There have been significant changes in Guan Yong’s paintings between 2009 and 2012, such transformation could be concluded as one that is from iconizing to painterliness, which is also an apparent shift in the general practice of Chinese contemporary painting. On the other hand, we are still unclear about the conceptions that we are used to describe this kind of transformation and not yet able to put them in context.

　　Painting - Image

　　Guan’s style was not “iconizing” until later on in his career. When Guan had just graduated from the Tianjin Art Institute in 1998, his style of painting was far from being iconizing. In Two Are Not Strangers (1998), he used a muskier, darker palette, painted in a simpler style, where his ability to model forms was still very visible. The subject of this painting are two blasé men sitting on a bench in front of a fence, where a pedestrian is passing by behind. Although the composition of this image is gravitated to the left, the subjects are looking to the right, shifting our focus psychologically. Futhermore, the white of the eyes had been deliberately painted whiter than usual, hence immediately becoming the center of gravitation, thereby drawing our attention to the direction of where the subjects are looking.

　　This painting is most likely based on a snapshot that captures an atypical, non-narrative moment. This snapshot aesthetic was clearly shown in Guan's paintings at that time. His brushstrokes were more spontaneous, almost careless, in many ways jeopardizing the standard of what art institutions required in style - texture and aestheticism. His methods dramatized the instantaneous sensation of snapshots and delivered the fleetingness of subjective emotions and sentiments – it was one of the most significant examples of figurative expressionism at the time.

　　Guan's style became more iconizing in the millennium. In Connection Landscape (2000), the spontaneity of brush strokes was controlled, and the ambiguous snapshot was replaced by the well-defined historical image. This work was divided into two parts, where the image on the right derives from a well-known painting from the cultural revolution - Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan (1968); in this adaptation, Chairman Mao is rescaled to a much smaller size; this once symbolically heroic image got integrated into the transparency of realism, merging the human figure into the landscape. On the left, is a scene of a man sketching infront of his easel in the same landscape as the right, and what he sketches is exactly what the audience is looking at - a man sketching infront of his easel, whereby creating an infinitely extending nested structure within the image. When the counterparts are placed together, a co-referencing world appears. Guan's borrowing from the historical image was not to convey his viewpoint on history, but rather, in this work, a Magritte-esque visual characterization. It is at this point that Guan abandoned his previous tendencies towards expressionism, neutralizing his personal style, as though it was to enter a purely conceptual horizon; and if it were so, then painting itself would become secondary, as it would merely be a medium for image-making; in other words, “what to paint” had more significance at this point than “how to paint”.

　　Image - Conception

　　In the painting-image-conception framework, the term “iconizing” becomes overtly ambiguous and vague for contextualizing visual language. This is because image itself embodies a sense of transition. We use the term “painterly” to highlight the stylisation of brush strokes and textures in paintings, while describing the smooth application of paint to surface as “iconizing,” though this kind of differentiation is superficial - the technique itself is to weaken its own significance, to minimize its corporal interference and to directly present the concept. This is to say, while comparing painting and image, it is in fact drawing a comparison between visual and language.

　　After Connection Landscape (2000), Guan developed a series of works between 2000 and 2008 that was informed by symbolism. They were mostly of human figures that represented young intellectuals or characters that mock the cadre members. The composition and the gestures of the characters were often borrowed from classics, and the main color palette is of a contrasting black with red and yellow - the large red curtains overtakes significant portions of the image, creating a strong theatrical presence. While Guan simultaneously employed visual elements that were borrowed from two different symbolic systems - the Chinese revolution aestheticism and the Western classical aestheticism, these elements were intentionally separated from both their original form and sense of aesthetics, thereby constructing a Utopian world. This world was a re-representation of the representation, the mirror-image of a mirror, and so to speak, what these works were, were yet another game of symbolic images, where these signifiers also belonged to the symbolic system.

　　The nature of the linguistic system is essentially images as co-referencing signifiers, which is perhaps applicable to any system. Any word in the dictionary needs to be explained by more words, and it is exactly these inter-explanatory words that form the entire dictionary. In this sense, Guan's works from this period were a series of images that employed the Western system of painting and the image of Chinese socialist culture, simultaneously creating interrelating ideas. These ideas lacked the practical linguistic contextualization, though the audience would always read them in their own context and see these works as a quasi-irony of ideology.

　　Conception - Experience

　　The transformation in Guan’s practice since 2009 becomes significant in this context, as it shifted from being in the symbolic, literary and conceptual world, back to a painterly, empirical world mode from the beginning of his career.

　　This transformation is most typically seen in his "bookshelves"- in Guan's earlier works, symbolic elements such as red books, pens, desks and characters of intellectuals were employed, as were bookshelves, though in these works, they merely played the role as a background or a prop, yet another symbolic image that represented knowledge and language. The significance of these bookshelves shifted in Guan's paintings in 2009. Firstly, they became the emphasis, placed with more significance in the composition of the image while taking up larger surface areas, with more details and sometimes even more so than the human figures. As they eventually became the subject of the image, the human figures became significantly flatter than they were before; secondly, the bookshelves were no longer just objects in the paintings, in fact the books-filled shelves almost made the paintings themselves the objects of sensory; and thirdly, on this basis, the corporality of the paintings e.g. colors, pigments and texture became emphasized, the spectators’ experience, the original symbolic images thereby transformed into images of sensory.

　　Guan’s focus shifted from being conceptual to empirical. Where conceptions are abstract, common and absent, the empirical is definite, personal and present. Guan gradually gave up the symbolic system that he was once familiar with and eventually faced the canvas infront of him in the utmost pure sense, which eventually had a significant impact on his practice overall. From conception to empirical refers to the significance of the shift from the conceptual back to the corporal. If a painting is regarded as a symbolic image, then the content and the concept within would create a signifier/signified relationship, and the content of form with the content of image would create another set of indication - this is also the three layers in the study of iconology, they are codependent and co-propellant, none of which is autonomous. Take Courbet as an example, his conceptions of realism are present in the three layers of his paintings - such as the leftist-idealism in the conception (idea); the images drawn from daily life (subject matter); and in form, as in how the paint is marked on the surface (image), the three layers that construct his realism in its entirety.

　　Empirical – Reality

　　After the "bookshelves" series, Guan began a new series of works on studios. This ongoing series was inspired by Francis Bacon's studio. Bacon's studio was a total mess where layers of disused paint were on top of one another. Each time after painting, the useless paint would normally be scraped off the palette, but Bacon preferred to have them left everywhere. The room was infested with the accumulating disused paint i.e. the remains from painting, all around the room. For a painter, the process of painting is one that is of incorporating paint into the visual order of the surface, and the remains on the palette are on the other hand, bits and pieces that have been rejected by an aesthetic order. The interesting thing is that, in the most recent works of Guan, he has allowed these remains to be incorporated back into the image where they had been excluded. It is as though the disused paint was taken straight from the palette and scraped onto the canvas. At this point, his paintings became more textural and delicate, and an interaction inbetween the two had been stimulated. The marks of disused paint in the image and the clusters of paint (form) that float on the image and do not fit in its content, urge a sort of interaction between the visual and the tactile, and at the same time, gain the painting a definite sensory existence. The practicality of this empirical layer could also transform into the actuality of the image, and propel this set of philosophical issues of “what is reality” and “how to discuss reality” into the conception behind painting.

　　This definite existence of perception is in fact the reality of painting, though reality is not realism - reality could not be conceptualized by any ideology, because reality is far from any symbolic system, perhaps, the conception of the so-called reality that we are so used to, should be redefined by the Lacan’s theory of The Real, this is to say that, reality is irreproducible, just as mirrors could not be mirrored. In this sense, Guan’s paintings of the studio do not reproduce reality, but rather, the photos of the studio are painted, where photos are merely secondary realities. On the other hand, just as a mirror need not to be mirrored, a painting is already a definite reality in itself that does not need to be reproduced.

Bao Dong

2012/9/14

作者：Bao,Dong