“鉴于我们现在没有一个完整的文化系统作为参照物，文化似乎只能处于一种纷乱状态，”中国当代最杰出的艺术评论家之一栗宪庭在他的一篇关于吕鹏的短评中如是说。在今日中国发生着的巨大变革当中，给栗宪庭所描述的“纷乱”做一个美学的定义是艰难的。像所有身处后工业和后现代社会中的艺术家一样，中国画家也同样能够做出选择：他们可以为保持传统审美价值而奋斗（通常是徒劳的）；不然他们也可以致力于一种单纯纪录的方式，而并不对这个物质和文化大杂拌的世界做出任何评判，这其实也是现今这个世界大家都习以为常的一种态度。也许有人会说吕鹏的作品，像其他中国艺术家一样，表达了一种精神上的灾难，这种强调，无疑假定了一种空虚的存在，而且不幸的是，这种空虚事实上已经被物质世界的荒诞性所填满。这当然已是一种老生常谈，但却占据支配地位，因为他们是适时和精准的。吕鹏观望他眼前的世界，发现这个世界是超现实的，于是他呈现给我们许多年轻人虚幻的映像，在海洋般的传统风景中，他们身着现代服饰，随波逐流。他的大部分形象都戴着墨镜，仿佛想透过黑暗看清事物。

　　无论吕鹏的作品多么富有象征意义，飘浮向宇宙，伴随着小小不言的神话人物的静态年轻人使我们感觉到一种不安的意识，同样产生了一种文学意义上的象征性。没有任何一种社会结构能够支撑他们，仿佛他们身处一种真正意义上的汪洋中。吕鹏恐怕也并不对他的人物组合与冷幽默的现实关联发出任何质疑，因为他的人物表情对空虚是冷漠的。像无数西方人一样，他们在被自身历史所囚禁的同时，又通过不间断的消费来缓解对感官享受和轻率的富裕的追求所带领的焦虑。吕鹏所追求要表达的一种意识，既他发现，艺术是无法对环绕我们的物质的大漩涡做出全面的判断的。在传统被后现代生活的无趣所替代的氛围中，人们很难保持心理的正常康健，人与人的关系变得短期而无意义，因为无人能长时间相处以培养出彼此的信任。色情的欢愉替代了持久的吸引；性成为了终极目标。这种论调虽然并不新鲜和尖锐，但它还是指出，我们的感官已经开始统治我们。然而，无论吕鹏笔下的中国年轻人感觉多么腻足，被红灯和暗影映照，他们依然表现出了一种与伴随他们身旁截然不同的神话人物之间的脱节。吕鹏让他的形象随机飘荡，以期找到一种连接的感觉，但背景一再逃离在画面中悠游的人物，似乎他们之间从未存在过关联。他们深陷其中的处境也从未演变为悲剧，疏离这个词相对于他们脸上虚无的瞠目而言应该算是美好的词汇了。的确，心理的挣扎远远惨烈于政治的挣扎，个人对自由的追求在社会千人一面的单调中闪现出可怖的表情。然而，微小的希望还是存在的，吕鹏的画面中通常会出现中国传统形象仙鹤，或天堂般美丽的风景，或神话中的仙人。这些形象提供了一种虽被消减，但尚未完全迷失的可能的选择，无论中国传统文化已经多么精疲力竭了。

　　如若没有画面中游戏的成份和出色的技巧，吕鹏这种对新中国生活中传统与现实的冲突的追问无疑会令人感到窒息的。他近期的丙烯作品表现出其对这种材质全面的掌握能力，他能够用飞翔的年轻人群像来构成整个画面的形象。在其中一张新近的作品中，众仙人穿越一片灰色的海洋，形象如此巨大，很难分辨首尾，这些想象中的人物成为混沌状态的代言人，他们的姿态和动机全然模棱两可暧昧不清。事实如此，吕鹏无法提供一个可替代的世界，因为若那样的话，那些形象必然是不可信的。因此，吕鹏呈现给我们世界的原貌，哪怕是它正在受到无目的性和同化的困扰。虽然对星巴克和必胜客特许经营同化全球的状态表现出甘之如饴的欣赏态度必然令人感到荒谬，但吕鹏还是对将过去和现实合成这种意识表现出某种痴迷。历史记载的恶魔与京剧人物相混杂，社会进程中不可避免的混乱吞噬了艺术家本人。

　　在时代的鸿沟间架起沟通的桥梁的可能性几乎是不存在的，任何这种企图恐怕都会被视为感情用事。然而，问题是，为了实现我们渴望的文化和社会的融合并尽量避免分裂，我们到底能够做些什么呢?我们在吕鹏作品中看到的那种现实，无法被视为一种折衷主义；恰恰相反，往昔的事物保持原态，以致于我们看到的画面效果仿佛是一个巨大的漩涡或龙卷风：人物视线所及的一切都被推转得旋转不已。这种压倒一切的无序，不仅对中国人，同时也对全世界的人们提出了某种禁告。这是我们想到，资本主义相对于中国文化而言，还是较新的观念，但在许多大陆艺术家的作品中已经显露出精神崩溃的迹象。这种状况对美国人而言已经习以为常并安之若素了，但对像吕鹏这样的画家而言，依然富有进攻性，因为人们的记忆中还保留着许多不一样的东西。正如胡同被摧毁了，旨在让位于高耸入云的塔楼，古老文化的记忆丧失了，旨在让位于国际化的生活，而推动这一切的能源来自物质主义和消费欲念。

　　也许有人辩驳说，吕鹏的想象局限于一个时间的框架中，一个强调现实而非历史的展示窗中。然而，这种强调是不无代价的。为了表现现实生活，吕鹏不得不将这些传统加以变化，主要表现在肉欲和无根性上。不过他的作品主旨表现的其实是一种尊严的丧失，甚至那些传统人物的加入也没能将其改善。不幸的是，画家是无能为力的——吕鹏无法返回传统绘画，无论其对他的吸引力有多大，他的表现主义形象只能保持粗鲁的外貌。画家在企图把显而易见的东西转换为超然物外的内涵时——这就是他画那些仙人的动机——欲望却扮演了一个重要的角色。结果从本质上来说，他们变得不可捉摸，在现代生活的欲求中沦陷。艺术无法将今日中国的现实生活变形，但却可以对决心将过去在脑后的一种改变着我们的生活的文化表达某种隐喻。剪娃娃头和戴列农的太阳镜的那个形象看起来像是艺术家本人，除了置身于包围着他的无序环境之外，他并没有做出任何特殊的举动。

　　在几幅作品中，吕鹏让代表他的那个形象摆出了功夫的姿势，似乎这种训练能够成为其保持对中国传统文化的专注力的试金石。然而这种训练却仿佛建立在哲学意义上的混乱之上——因为任什么都无法阻止吕鹏作品中那些年轻主角的脚步，他们径自向宇宙的深处飞翔而去。如果说一而再再而三的出现在吕鹏作品中的自由落体是对不确定性和不安的一种隐喻的话，观看者也只能低声抱怨说他的概念性过强。我的感觉是，吕鹏的这种奢侈是有意为之的，因为其实他们过多的出现也并不能在不同时代，包括不同文化价值和民众之间，形成一种真正的合并或连接。在吕鹏的作品中很难找到历史的连贯性，这于是提醒我们，无论在中国人还是世界其它地方的人的天性中存在的与生俱来的疏离性。我们所有的文化诉求都无法打败强大的资本主义浪潮，吕鹏以含蓄的方式表达出他的看法，他认为这种浪潮是无休无止的。即便艺术的优势也是值得怀疑的，从长远角度看，艺术无法改变作者或观众的境遇。当然，这些作品也不能被视为绝对悲观的，因为艺术行为本身就具有实现欲望的经济意义。

　　通过游戏寻找共通点是吕鹏作品的一个关键。艺术家属于他的作品，但他无法履行作品的影响，这点我们现在都很清楚是问题所在。无人能够为吕鹏作品中的狡猾和空虚负责。事实上，吕鹏的技术从某种方面说担负起了承担那些无人能控制的力量的责任。吕鹏作品中的人群仿佛是一个梦境，然而，在他丰富描绘的那样的境况中，那个梦是否可能实现，是值得怀疑的。混乱虽然无法超越，但他们也并非对迫在眉睫的行动无动于衷。艺术于是变得既大于又小于其要表现的主题，将笔下描绘的宇宙转化为对社会现实的评判。像与他同时代的许多艺术家一样，吕鹏用比喻的手法观察中国前所未有的与西方产生如此多共通的现实。这种预先的假定于是产生了一份东西方共同的责任，既，抵制全球一体化，因为它必将摧毁传统文化，无论是亚洲的还是西方的。

　　很难说吕鹏是否表现出了某种对过去追往的意识，他似乎更乐于表现给大家现实的腐朽和未来恐怖的可能。无论现实生活多么不稳定，但却肯定是非常有趣的。这一特性有赖于吕鹏在作品中孜孜不倦的努力而得以体现，他有意让人群体现出一种对生活失去掌控的状态。通过评判吕鹏的内省和通过以往对吕鹏作品中没有稳定文化结构的体验，我们的心理防线会被物质浪潮彻底击破，其结果不仅不会导致，更有可能避免人生的无意义感的发生。无论如何，也许正是由于吕鹏驾驭寓言的技巧和能力，他的作品的意义超越了单纯的悲观主义论述。吕鹏表现了过多的训练，其宗旨不过是为了纪录自我异化和社会失范的不同阶段。他的努力杜绝了对他作品的误读。他的人物繁忙而丰富，充满活力，文化氛围包围着它的敌手，哪怕无法将他们转变。其结果是，在已变得混乱不堪的世界中，一些进步还是产生了。吕鹏的作品告诉我们，身为中国人，也就是身为世界人，时常被疏离所困扰。如果他的作品无法挽回过往的时光，那也并非他的过错——同样的状态也困扰着他——其实是困扰着我们所有人——那力量太强大，无法改变。他的作品清晰地表明，他也像我们所有人一样在挣扎，试图在困惑中保持清醒。

　　注：Jonathan Goodman：美国当代艺术评论家，长期关注中国当代艺术，现居纽约。

Lu Peng: Bits and Pieces

　　"As we have no cultural system to rely on, culture seems to be in a state of chaos" - so writes Li Xianting, one of China's most prominent critics, in a short essay on the painter Lu Peng. Given the massive changes taking place in today's China, it is hard to formulate an esthetic that would do justice to the "chaos" Li describes. Like all artists in a postindustrial, postmodern society, Chinese painters have a choice: they can strive (usually in vain) to maintain traditional values or they can commit themselves to a language that documents, without judgment, the hodgepodge of materialism and cultures much of the world is now accustomed to. One would like to add that Lu, like other Chinese artists, is addressing a spiritual crisis, but such an emphasis presupposes a vacuum that must be filled, and unfortunately such emptiness is in fact being stuffed to the point of absurdity with material goods. This is of course by now a commonplace, yet such truisms hold sway because they are timely and accurate. Lu looks at his world and finds it surreal, and so he presents us with unreal portraits of youth at sea - literally floating in an atmosphere of traditional landscape and contemporary costumes. Most of his figures wear sunglasses, as if to see through the dark.

　　However symbolic Lu's art may be, we feel an uncomfortable awareness that his tableaux of teenagers flying into space, accompanied by diminutive immortals, are literal as well as emblematic. No social structure sustains them; they are quite literally at sea. Lu may not be questioning why his compositions relate a grimly humorous reality; the expression on the faces of his figures is indifferent to the point of vacancy. They, like so many Westerners, remain imprisoned by their very history, now consumed by the act of purchase, with consumption inevitably, and ineffectually, serving to assuage the gnawing hunger brought about by the pursuit of pleasure and thoughtless affluence. One senses that Lu is in pursuit of a metaphor, a reading that would do justice to the complex reality he has given himself to describe, only to find that art cannot do full justice to the maelstrom of things we surround ourselves with. It is hard enough to survive psychically in an atmosphere in which tradition has been replaced by the barrenness of postmodern life; relations take on a meaningless cast because no one can keep still long enough to develop trust.

　　The joys of eroticism thus replace those of long - standing affection; sexuality not only sells things, it has become a goal in and of itself. This comment is hardly new or incisive, yet it points out the extent to which our senses now govern us (for example, Wei Dong, the New York City area - based painter, has made sex his primary theme). But however satiated Lu's Chinese youth may be, lit luridly by red light and shadow, they express a disconnectedness that exists in sharp contrast to the figures of story and myth that accompany them. Liu floods his composition with random effects, in the hope of finding some sense of a tie, but common ground eludes the persons who sail through his paintings; they never seem to exist in relation to each other. Still, the situation they are enmeshed in never descends to tragedy; alienation is a far better word for the blankness of their stare. Indeed, the struggle is psychological far more than it is political; personal freedom has its horrific aspect in the face of social monotony. There is some small hope, however; Lu's paintings usually include images taken from Chinese historical art - a crane, for example, or a heavenly landscape, or a mythical god. These images offer a diminished context, not entirely lost, that serves as an alternative, no matter how exhausted traditional Chinese culture may be.

　　The contrast between legacies and contemporaneity would all but swallow up Lu's tension - driven approach to life in New China - if it were not for the sense of play and remarkable technical skill he displays as an artist. His recent acrylic works demonstrate a complete command of the medium; he is capable of building complex imageries whose structure is crowded with flying youth. In one recent painting, immortals cross a gray sea; painted en masse, so that one can hardly assign a body to a head, the spiritual beings come across as agents of anarchy, so completely ambiguous are their pose and their purpose. Art being what it is, Lu cannot propose a completely alternative world, for that kind of vision would be implausible in its implications. Instead, Lu gives us the world as it is, although it is haunted by its presentiments of purposelessness as well as its facile assimilation of historical fact. It is of course absurd to entertain notions of classical restraint in the franchised world of Starbucks and Pizza Huts, but Lu appears to be driven to the point of obsession in his conflation of what is and what was. Historical demons mix with characters from the Chinese opera; chaos arrives as the inevitable conclusion to social processes overwhelming the artist himself.

　　It is hardly possible to bridge the gap between epochs, and any attempt at doing so may be fairly seen as sentimentality. The question, then, is, What shall we do to alleviate our longing for cultural discourse that solidifies rather than tears apart social relations? The kind of reality we come across in Lu's paintings can hardly be said to synthesize the eclecticism of his vision; rather, things of the past remain things of the past, so that the effect of the painting is like a vortex or tornado: objects are pushed around in glancing contact with the persons in the composition. The overall effect is one of amazing disorder, which serves as a warning not only to the Chinese but to all of us. We remember at this point that capitalism is relatively new to Chinese culture, but already the signs of spiritual collapse have been central to many artists working in the Mainland. These issues are old hat to Americans, who live out daily the consequences of absent meaning. But to a painter like Lu, they are more invasive, in the sense that people remember something different. Just as the hutongs have been destroyed in favor of high - rise apartments, so have cultural memories been lost in favor of internationalized life, whose engines are materialism and constant desire.

　　It may be argued that the personae of Lu's imagination exist within a time frame, a window that emphasizes the current, as opposed to the historical, effects of cultural life. This emphasis, though, is not without its cost. Lu ends up exchanging tradition for the more recent aspects of Chinese life, in particular its eroticism and rootlessness. Yet the general tenor of his art emphasizes a certain loss of dignity, a loss that is not ameliorated even by his inclusion of gods from historical painting. Unfortunately, there is not much else for the artist to do - Lu cannot return to classicism, as positive as it may look to him, while his expressionist compositions can often look rude. Desire plays an important role in the artist's attempt to translate the obvious into something approaching a transcendent spirit - there is a reason for his painting the immortals. Essentially, however, they are out of reach, falling and failing the needs of contemporary life. Art cannot transform the social realities of today's China, but it can express metaphors that change our relations with a culture that appears determined to put the past behind it. The figure with a bowl haircut and John Lennon sunglasses looks like a stand-in for the artist himself; he doesn't do anything in particular, beside participating in the general disorder surrounding him.

　　In a couple of works, Lu paints his figures engaged in kung fu movements; this discipline is taken up by the artist's alter ego, the figure in sunglasses, as though the exercise were a touchstone for remaining focused on inherited traditions in Chinese culture. Yet the practice seems to founder in the face of philosophical disarray - nothing holds up Lu's youthful protagonists, who are flung into space without any means of support. If the free fall seen again and again in Lu's art works out to be a metaphor for uncertainty and unrest, viewers can only murmur at his conceptual excess. My feeling is that Lu's extravagances are deliberate, for they don't so much forge ties between different epochs as depict juxtapositions that mix everything up, including cultural values and people. It is extremely difficult to read any kind of historical continuity in Lu's work, which reminds us of our inherent isolation in both a specifically Chinese and universal context. All of our cultural apparel cannot defeat the strong tides of capitalism, which Lu implicitly views as a never - ending force. Even the advantages of art seem suspect, for in the long run, they too remain unable to transform the circumstances of either painter or audience. Still, the paintings cannot be seen as entirely pessimistic, since the act of art alone carries with it the implications of fulfilled desire.

　　The search for common ground through the presentation of play stays key to Lu's work. The artist belongs to his work, but he does not redeem its implications, whieh we now know to be problematic and fragmented. There is no one who bears responsibility for the archness and emptiness of Lu's presentations; in fact, Lu's technical skill is a way of bearing up in the face of forces beyond anyone's control. Lu crowds his compositions with characters who are suggestive of a dream; however, it is hard to say whether that dream can move beyond the circumstances he so richly describes. Although chaos cannot be transcended, its imminence and dense activities are not without their interest. Art thus becomes both more and less than its theme, which translates pictorial space into the realm of social commentary. Like many Chinese artists of his generation, Lu uses figurative art to observe China's new mores, which have more in common with the West than ever before. This presupposes a shared task, namely, that of resisting such globalization as innately destructive to traditions in both Asia and the West. One wants China to remain Chinese, after all, even if that means a certain indifference toward cultural positions expressed in America and other highly developed countries.

　　It is hard to say whether Lu is painting out of a sense of the past; he seems more interested in showing us the decay of the present and the terrible promises of the future. However unstable contemporary life may be, it has the inevitable quality of being interesting. This attribute accounts for the persistent effects of Lu's paintings, which deliberately are crowded with figures who appear to have lost control of their lives. We remember critic Li's insight now and throughout our experience of Lu's art - without a stable cultural structure, our psychological themes will be taken over by a tidal wave of things, which do not generate but rather prevent individual meaningfulness in people's lives. Somehow, perhaps because of Lu's technical skill and ability to work with allegory, the art becomes more than a mere statement of pessimism. Lu shows too much discipline merely to be documenting various stages of alienation and anomie. The sheer fact of his efforts excludes a purely negative reading of his art. His compositions are essentially busy, indeed teeming, with life and activity; culture surrounds his antagonists even if they are unable to make good its potential for spiritual change. As a result, some progress is made in a world that has become full of chaotic distress. Lu's art, then, shows us that being Chinese is also being human in a world that regularly inspires isolation. If his paintings do not completely redeem their time, that is not his fault - the situations facing him - indeed, facing us all - are too powerful to completely transform. His reports make it only too clearthat he is struggling like the rest of us, that he is trying to stay focused in the midst of confusion.

Jonathan Goodman

作者：Jonathan,Goodman