雷子人以画人物为主。他的近作大约可分为三种类型：一类是以情爱为母题的各种姿态的人体他作，画面中的人物多被抽离了时间情境而游移于狭小的空间之中，在视觉上给人以紧张和压迫感。无论是画面看似静止的《相爱的风景》，还是动态强烈的《水中花》系列，在画面构成上都有一种不稳定的感觉，强对比度的明艳色彩和写意铺陈的背景更为画面营造出一种躁动不安的气氛。这与他笔下人物表情的安祥静谧形成不和谐的对比，尤其是《水中花》系列所描绘的在水中嬉戏的男女在画面的安排上有强烈的错位和运动感，使观者产生一种视觉和心理的落差。另一类《从窗台眺望的风景》系列，记录了快速变迁的城市景观。与那些抽离了时空的人物画相反，画家在此试图捕捉时间，留住那些伴随城市的喧嚣与躁动而不断流逝的记忆。第三类作品是田园风光与现实人物的结合，如《丽日园记》，充满田园诗意。与前两类作品不同，这一类作品的意境显得格外平和宁静。他从容地描绘充满闲情逸致的青春男女，就像他曾反反复复地描绘的采莲、放风筝等如烟往事，这显然是他梦中的景致；用雷子人自己的话说，是他生命中“不落的童话”。这三类作品看似不同，却都是画家真性情的流露，它们既有现实的冷静也有梦境的虚幻。也许多样性的艺术面目正是画家所追求的，它们分别表达了现代生活中人们普遍具有幻想、孤寂、失落、局促、迷惘、焦灼、期冀等种种复杂的感觉。雷子人的水墨作品题材单纯而意境丰富，水墨语言的运用如同题材本身，返璞归真，没有过多的夸张和炫耀。人物的刻画简逸而细腻，虽有风花雪月式的浪漫情怀，却没有世俗的圆熟与甜腻，这与他有意运用的朴拙的笔墨相应成趣。

　　实际上，雷子人的笔墨并非仅仅是他个人抒发情感的独特方式，而且是他所接受的水墨文化与其它多重视觉文化长期积淀的反映。他对于中国传统水墨语汇的吸收自不必说，同时他又吸收了水墨之外的“另类”艺术，如西方现代艺术形式和民间艺术的语汇。他的人物画，不仅有戴进、陈洪绶等中国传统水墨人物画宗师的遗风，也有西方现代主义鼻祖塞尚、马蒂斯风格的影子。显然，雷子人还在他所从事的插图、设计、剪纸和制陶等艺术活动中得到了触类旁通的启发。结合现代形式和民间传统艺术的水墨实验是当代中国画艺术家在革新水墨语言过程中所普遍采用的方式。作为中央美术学院培养的年轻一代艺术家，雷子人的绘画语言延续并正在发展着与他有直接师承关系的学院水墨人物画的革新传统。而雷子人的独特性在于他在结合其它艺术形式时所表现的一种超然、自然的态度。像他这一代年轻的艺术家对中国和西方、传统与现代、民间与经典的艺术形式的结合和取舍显得更为轻松随意，他们从一开始对于各种视觉经验的接受就是开放式的，他们的水墨实验无须特意强调某一种特别的模式，也不可能无视人类视觉文化中的任何一个部分。

　　水墨与其它艺术语言一样，是一种中、西方艺术家都可以运用的媒介，一个与艺术家与现实生活对话的方式。水墨语言的特殊性在于它更适于表达感性，表达人们心灵中最细腻的感受，因而更富于隐逸、玄妙之美。感性与理性同样是人类通往精神自由境界的基石。尽管当代艺术普遍强调理性和观念，更多地针对社会政治问题，但是情感依然是人们普遍期待在艺术中寻求寄托的精神取向。雷子人的水墨实验偏重于感性，他的作品在延续水墨文化的人文特性的过程中，传达了他个人独特的情感经验和生存状态，同时也呈现了中国人从农业社会向都市现代文明转换时期具有的普遍性和情感体验。

　　雷子人是勤奋的。面对他的厚厚一叠近作时，人们很难不为他的勤奋所感动。在当今这个人心浮躁、急功近利的时代，踏实勤奋是一种格外难能可贯的品质。但是，雷子人水墨创作的价值并不只在于他的勤勉，也不仅在于他的才情，而是在此背后所显示出的他对于水墨语言的热情和水墨文化在现时代的意义。在水墨语言由传统向现代转型的过程中，有许许多多的艺术家们在做一系列默默无闻的传接。雷子人的水墨实践无疑是当代水墨传承这一巨大的链条中的一个年轻而有生命力的一环。在中国这个特定的向现代主义过渡的历史转型期，水墨传承的努力作为中国现代性经验的独特体现注定是困难重重的：艺术家既承担着延续传统的重负，又面对现代主义普遍模式的压力，因此很难超越现有模式而形成独特面貌。然而，现代性本来不是独特而单一的，而是多重的具有普遍意义的。如果说中国经验可以丰富现代性的内容，雷子人的这种水墨语言的现代尝试无疑可以给我们提供了一种重要的参照。

　　Painting Practice of Lei Ziren

　　Shao Yiyang

　　Most of the Lei Ziren's paintings are set to focus on people. His recent works can be roughly divided into three types: one is representation of various postures with love as its theme. The figures on the painting are deprive of time and space and are confined within a narrow enclosure, instilling sense of pressure and urgency into the viewers. Both the Scenery in Love, featuring static images, and Flower in Water series, marked by dynamic nature, have constructed a restless atmosphere, acutely constructing the images of people with composure and pleasure. Especially in the latter series, the dislocation and mobility in the arrangement of a couple playing in the water have seized the viewers with impressive visual and psychological gaps.

　　Landscape over Windowsill series, which record the rapidly changing urbanscape, are typical cases of the second type. In contrast with the first type, the painter tends to hold back the passage of time and grasps the moments that are constantly going by with hustle and bustle of urban lives. The last type is marked by a combination of rural sceneries and real people. The idyllic Painting of Beautiful Garden on Pleasant Day is just an example in point. Different from the first two, works fall in the third category usually create an extraordinarily peaceful ambience. The painter depicts, with the ink and brush, the joyful young men and women as he has done, for many times, to the lotus, the scene of kite-flying and the bygones. All the images represented on his paintings are from his dreams or, in the words of Lei Ziren himself, they are "everlasting fairy tales" in his life.

　　In spite of the differences, all the three types of paintings are expressions of the painter's true sentiments, both reality and fantasy. The diversity of artistic representations may be the very pursuit of the painter, who intends to reveal varied complicated feelings that are common among human beings, from fantasy, loneliness, disappointment, loss, anxiety to expectation. The paintings of Lei Ziren are simple in subject matter but profound in artistic conception. The ink painting languages he applied are also of original natures without excessive pomposity and exaggeration. Correspondingly, every touch of the depicted figures is swept in ideal romance rather than the secular obsessions.

　　Actually, the paintings of Lei Ziren are not all about his personal emotions. Instead, they are also a reflection of his accumulated experience of and yearlong interaction with multiple cultures including western modern artistic style, folk arts as well as Chinese traditional art. In creating figure paintings, Lei not only adopts the core styles of Chinese ink master painters such as Dai Jin, Chen Hongshou but has also drawn on the essence of western modernism masterpieces produced by Cezanne and Henri Matisse.

　　In addition, other artistic activities such as designing, paper-clipping and pottery have also inspired Lei in his painting creation. The innovative way of integrating elements of traditional folk arts into ink painting have been widely adopted among contemporary Chinese painters. As a young artists graduated from CAFA, Lei acts in line with the institution's tradition and keeps on the pursuit of innovation. The unique quality of Lei lies in his attitude of detachment in the course of combining different artistic forms. As for artists of his generation, they had an open perspective, from the very beginning, towards varied art forms, eastern or western, traditional or contemporary, folk or classic. They have no emphasis on any particular style and are therefore inclusive to all.

　　Ink painting is, as the other art forms, a medium available for both Chinese and western artists to communicate with their real lives while the major distinction lies in its ingenuity of expressing the subtlest feelings deep in our heart. Both sense and sensibility are indispensible stepstones for our pursuit of spiritual freedom. Although much emphasis has been laid on rationality and social and political issues in contemporary arts, sentiment and emotion are still the ultimate appeals of most viewers. Inheriting the humanistic traits of traditional Chinese painting, Lei Ziren attaches more importance to sensibility and conveys both his personal affective experience and the average people's state of living during China's transition from agricultural society to urban civilization.

　　Lei Ziren is a hard-worker, impressing viewers with thick stack of recent works. On top of that, the value of Lei's creations is not just about his diligence or talents but closely connected to the contemporary meaning of ink painting. Numerous artists have made contributions to the transition cause of ink painting language. Lei Ziren , a dynamic link in inheriting and passing on the cream of traditional ink painting, is also an active one of them. Against the special background, when China is going through a period of social transformation, a host of obstacles will surely stand on the way of art development. With the duel burdens of maintaining traditions and incorporating modernism, the artists inevitably find it hard to innovate. However, "modernity" is in fact diversified by nature. Lei Ziren's practice has just provided an example for us to regard the unique representation mode of Chinese paintings as an enrichment to modern art.

作者：邵亦杨