徊街头的人》系列，是他将直面世界的真实体验转化为绘画语言的首次见证。这些色调暗沉、面孔扭曲的作品中，已然埋下了他日后毕生创作的执念。赵能智曾清晰地坦言：

　　“这些作品记录了我亲身的相遇，映照了我自身的存在。那时的我，在重庆如同一个局外人，这座城市与我毫无关联。我仿佛只是漂浮在这座城市里，无根无依。”[1]

　　正是这种漂浮感，这种身处世间却无法真正归属的感受，构成了他全部创作的核心。对赵能智而言，人脸不是肖像，也不是世俗画家笔下的社会面具，而是一种更令人不安的存在：一张看似可以被解读的表面，却在凝视中不断逃逸。画中人物的神情凝固在暧昧的瞬间，没有明确的痛苦，也没有可辨识的喜悦，只是一种模糊、不确定的状态，引发难以名状的不适感。

　　精神分析理论为此提供了深刻的解读。雅克·拉康在关于欲望结构与凝视的研究中提出，凝视从来不是中立的：它永远是主体与客体、所见与所求之间一场错失的相遇[2]。当我们注视一张面孔，尤其是陌生的面孔时，总会将自我的内在世界投射其上，默认面孔背后是与我们相似的灵魂。但赵能智的面孔，抗拒着所有投射。画面的构造让观者的目光不断游移、迟疑，无法落脚。被极致放大的颧骨、眼睑、皮肤褶皱，瓦解了人脸的完整性，将观者推回自身的陌生感之中。这些画作仿佛专为挫败观者的解读欲而作：它给予人脸可被读懂的假象，最终只交付无解的谜团。这恰恰印证了拉康的直觉——凝视永远只能捕捉到那些抗拒被看见的事物。

　　艺术家本人以一贯的克制谈及这一维度：“我的创作核心，是让熟悉的事物变得陌生。我希望你能以全新的视角，重新面对那些习以为常的东西。选择人的表情作为载体，只是为观者打开一扇容易进入的门，他们会立刻明白：啊，这是人类的表情。可当你真正走进作品，就会陷入彻底的迷失。”[3] 这句话道尽了一切：入口轻易可寻，深入却令人眩晕。这正是拉康理论在视觉艺术中的呈现，初始的熟悉感，最终通向他者的深渊。

　　赵能智的面孔，摒弃了心理肖像绘画的所有常规符号。它不诉说痛苦的缘由、身份与经历，不指向任何传记、阶层与历史。正如评论家李旭所言，这些面孔是“身体的荒芜平原”——没有刻意展现的深度，却因极致的空无，拥有了令人无法忽视的存在感。2000至2004年主导画面的单色灰调，强化了这种脱离具象的疏离感：头颅漂浮在不确定的空间里，无内外之分，无时空之界。它们游走在精神分析学中“诡异感”的边缘，熟悉之物因过度贴近，反而滋生出威胁感。

　　但仅以此解读，未免过于狭隘。因为赵能智本质上是一位画家，形式与媒介对他而言永远是核心。在这个理论常被用来掩盖技法匮乏的时代，他始终清晰地强调：“我相信艺术是独立的，绘画就是绘画。它不记录、不评论、不叙事。它只是视觉形式、色彩与肌理，以此唤醒记忆。”[4] 这份坚守绘画本体、拒绝沦为观念图解的信念，让他的作品跳出了所有简单的分类。他不属于上一代玩世现实主义的阵营——那些艺术家以政治符号的反讽迎合西方市场的身份猎奇;他也并非纯粹的表现主义者，严谨的形式语言与对情绪宣泄的警惕，让他与该流派划清界限。

　　正是这种难以被归类的特质，成为了他的艺术力量，也部分解释了他在国际舞台上相对低调的现状。当代艺术市场习惯于用安全的标签定义艺术家：中国异见艺术家、伟人符号艺术家、全球化艺术家。赵能智无一符合。他呈现的是内在体验的原生复杂性，转化为需要观者付出心力的绘画语言。而这份心力，坦白说，多数人不愿付出。

　　他的形式探索历程极具启示性。90年代的表现主义阶段之后，他走上了不断剥离的创作之路。色彩褪去，叙事细节消散，构图紧紧聚焦于人脸，继而聚焦于人脸的局部，不断放大直至失去可辨识的特征。这是一场极少艺术家能坚持到底的苦修。2004年之后，色彩重新回归，却以全新的姿态：不再是内在情绪的表达，而是独立的形式语言，承载着更强烈的陌生感。2006年《佩的表情》系列中的女性面孔，搭配金色调与凝固的笑容，进一步加剧了表象与意义之间的割裂感。

　　这段创作历程，令人不可避免地联想到弗朗茨·卡夫卡——不是那个书写官僚寓言的卡夫卡，而是描绘内心蜕变的卡夫卡，刻画一个人洞悉世界表层逻辑，却无法融入其深层意义的终极迷失。格里高尔·萨姆沙变成甲虫，其可怖之处，仅在于他失去了世界期待的形态：他的陌生，源于人与人之间识别关系的崩塌。在赵能智的作品中，人脸经历了相似的蜕变：它们拥有人类的五官，却在构图、近乎临床般精准的皮肤肌理中，打破了具象表达的常规契约。既贴近又遥远，如同蜕变之初妹妹眼中的格里高尔：可辨认，却又彻底成为了他者。

　　这种卡夫卡式的特质，也体现在赵能智的创作方式中：他以个人照片为蓝本，放大人脸细节，再进行轻微变形、调整比例、模糊轮廓，这是一个让事物既熟悉又陌生的过程。文学研究中所说的“陌生化”，在俄罗斯形式主义理论中占据核心地位，而赵能智将其转化为了视觉语言。他让人类面孔变得令人不安，如同卡夫卡笔下荒诞的办公室——仅仅是将现实过度曝光，便催生了极致的陌生感。

　　2019年在北京T6画廊展出的最新《蠕行》系列，标志着全新的转向。画面中不再只有面孔，而是出现了受困、扭曲的躯体，仿佛无法在社会空间中找到适配的姿态。树脂雕塑与绘画相辅相成，呈现出深陷泥泞中的人体，以缓慢而决绝的动作蠕动，如同无脊椎生物，系列名“蠕行”也由此而来。策展人杜曦云指出，这些躯体仿佛“在寻找一道可以藏身的缝隙，寻找逃离的方式，或只是凭本能在原地挪动”。艺术家在展厅墙面留下了一行大字：“怎样更好?” 这是一个没有答案的追问，如同氛围一般悬浮在展厅之中。

　　这是赵能智艺术走向成熟的标志：他从不寻求定论，不提供慰藉式的表达，也不做直白的社会批判。他开辟出一片充满不适感的空间，将观者置于其中，留下无尽的思考。这种克制，稀缺而珍贵。他并非那些借艺术表达对当代中国、资本社会、人类命运观点的创作者，而是为一场精神体验创造条件，相信观者能自行完成这场旅程。

　　走过这段艺术之旅，最终留下的，是至关重要的本质。赵能智的面孔不讲述故事，只为见证一种生存状态——当代人的状态：身处图像饱和的世界，无数张面孔在屏幕上无限复制，可即便如此，人们依旧无法真正凝视同类。赵能智的作品，是治愈这种习惯性视而不见的解药。它迫使目光停留、驻足，承受凝视带来的不适感。这是一场对抗周遭浮躁的抵抗，这场抵抗无声无息，没有宣言，仅以绘画为武器，因而更具力量。

　　最终，赵能智的作品向整个当代艺术提出了一个问题：当图像成为世界上最泛滥、最廉价的材料时，凝视究竟意味着什么?每天，数十亿张面孔在网络中流转，被简化为信号、刺激、即时反应的载体。注意力匆匆掠过，从未真正停留。而赵能智的绘画，恰恰要求这个时代最稀缺的东西：时间、停顿、抵抗浮躁的坚守。他的画布不会在第一眼就展露全貌，它要求观者驻足。正是在这份被迫的停留中，某种感知悄然发生——不是神秘主义的启示，而是缓慢而不安的觉醒：人类的面孔从来不是可读的符号，而是无法消解的谜团。顶级的艺术从不阐释世界，而是还原其混沌本质。赵能智属于那类稀有的艺术家，不向时代的便利妥协，始终坚守绘画的边界，守护绘画所能言说的，以及唯有绘画才能缄默守护的一切。

　　注释

　　[1] 刘淳，《与赵能智对话》，2001年12月。未刊访谈，引自吕澎，《赵能智：表情的历史》。

　　[2] 雅克·拉康，《研讨班第十一卷：精神分析的四个基本概念》，巴黎，瑟伊出版社，1973年。

　　[3] 郭晓丽，《赵能智访谈》，收录于新加坡季节画廊展览画册，2006年。

　　[4] 赵能智，个人笔记(1996)，引自李旭，《身体的荒芜平原——赵能智作品解读》，法兰克福LA画廊《面孔》展览画册，2006年6月。

　　(文章英文为作者原文，已获作者授权在中国艺术媒体发表，文章中文由原文经AI翻译)

作者：埃尔韦·朗瑟兰

《艺术评论》杂志主编

英文

　　Zhao Nengzhi: The Hidden Treasure of Chinese Art

　　Author : Hervé Lancelin, editorial director, ArtCritic magazine

　　Published : 16 April 2025

　　URL : https://www.artcritic.com/en/zhao-nengzhi-the-hidden-treasure-of-chinese-art/

　　Excerpt:

　　Since the late 1990s, Zhao Nengzhi has been building a radically personal pictorial language centered on the human face, enlarged, blurred, disjointed to the point of strangeness. While his Chinese contemporaries exploit the codes of political irony or narrative figuration, he delves into pure interiority: a painting of consciousness, without safety net.

　　Essay:

　　Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: when the international art market opened up to China around the 2000s, it chose its icons with the subtlety of an algorithm: ironic faces, repainted Maos, identity symbols sufficiently readable to circulate easily from one fair to another. Zhao Nengzhi, born in 1968 in Nanchong, Sichuan province, offered none of that. Only the obstinate radicalism of a painting that refuses to be reduced to what it represents. Yet he is among the most important artists of contemporary China; his work, coherent over three decades, constitutes one of the most demanding corpora of the current Asian scene. His absence from the international scene betrays less an insufficiency of the work than an insufficiency of the gaze, that of a West still prisoner of its own frameworks, incapable of recognizing what doesn’t hold up the mirror it expected.

　　What is art, if not the shaping of a concern? And what concern is more relevant than that which focuses on the human face, this territory we believe we read and understand every day, and which remains, upon close examination, the place of all opacities? Zhao Nengzhi has devoted most of his career to exploring this vertigo. His emblematic series Expressions (Biaoqing), started in the late 1990s and pursued to this day with remarkable consistency, represents human faces, or rather what faces would become if we truly looked at them, that is, for too long and too closely. Swollen, distorted, bathing in muted grays or streaked with sickly colors, these monumental heads seem to emerge from an experience that ordinary consciousness would prefer not to cross.

　　The path of this artist is itself a lesson in resistance. Son of a modest family from Sichuan, he entered the Chongqing Fine Arts School in 1986 and graduated in 1990, trained notably by Zhang Xiaogang and Ye Yongqing. His path then resembled that of many young artists of his generation: poverty endured in a cramped apartment, odd food-service jobs, wandering the streets of Chongqing where he observed the vagabonds produced en masse by economic modernization. His series Street Vagabonds (1992, 1993) is the first testimony of this ability to transform direct experience of the world into pictorial language. There is, in these dark canvases with distorted faces, something that already foreshadows the great obsession to come. Zhao Nengzhi himself expressed it with rare clarity: "These works speak of my own encounters and reflect my own existence. At that time, I felt like a stranger in Chongqing, and the city had nothing to do with me. I lived as if I were merely floating through the city" [1].

　　It is in this floating, this feeling of being present in the world without fully belonging to it, that lies the core of his entire work. The face, for Zhao Nengzhi, is not a portrait. It is not a social mask either, in the sense that an anecdotal painter would understand it. It is something much more unsettling: a surface that claims to be readable and which, as one examines it, eludes. The expressions of his characters seem frozen in a moment in-between, neither clear pain nor recognizable joy, but something intermediate, undefined, which causes a hard-to-name discomfort.

　　This is where psychoanalysis offers valuable insight. Jacques Lacan, in his work on the structure of desire and gaze, developed the idea that the gaze is never neutral: it is always the site of a missed encounter between the subject and the object, between what one seeks to see and what one actually sees [2]. When we look at a face, especially an unknown face, we project onto it an interiority that we imagine to be homologous to our own. We assume that behind these features, there is someone whose world resembles ours. But Zhao Nengzhi’s faces resist this projection. They are constructed in such a way that the viewer’s gaze slips, hesitates, cannot find purchase. The details exaggerated to the extreme, a cheekbone, an eyelid, a skin fold, undo the unity of the face and send the viewer back to their own strangeness. These canvases seem specifically built to thwart the spectator’s desire for understanding: they promise the readability of a face and deliver only the enigma, thus confirming Lacan’s intuition that the gaze never captures anything but what resists it.

　　The artist himself has spoken about this dimension, with his characteristic sobriety: "My problem is making familiar things strange. I want to make you face familiar things again from a new angle. The choice of the human expression is simply an easy door to open for the viewer, who immediately understands: ah, these are human expressions. But when you enter the work, you are very disoriented" [3]. This formulation says it all: the entrance is easy, the crossing is dizzying. This is exactly the structure of the Lacanian device applied to the image, an initial familiarity that opens onto the abyss of otherness.

　　Zhao Nengzhi’s faces offer us none of the usual markers of psychological representation. They do not tell us who is suffering, nor why, nor for how long. They do not give us access to a biography, a social class, or a particular history. They are, as critic Li Xu wrote, "devastated plains of the body,” surfaces without displayed depth, but that the very quality of their emptiness renders unbearably present. The gray monochromy that dominates the 2000-2004 period accentuates this effect of detachment from the particular: these heads float in an indeterminate space, neither inside nor outside, neither past nor present. They exist on the border of what psychoanalysis calls the uncanny, das Unheimliche, the feeling that something familiar has become threatening precisely because it was too familiar.

　　But it would be reductive to stick to this interpretation. Because Zhao Nengzhi is also, fundamentally, a painter, that is to say someone for whom the question of form and medium is never secondary. He has always insisted on this point with a clarity that stands out in an environment where theory often serves to mask weak execution: "I believe that art is independent; paintings are paintings. They do not record, do not comment, do not narrate. They are only visual forms, colors, and textures that trigger memory" [4]. This profession of faith in painting as painting, and not as an illustration of a discourse, explains why his work escapes easy categories. He cannot be classified among the cynical Realists of the previous generation, who ironized on Chinese political icons to satisfy a Western market hungry for identity signs. Nor can he be classified among pure expressionists, because his formal rigor and mistrust of emotional outpouring forbid that register.

　　It is precisely this resistance to classification that is his strength and partially explains his relative obscurity on the international scene. Contemporary art markets often operate with reassuring categories: the dissident Chinese artist, the artist who cites Mao, the artist of the global village. Zhao Nengzhi offers none of these. He offers the raw complexity of inner experience, translated into a pictorial language that demands genuine effort from the viewer. That effort, to be honest, many prefer to save themselves from.

　　The artist's formal trajectory is particularly instructive in this regard. After the expressionist period of the 1990s, he embarked on a path of progressive stripping down. Colors withdraw, narrative details fade, the composition tightens around the face alone, then around fragments of the face, enlarged until they lose their recognizable character. It is a work of asceticism that few artists have the discipline to carry through to the end. From 2004 onwards, color returns, but differently: no longer as an expression of an inner life, but as a full-fledged formal element, carrying an additional strangeness. The female faces of the series L'expression de Pei (2006), with their golden tones and frozen smiles, further intensify the feeling of dissociation between the surface and what it is supposed to mean.

　　There is something in this trajectory that irresistibly evokes Franz Kafka, not the Kafka of bureaucratic allegories, but the Kafka of intimate metamorphosis, the one who describes the fundamental disorientation of a being in a world whose superficial logic he perfectly understands yet cannot inhabit its deep meaning. The character Gregor Samsa, transformed into an insect, is monstrous only because he has lost the form the world expected of him: his strangeness is a failure of mutual recognition. In Zhao Nengzhi's work, the faces undergo a similar transformation: they have the appearance of human faces, two eyes, a nose, a mouth, but something in their arrangement, in the texture of their skin rendered with almost clinical precision, signals a break with the ordinary contract of representation. They are too close and too distant at the same time, like Gregor seen by his sister at the beginning of the metamorphosis: recognizable and yet irredeemably other.

　　This Kafkaesque dimension is found in Zhao Nengzhi's very practice: his way of working from personal photographs, zooms on details of faces that he then reworks by slightly deforming them, altering proportions, blurring contours, is a process of simultaneous familiarization and estrangement. What is sometimes called, in literary studies, ostranenie, the defamiliarization dear to the Russian formalists, finds here its plastic equivalent. Zhao Nengzhi makes the human face as unsettling as Kafka made the Kafkaesque office: by the simple overexposure of its reality.

　　The more recent works of the Wriggle (Ruxing) series, presented in 2019 at the T6 gallery in Beijing, mark a new turn. Bodies appear there, not just faces anymore, but constrained, twisted bodies, as if unable to find a posture that suits them in social space. The resin sculptures accompany the paintings, representing human forms collapsed in mud, animated by a slow and inexorable movement that recalls invertebrates, hence the title, "creeping." The exhibition curator, Du Xiyun, observed that these bodies seem "to look for a crack to hide in, a way to escape, or simply to move in place by instinct." The artist himself left in large letters on the gallery wall this question: "What is better?", an unanswered inquiry, suspended in the exhibition space like atmospheric pressure.

　　This is a mark of Zhao Nengzhi's maturity: he does not seek to conclude. He does not offer a consoling message nor a clearly articulated social critique. He opens a space of discomfort, places the viewer there, and leaves him with his questions. This restraint is rare and precious. He is not one of those who use art to say what they think about contemporary China, capitalism, or the fate of humanity. He is among those who create the conditions for an experience and trust the viewer to go through it.

　　What remains at the end of this journey? Something essential. Zhao Nengzhi's faces do not tell a story; they attest to a condition. The condition of the contemporary human being, who lives in a world saturated with images, with faces reproduced endlessly on screens, and who, despite this profusion, remains fundamentally unable to truly look at his fellow human. Zhao Nengzhi's work is an antidote to this comfortable blindness. It forces the gaze to settle, to stay, to endure the discomfort of what it sees. It is an act of resistance against the surrounding superficiality, an act all the more powerful because it is accomplished without discourse, without manifesto, with no other tool than painting.

　　What perhaps remains is a question that Zhao Nengzhi's work poses to contemporary art as a whole: what does it mean to look, at a time when the image has become the most abundant and cheapest material in the world? Every day, billions of faces circulate on networks, reduced to signals, to stimuli, to opportunities for quick reactions. Attention is spent there without ever settling. Yet Zhao Nengzhi's painting demands precisely what our era has the most difficulty offering: duration, a pause, resistance to passage. His canvases do not reveal themselves in the first second; they impose a stay. And it is in this constrained stay that something happens, not a revelation in the mystical sense, but a slow and uncomfortable awareness that the human face is not a readable sign, but an irreducible mystery. Art, at its highest degree of demand, does not comment on the world: it restitutes its opacity. Zhao Nengzhi belongs to that rare line of artists who, without yielding to the conveniences of the time, maintain painting at the level of what it can say, and what it alone can keep silent.

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　　Footnotes:

　　[1] Liu Chun, Dialogue with Zhao Nengzhi (Zheng Nengzhi fangtan lu), December 2001. Unpublished interview, cited in Lü Peng, "Zhao Nengzhi: The History of Facial Expressions".

　　[2] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Paris, Seuil, 1973.

　　[3] Guo Xiaoli, interview with Zhao Nengzhi, published in the exhibition catalog of Galerie Art Seasons Singapore, 2006.

　　[4] Zhao Nengzhi, personal notes (1996), cited in Li Xu, "The Barren Plain of the Body, An Interpretation of Zhao Nengzhi's Work", catalog of the exhibition Faces, LA Galerie, Frankfurt, June 2006.