作为一位女性艺术家，黄莺并没有将性别作为创作的唯一理由，而是把自我的身体和形象作为艺术表现的载体，主观编织出了一种“虚拟的现实镜像”，即前期实拍和后期创意合成的创作方式，重新界定了真实与仿真、自然与人造的世界。她用两年时间完成的全新创作给人以耳目一新的感觉。
　　黄莺的艺术传递出的那种“仙镜”与其说呈现了一种自我探寻之路，倒不如说表现出了艺术家个人内心的自由领地。这种境界是她期盼的一种乌托邦之境，一种通过技术美学实现的理想之地，一种虚拟的精神世界。正是在这样一种探寻中，她在自我与环境、真实与虚构、时间与空间的多重关系中发现新的可能性。面对一个自我消失的世界，黄莺反思自我的存在意义，她热衷于身体的肢体语言，因为身体是非常个人化的，也是私密的。其独特性在于具有无限的可塑性。她将身体置于一个虚幻现实中，营造出介乎于现实与梦境之间的模糊地带，犹如传统中国画的诗性美学，无论她摄影中的冰山，还是长城，或者冰的海洋，都变成为一种“可居可游”的精神世界。她身体上的毛发并没有与自然形成对立，而更像是从大自然中的延伸物，既原始又质朴，既轻盈又诗意。事实上，在艺术家看来，身体上毛的象征性就在于“自身滋长出来抵抗外界冲击的一种状态，一种保护，一种力量”。
　　这里，她显然用毛充当一种微妙的桥梁，表达了一种既适应与保护又防御与抵抗的意识。从这一视角出发，她主观想象和营造了一个自我的世外桃源，一个远离世俗的超真实的世界。虽然她的摄影和录像并没有对现实世界表现出直率观点，但这种冷寂的图像本身在某种意义上正折射出艺术家对当代商业社会尔虞我诈、急功近利、物质主义横行的反思和批判。黄莺的摄影之所以以身体作为表现媒介，就在于身体蕴涵了太多的人类学内涵，身体蕴涵异质的力量，往往映射出他者的欲望——身体作为被凝视的对象，是一种唤起人的情感冲动的驱动力，是一种承载着社会伦理的载体。
　　然而，黄莺并没有选择这种赋予身体的社会内涵，而是让身体除去任何特定的标识，变成了一种抽象的、形而上的东西。她并不是选择主体与客体、顺从与抗争的对立，而是强调在日常与异常、真实与超真实中寻找某种新的契合点，这是她试图建立的美学平衡点：人与环境的互动性、适应性和抽象性正好体现了黄莺追求的东方美学——内敛而柔美，冷俊而诗性。值得注意的是，她在最新的作品中摒弃了以往传统的形式，而是大量运用了跨学科的方法，如电影镜头、蒙太奇、叙事间断、3D技术的合成，改变了对特定的空间和时间的认知，巧妙将中国美学与现代艺术语言相结合。
　　黄莺表现出那种还原自我的过程更像是一个发现和塑造自我的过程：人与自然、人与现实之间建立起互为的有机关系。她将身体变成了自我突破口，身体被层层剥离，从自然的身体到社会的身体，从科学的身体到艺术的身体。尽管如此，身体被赋予复杂的内涵和意义。黄莺把“身体”置于一个交织着自由与限制的空间中，意欲“是在表达生命与环境的相互作用和关系”。在这样的关系中，她不仅把空间与身体的关系处理成了视觉表现的张力，而且用诗一般的摄影语言模糊了真实与虚构的二元对立的世界，并将人变成了可以象征性拥有的物体。
　　黄莺以摄影来证明现实与美化的经验，她将这种经验转变成一种观看方式。她的摄影什么也不会解释，但它会让人们去自由的演绎、推测和想象。她的摄影没有明确说明什么，但它还是可以强化出某种立场——并可以催生某种观点。今天，摄影不再遵循已往的线性视觉逻辑，而是在新的电脑技术介入下采用挪用、复制和拼贴的方法进行重新编码，从而解构了自然和现实中的各种物像，并建构了新的摄影语言。正是基于这样的艺术逻辑和技术美学，黄莺将其摄影和录像进行观念化的处理，进而生成了某种新的艺术语言和意义指涉。
　　如鲍德里亚（JeanBaudrillard）认为的那样，艺术是一种无目的性的模拟（simulations），徘徊在每一件事物之上，包括技术性模拟、声名难定的审美愉悦。但不可否认，当艺术进入了生产与再生产过程的时候，它要面对诸如日常生活和平庸的现实，这一切都可以成为审美表现的对象。正是因为后现代主义提示了一种新的方法论，黄莺的艺术维度恰恰就在于她以新的影像语言对人与环境、现实与虚拟加以再观念化（re-conception），从而产生了新的审美意识：一种消解韵味（de-auraticization），一种欲望美学，一种诡异形式。她的摄影作品“嬗”则充分体现了这种新的审美原则——让积淀于历史和文化的图象“韵味”消失，凸显的是人与动物间的难分难解。她把蜻蜓比喻为“自我与他者之间的对抗”。蜻蜓被放大后，“它的结构又比较雄性，更像一台精密仪器，我试图在作品中抽离出它的魂来，表现那种非现实的感觉，有些神秘。它一方面是你内心里的一种情绪的表现，一方面它也代表着外界的一个环境”。蜻蜓与人的关系则产生了一种纠结、混乱、敏感、烦恼、矛盾和纠缠。

　　所以，蜻蜓与人关系是一种对话，是一种共舞，是一种角斗。在这个意义上，照片自身进入了一个真实与虚构难以区分的境地，仿真变成了真实，真实又变成了仿真。艺术家在这个空间中发现了表现自我的自由地带。正如黄莺所表述的那样，“我的创作过程是一个逐步抽离的过程，也就是寻找表达的语言方式逐渐纯粹化的过程”。她把摄影看作捕捉社会和生活中短暂的、瞬间即逝的图象的媒介，这个媒介也体现了人与自然之间的对话中所表现出艺术家的态度、立场和观点。
　　可以说，黄莺的作品仍延用中国文化的传统美学要素，把自然与自我看作是一个整体。身体是自然的延伸，自然则关照了身体的存在。人在现实中把自然与自我相联系，这样的互补关系形成中国人的自然观。
　　虽然黄莺在作品中把身体与冰床、冰山和楼台亭阁生成为一种她称之为的“仙镜”，但她的艺术语言还是反映了中国人独有的自然观和美学观。她的摄影画面流露的断裂、重叠、不稳定的氛围，恰恰反映了艺术家具有的强烈的生命政治意识——一种对主体与客体、人与自然关系的发问，一种对人类欲望无限扩张的批判。正是在这个意义上，黄莺的作品呈现出自然而质朴的视觉表现力，除了给人以美的视觉享受，还对人起到一种心理“疗伤”的作用和“警世”意义。因此，黄莺通过带有禅意的影像理念和方法表达了“主客合一”的视觉哲理和心理抚慰。

黄笃（独立策展人）　　

My Mirrored Realm：the Free Territory of Huang Ying's Art
　　Unlike many other female artists who work singly around gender issues, Huang Ying chooses her body and images to be the vessel of artistic expression, and has subjectively weaved out a so-called "simulated mirrored realm of reality". Combining hand shooting and post-production, Huang has re-defined the boundary between the real and the simulated, the natural and the artificial. Within two years she added to her oeuvre a refreshing new body of works.

　　The "mirrored realm" in Huang Ying's art, not so much as a quest for the self, is more of a free terrain fabricated in the artist's mind, a utopia that she has long aspired to, an idealized place realized through technical aesthetics, a simulated spiritual home. In such practice Huang attempts to spot new possibilities at the junction of the self and the world, the real and the simulated, time and space. Facing a world where the self gradually dissolves, Huang questions the meaning of existence. She is fascinated by the body, a highly personal, and private medium, and by the body's infinite malleability. She transports the body into a simulated realm, creating a blurry terrain between dream and reality, much akin to the poetic aesthetics in traditional Chinese ink paintings. The iceberg, the Great Wall, or the icy oceans in her photographs are spiritual terrains that could be both travelled and dwelled upon. The hairs on her body do not stand in opposition to nature, but rather, serve as an extension of nature. They are genuine, pristine, lighthearted and full of poetry. From the artist's perspective, the symbolism of hairs is "a state of mind, a protection, a force" that grown out of one's own body in resistance of exterior elements.

　　Here, she is obviously using the hair as a subtle metaphor for a consciousness that is at once adapting and protecting, resisting and defensing. From here on she fabricates a dreamland out of her own will, a surreal world far from the rule of social conventions. Although her photos and videos do not comment directly on the real world, the calm, detached images per se show the artist's reflection and criticism of the deceptions, avarice and materialism of the contemporary commercialized society. Huang Ying chooses the body as the medium for its heavy anthropological implications. The body is often a mirrored reflection of the desires of others. An object of the gaze, the body can easily evoke emotional impulses and act as a mirror of the ethos.

　　However, Huang Ying deliberately avoid assigning specific social implication to the body, instead she takes away all its cliché tags and renders it abstract and metaphysical. She evades from usual binary oppositions such as subject-object, compliance-rebellion, emphasizing the new conjunction point between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the real and the surreal, an aesthetic balance point she ventures to strike. The interaction, adaptation and abstraction between human and its environment best elucidate the Oriental aesthetics that Huang Ying inherits. It is reserved and graceful, calm and poetic. It is worth special notice that this time Huang Ying breaks far off from conventions and embraces a broad range of cross-disciplinary practices, such as film shooting, montage, narrative disruption and 3D synthesis. Not only does she change stereotypical view of space and time, she also succeeds in elegantly weaving together traditional undertones with a contemporary expression.

　　Huang Ying's self-restoration is the rediscovery and rebuild of the self: the interactive, organic relationship between man and nature, man and reality. Setting the body as the starting point, she strips it off its layers of meanings, from the natural body to the social, from the physiological body to the artistic. Nevertheless, her body imagery is still loaded with a myriad of connotations. Huang Ying put the body at the crossroad of freedom and restrain, "articulating the mutual impacts and relations between living things and the environment." She not only charges the body-environment relationship with visual intensity, but also blurs the binary opposition between the real and the surreal through her poetic languages, and renders the human an object of symbolic possession.
　　Huang Ying invites photography to witness the experience of reality and simulation. She then transforms such experience into a way of seeing. Her photos do not speak out loudly but allow much room for free interpretation, speculation and imagination. They do not make a concrete statement. Still one can detect some sort of stance-from which one can derive opinions. Photography of today no longer follows the linear visual logic of the past, with the impacts of computer-inspired techniques, such as appropriation, copy and collages, photography constantly refreshes itself and arrive at a new set of codes, deconstructing the abundance of images in nature and reality. It is based on such artistic logic and technical aesthetics that Huang Ying conceptualizes her photos and videos, thus grasping new expressions and implications.

　　Just as Jean Baudrillard once pointed out, art is a kind of aimless simulation. It lingers above a certain object, including technical simulation, and the aesthetic pleasure that is difficult to define. But we cannot deny that once art enters the process of production and reproduction, it has to face an ordinary, even mundane reality. All of these can be the objects of aesthetic renditions. Post-modernism once gave us some clue to a new approach. Huang Ying's achievement lies precisely in her application of a brand new set of photographic codes to re-conceptualize the man-environment, reality-simulation binaries. From here a new aesthetic consciousness is born: a kind of de-auraticization, aspiration aesthetics, and a form of idiosyncrasy. Her work "Metamorphosis" fully embraces the new aesthetic principal-doing away with the historical and cultural "aura" surrounding the object, while highlighting the subtle entanglement between the human and the animal. She compares the dragonfly to "the battle between the self and the other". After being magnified, the dragonfly's " masculine structure bear resemblance to a precision instrument. I try to extract its soul and show the sensation of the ethereal, the mystery. On one side it exposes inner emotions, on the other it is also the mirrored reflection of the exterior world." The dragonfly-human relationship gives rise to a series of emotional involvement, sensations, anxiety, conflicts and complications.

　　As a result, such relationship amounts to some sort of dialogue, choreograph, or even a combat. In this sense, the photo enters a nuanced realm in which the simulated becomes the real and the real becomes the simulated. It is here that the artist finds her own free terrain. As it is in the artist's own words, "My work is a gradual process of extraction, an ongoing process of purifying the expression. " She regards photography the perfect medium for capturing momentary, fleeting images in society and in life. The medium also serves as a mirror of the attitude, stance and viewpoint of the artist conveyed through the human-nature dialogue.
　　It's safe to say that Huang Ying's work is deeply indebted to traditional aesthetics of the Chinese culture, so much so that she regards the nature and the self an inseparable whole, the body, an extension of nature, while nature, a mirror of the bodily existence. Man connects the dots between nature and the self through living in reality. Such complementary relationship forms the Chinese outlook of nature.

　　Though Huang combines images of the body with those of the ice beds, icebergs, Chinese-style pavilions and pagodas, and with these raw materials fabricates what she termed "the mirrored realm", her aesthetics and philosophies are still, decidedly Chinese. The disruption, repetition and unrest in her images simply show that the artist has a strong bio-political consciousness-questioning the relationships between the subject and the object, human and nature, criticizing the ever-growing human desires. It is in this sense that Huang Ying's work attains its pristine visual expressiveness. Much more than just giving out eye candies, they also served as a form of psycho "therapy" or social "warning". In her Zen-like images and approaches, Huang Ying instills a visual philosophy and a healing process based on"subject-object harmony".

Huang Du(Curator)

作者：黄笃