The role of quantification in everyday life constitutes one of the most conflicted tenets in our rapidly accelerating global society. It would appear that all aspects of human life are in the process of becomingsubjected to various codes, passwords, and numbers that presumably represent the inevitability of a hyper-structure in our everyday lives. At the other end of the spectrum, one might ask: Is it possible that this overriding emphasis on quantity in today's world is misleading? Are we going in the wrong direction? There is evidence that a significant number of human beings have lost the notion of meaning in their lives - not solely from a materialist perspective - but in ways more significant. One of the major, unspoken questions in today's environment- deliberately evaded by commercial media - is how to find a balance in a way that satisfies our fundamental human need for stability as we embark on a course of living with artificial intelligence. There are some who believe the answer is not solely related to high-level investments, block chain technology, and other financial proprieties, but may also be discovered through an innately discernable search for quality and meaning in the presence of art that would also include our desire to find emotional and spiritual fulfillment.

　　In the context of this statement, I would like to introduce the work of the artist, Deng Guo Yuan, whose involvement in art has taken him to many areas of investigation, both complex and intriguing.  The complexity has a metaphysical aspect to it as well as a biomorphic one in that he appears to be dealing with matter and form in ways that go beyond the normative world into a vast imaginative territory that surpasses ordinary events and perceptions of routine behavior. What strikes me as significant in Deng's work is his ability to construct an alternative world based on the parallel reality of the imagination. This realityencompasses the artist's Chinese tradition as he concurrently moves through other galaxies of thought that propose to impact the course of human life. As Deng has made clear, the world of his imagination is one removed from how he lives in the reality of the present.  It is a vastly different world, one that we might expect from artists who are perpetually in the process of inventing new systems of thought, which is, for the most part, outside or beyond the reaches of everyday life.

　　Like many artists, Deng has constructed a mythological world that encompasses

　　another reality, a reality that he invents and re-invents in his studio from one day to the next.  His mythical context is complex and open to many different ideas and forms of interpretation.  Critics will often read what they see or how they think in relation to the artist's work; but Deng's work should be seen and understood from an independent, autonomous point of view. He has been influenced by the ancient Chinese legends and the stories born from Classical literature that revolve around the history of what has occurred in the mountains and rivers throughout his country. These are myths and folklore embedded in different geographies. Their various locations are largely in the interior of China. They are stories that lend themselves to the artist's transformative idea of art, and stories that embed the truths he has learned from the past.

　　At the same time that Deng is influenced by these traditions in the context of nature, he is also cognizant of the deluge of mass-produced objects that have come into our fast-paced commercial environment - plastic toys and dolls and machine parts that are designed for children to play.  But in the case of Deng, they are not merely for play, they also suggest a future world in which the problems of everyday life are surmounted through fakery and the encroachment generated by artificial intelligence (AI). As a kind of prediction of the future, the artist takes these manufactured toys, animals, machines parts, and life-like dolls into his reality. As he mutates these animal toys with one another, he is also reflecting on the process that genetic mutations will inevitably come through scientific laboratories and ultimately will integrate themselves into the human population.  What happens when the genetic structure of a marine creature - a shark or a whale or a crab or a lobster - is mutated with a mammal whose history has always been  on the land?  Will this hybrid creature have a better life in the throes of trying to exist in a foreign, unknown environment? And what happens if machine parts replace intestines or armatures of the human body as they are already doing?  What will be the impact of further experimentation on human life and on the world as we know it today?

　　For the artist, Deng Guo Yuan, the schemata he has outlined moves from the ancient past into the present and ultimately to an unknown future. He begins with his "Lorely's Garden" in which he constructs cubistic taiku rocks. Instead of the natural form of rocks, the structures are geometrically constructed using steel pipes and LED lamps. The variety of these structures, when seen together in a darkened space, is mesmerizing. Whether of not, one thinks of the ancient past is almost irrelevant. The fact of the matter is that these forms give a new look to "scholars' rocks" and are perhaps more in keeping with the postmodern present. Another category referred to as "The Gardens of the Gods and Gods of a New Classicism of Mountains and Rivers" is also a provocation, but in a vastly different way.  Here the artist is morphing the appearance of dolls and various toys through his own set of mutations. His suppressed anxieties relate to the future and begin to reveal themselves both in terms of "scientific" mutations and the out-of-control usage of AI (artificial intelligence).

　　In a series of works referred to as "Revelation," Deng goes further in working with neon signs and words. He enters into the virtual world of a heightened artificial intelligence that has lost control of its own facility.  In "The Passing of the Gods and Apocalypse," his exorbitant light installations are directly based on genetic mutations, AI codifications, and quantum physics. Deng claims to worry about the future as he proceeds to work on these projects - all part of a grand myth - yet he also appears committed to realizing these structures as biomorphic systems emanating through nature as he elevates these systems into a hyper-surreal environment. Essentially this is a metaphorical world that one might consider parallel to the reality of another world.  It is a dream world exploited and developed in a manner that obscures our understanding of what human beings have grown accustomed to over thousands of years. It would appear that Deng Guo Yuan's position as an artist is to challenge the reality of the past in such a way that we stare into his mirrored installations where tiny specimens of fantastical life abound.  While we may not know exactly what we are perceiving, we understand they are something from the unconscious than has suddenly come into our conscious world.

　　Might we call it a new way of thinking and seeing?  This is possible, but also commonplace?  It has been said before in the work of the Surrealists, the Hyperrealists and the Neo-Dadaists, among countless others. But these are Western forms of art, not necessarily Chinese.  Therefore, it may be the right time to turn the tables and to look at Deng's array of intensely severe installations as being the result of a culture that skipped over modernism and moved directly from an oppressive past into a postmodern phase that has now begun to blossom into something far beyond what the Western world would have imagined a half-century ago.  Indeed, this is the time for an artist like Deng Guo Yuan to emerge in coming to terms with how the impending future with all its scientific and pseudo-scientific baggage impacts the direction of Chinese art. His fabulous creatures exert a resonance that life on Earth may still be the source for the human imagination to spring forth. They offer fantastic qualitative possibilities for how to think and understand one another through the medium of cultural exchange.

作者：Robert C. Morgan