It is believed that a masterpiece either ushers in a new style or breaks through the existing ones. In front of Mr. Shen Yantian’s paintings, we are struck by a peculiar feeling: we feel like watching the collections in a science museum. Not only are we amazed by the nature’s wonder, but we also cannot help admiring the fantastic immaterialness represented through the material images. Those drifting, rolling and surging blocks, heaps and bays strive to stand out from the canvas, unfolding patches and patches of dazzling colors. There are movements and stillness of time and space amidst the implication of various colors. These convey the sense of tension which generates a strong impact to our eyes. At this moment, whether an old style is broken or a new one is created, it does not matter. Needless to say, the materialness that Mr. Shen’s painting carry does not correspond to the world we see with our eyes.It would also be too simplistic to assume that those works are abstract paintings without meanings to convey and thus they do not allow interpretations. As a matter of act, the images in those works look familiar to us. We seem to come across those mysterious, flowing, and even momently frozen images in our past life, not because the painting is just a repetition of some previous master or it resembles a certain art school. Thus we would intentionally try to seek nonartistic evidence for proofs through our memory and experience. By thinking and reflecting, we finally get the key — Mr. Shen’s works have recorded our unconsciousness.
　　Artists usually seek to resonate with both the inner and outer world by means of mimicry, interpretation, narration and expression in the reconstruction of a new world on the canvas. However, during the process of echoing the world, abstract paintings shift the perspective from the binary inner-outer world perceived by the naked eyes to a unitary world seen by the mind’s eye. The mind’s eye, blind to the outer world, is of inward-looking, introspective, and individual character. Abstract paintings hence are much entitled with an air of mystery and suspension, deficient of directness or panoramas. With regard to its method of expression, abstract art seem to lay more emphasis on forms and techniques rather than contents and meanings. It pursues to depict or represent the imagined world existing in both the consciousness and unconsciousness of the painter. However, as impressionists like Paul Cezanne tried to depict the immaterial such as air and mist, abstract paintings aim to display the existence of unconsciousness discerned by no one but the painter himself. As the result, different painters have different styles of their own. Wu Guanzhong’s abstract paintings demonstrate the stress on aestheticism; Zhao Wuji’s works sparkle with skillfulness and profound consideration of philosophy; Zhu Dequn’s abstract art reveals his engrossment in the immense universe, whereas Shen Yantian attempts to interpret in his paintings the immaterialness through the lens of materialness and abstractness through concreteness, with the emphasis on “interpreting” in the context of contemporary art and social milieu.
　　The word “interpret” here means to explain, to portray, and to construct. Friedrich Nietzsche believes that there are no facts, “only interpretations.”  Some artists may argue that in the process of their painting, what would be presented or constructed are not his concern. But the viewers would tell a different story. For them, Shen Yantian’s works indeed interpret something. The “interpretation” endows his works with significance and distinction. According to this interpretation, the etherealness and vagueness in Shen Yantian’s unconsciousness are to the very core a kind of aspiration; it is the emotion like children’s eagerness for fun that links the painter’s imagination and the canvas and helps render the meaning to the work; and the colorless time is suggested by the colored space on the canvas.
The Optimistic Unconsciousness
　　The psychological term “unconsciousness” is hard to define. Sigmund Freud formulates the essence of unconsciousness with a triple-structure: “id,” “ego,” and “superego.” Then in what form does unconsciousness dwell in us? In Chinese culture, unconsciousness is hinted by “fantasy,” “dream,” and “meditation.” Words like “illusory,” “delusory,” and “wild” are used for the intangibility of unconsciousness. The postmodernist psychologists, led by Jacques Lacan, believe that consciousness and unconsciousness exist in the form of language, and language determines thoughts. In light of this theory, unconsciousness takes the linguistic shape of letters, words, sentences, textual structures, and stream of consciousness. But the British art critic Roger Fry avers, “There are innumerable shades of feeling, overtones of our normal life of which we should never become aware if the artist did not bring them to our consciousness.”  Abstract art ensures us that unconsciousness, immaterial as it is, is not merely the reflection of intellect, vague, misty, or untraceable. It can be tangible, colorful, affectionate, as well as individualistic under the cloak of materialness. Thus, in Shen Yantian’s paintings his theme is obvious: the allusions of fantasies, expectations and aspirations there expose an optimistic, though conflicting, unconsciousness.
The uniqueness of Shen Yantian’s works is the prevailing eye-catching dark colors. The shades of darkness, whether large or small, are so semiotic that one would instantly thinks of the deep mysterious sea in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. They betray downright the artist’s anxiety, which is to be aware of and acknowledge the existence of the unknown world. But the anxiety does not bother the artist so much. In his mind, that unknown world simply exists like black holes and sunspots, natural and normal. He is not intimidated or daunted by the mysteriousness and strangeness. Take Figure 1 for instance. The bright colors contrast sharply with the dark, bringing the whole picture into something like sunrays beaming from behind the darkness. The brightness, conflicting and struggling, implies an ardent wish to know, to understand and get involved in the unknown. The contrast of colors also suggests the war in John Mliton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan struggles tenaciously to return to Eden. The dark colors are so protruding in the contrast that the sense of conflicts and tension comprise the keynote of Shen Yantian’s paintings. Cognizing that the unknown and the eagerness to grasp the unknown lead to tension, the painter also understands that the two divergent forces do not always form one unity of binary opposites. In Untitled No 2, the colors diverge in a vivid way. The dark colors float over other ones like an isolated mass dangling in the vacant universe. The colors, bright or dark, however, do not blend each other, leaving a signal that shows how difficult it is to approach the unknown. Nevertheless, most of Shen Yantian’s works lend a theme of triumph no matter how dark colors dominate the paintings. We see red and yellow enclose the murkiness, making the scene of the moon shaded by colorful clouds; or, some darkness is disintegrated by bluish green and brownish yellow; at one time, misty colors would dissipate the darkness; at another, the dull unknown world seems to vanish in a twinkling, with two green tranquil creeks sprawling in the yellow background; sometimes, the cherry-red strives to showcase itself, delightfully and proudly like a young bird breaking the eggshell…
　　According to some postmodern views, art works are not created by artists, but come out automatically. The contemporary British writer Fay Weldon asserts that she does not create her novels. “They come out naturally. I simply write down what to be written.”  Shen Yantian holds similar ideas. In an interview he insists that it was the existing images in his mind that guided him to do the painting.  In another word, Shen Yantian believes himself to be simply the ghost painter of his unconsciousness. If this is true, the unconsciousness that Shen Yantian represents has its own features. It is optimistic, aspiring, with strong passions and eagerness to know the unknown. Perhaps that explains why no matter in what shape or color the unknown world exists on his canvas, there remains the painters’ attempt to comprehend and interpret the unknown, as produces such a magnificent landscape out of the conflicting consciousnesss.
The Artist’s Childhood Play
　　Shen Yantian’s paintings seem to be disorganized at first sight. There is mass, but the mass is irregular. There is perspective, but its focus is not quite definite. However, a close examination can identify the unified motif among those paintings: the central image is the cloud in the sky and the dominating structure is two-dimensional. The theme carries a kaleidoscopic effect: the white clouds floating across the blue sky, materialized themselves now in the shape of colorful ducks playing joyfully; now that of blue birds flying with avidity across the moon; now fires burning fervently against the sky. Basic colors like black, yellow, red, green and colors derived from them are exploited to embellish, highlight and illustrate the major themes. One may notice that the implication of profundity suggested by multi-dimensions and stratums seems to be absent from the works. A few of the paintings elicit a bit of vestiges of the depth, but they would halt all of a sudden without a full development. Thus no matter how kaleidoscopic the paintings demonstrate, they leave us a flat, rather than, cubic, impression. There is breadth with little depth. We realize that those flat and simplistic images are in fact the variations and metamorphosis of clouds we look down from the plane or up from the ground. The difference lies only in that the transformed images are colored and translated as if disguised on the canvas.
　　The image of transfigured clouds and the planar structure claim our special attention, becoming the cut-in point for us to interpret Shen Yantian’s works. Why is Shen Yantian’s unconsciousness represented by the image of clouds? Why does he prefer the two-dimensional to the more complicated three-dimensional structure? Indeed, Shen Yantian employs the color metaphors to recount the story of unconsciousness. His exploitation of transfigured clouds and the planar structure actually disclose his inner secret which otherwise we may have no chance to learn: he takes the work of painting as a child at play. He is fascinated by it and obsessed in it. The absence of multilayer patterns explains that he, as a innocent little boy, has no interest in things or conceptions like greatness, profundity, eternality, or grand narrative. He will not devote himself to those vast and glorious values or themes. The planar thematic structure divulges the choice that the painter makes for his painting. He takes a concise and lucid route. In this view, complexity, profundity and subtleness become unnecessary and useless. Like a child, Mr Shen plays his painting enthusiastically. He chooses nature and the clothing of simplicity for his play of painting and then become indulged in his daydreaming. We can imagine how the child is captivated when he looks high up into the sky or looks down from a plane at the floating clouds. In his daydreaming, the clouds sometimes fight ferociously against each other, symbolizing the ever-lasting fight between the unknown and the eagerness to know. Paintings of tranquility in green and intensity in dark red also appear on the canvas. Mr. Shen sees the images in his unconsciousness and plays with them: the sulfur fire of the Hell pictured by Dante, the dark bays in the mysterious night, the colored smoke and fog, the dyed explosion... All in all, the cloud image and the simplistic plane structure bring Shen Yantian back to the state of “artists/children” that Sigmund Freud mentions. Quite neglecting the toil painting takes, he continues with enchantment “what was once the play of childhood”. 
　　Psychologists often aim at the artist’ psyche at creative work, associating the his play with his ego. D. W. Winnicott contends that “it is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.”  Danielle Knafo avers that “through his/her creations, the artist, like the child at play, can turn passive grief and feelings of helplessness into active mastery, and s/he can obtain pleasure from the process of doing so. Play and creativity additionally provide an arena for the establishment of a sense of self in interaction with one's internal world of fantasy and the external world of reality.”  In his Creative writers and Day-Dreaming, Freud demonstrates how an artist realizes his unfulfilled dreams in the real world by doing his creative work like a child at play. Indeed, during the process, the artist recalls both the pleasure of plays and perhaps the anxiety and worry resulting from them. Yet, they locate unconsciously the stage whereupon to discover, construct, re-examine  and even entertain themselves. But, as viewers, we are concerned about what those abstract paintings mean to us and how we are involved in the construction of the meanings.
　　We find that Mr. Shen’s works also transmit pleasures to spectators. Their richness of the various shapes of clouds in the flat-structure takes us back to “the familiar scenes in our memory”.  Our sense and imagination are activated to join in the game of constructing pleasure. Our delight is graded in some progressive dimensions: we feel the first pleasure when we realize the fact that the models of those pictures do not come from the outer world; we experience a further pleasure by the time we are conscious of those images flourished in our dreams and imagination and identify them as from the world of unconsciousness; a gratification dawns upon us as we we decipher the cipher of the abstract painting and are enjoying the fantastic sceneries of unconsciousness created by the artist. In this stage, the artist guides us into a new world, which is different from the real world. Taking the glasses of metaphor and threading through the corridor of memory, we are engrossed in the unconscious scenery on the canvas. We start to decode the symbols of the abstract paintings, and construct our own meanings. Different from the painter, we gain revelations from the images and compose meanings of the pictures with the help our memory and imagination. Our memory includes the experience both from the unconscious world and the world we live in. With this reading strategy we enjoy a superb scene. The dark colors of Mr. Shen’s paintings remind us of the dark woods, in Nathaniel Hathorne’s novels, which symbolizes the unknown world; we once beachcombed when the tide is on the ebb, then we see beaches and bays in Mr. Shen’s paintings. We have experienced many obscure scenes and the foggy and misty images are conjured up before our eyes in front of those paintings.. We review our experiences in our appreciating activity. When getting the core of the paintings, we share the painter’s joy; if not, we taste the painter’s pain. At last, we ask ourselves: “What are we doing now?” The answer is: Play with the artist. His paintings are the bridge between us.
The colorful space and the colorless time
　　We insist that one should take the spectators’ point of view in the appreciation of art works. However, the art works seem to be open windows, from which we amuse ourselves as well as probe into the artists’ inner world. It is true that one cannot see the grand historical scenes in Shen Yantian’s abstract paintings. No  sense of stateliness is emanated from the pictures. We, notwithstanding, perceive the colorless time through the colorful space there in the paintings. We immediately recognize “His Majesty the Ego” as Freud formulates.  This colorless time here is individual, past-tense and non-linear. It is the life history of somebody. Shen Yantian’s typical planar structure of multi-shaped clouds offers a marked hint in the artist’s life history. We call this hint as “transitional object”.
　　“Transitional object” is the term created by British psychologist D. W. Winnicott in his study of children’s psychology. The reason that we use the term of children psychology to interpret artistic works is that there are many similarities between the artists at work and the children at play. Freud summarizes the similarities from three points in Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming. First, both the artist and the child create seriously “a world of his own”. Second, either the artist or the child rearranges the things of the fantasy world in a new way to satisfy his unfulfilled wish. Third, they like to link their imagined objects and situations to the tangible and visible things of the real world.  Besides, the contemporary scholar asserts that art is “a transitional object-process, a representational oasis to which we constantly return as we negotiate our alienations from reality.” 
　　According to D. W. Winnicott, “transitional object” refers to something the child experiences as both under its control and having objective existence, thus enabling meaningful relations between inside and outside. A nipple, a strand of hair, or a toy can be “transitional objects”. In contrast to children, artists express themselves by using “transitional object” to connect the world of imagination to that of reality.  In Picasso’s famous abstract painting A woman in a chair, the woman and the mask are his “transitional objects”. These objects, varied, attractive and protective, convey his mixed feelings of anxiety and desire. The “transitional objects” in Shen Yantian’s abstract paintings are the cloud images framed in the planar structure. They look innocent and mysterious, mirroring the avid longing for the bright future inside the artist.
　　The artist’s “transitional objects” reveal his personality in his life history inadvertently. No matter how many times Shen Yantian accentuates that his paintings do not mean anything, his “transitional objects” gives away his unconsciousness. They enable him to execute his unsatisfied wish. He longs for success, the sky in his paintings then assumes the color of light blue, or a bird of the same color flying across the moon; or some poetic image of clear and tranquil green lakes lying silently in the sand. Sometimes the artist confronts a feeling of confusion, what appear in his paintings correspondingly become things like misty clouds and hazy fog. He is eager to grasp this world, and his aspiration is revealed by his bold use of the pure luminous colors to approach the fearsome darkness. There are moments when he is harassed with intense conflicts in the mind, the figure on the canvas accordingly takes the form of striking explosion. He also has the psychological moment like the blue fresh morning after a nasty stormy night. The paintings will then be in a soft rhythm, with strokes of red colors here and there gently highlighting the whole painting, like fits of breeze flowing across the air.
　　Mr. Shen is an obstinate artist. Indulged in his paintings, he is the downright protagonist, not the stander-by, in his paintings. Through the repetition of the same color, tone and structure, he represents, elaborates and interprets his unconsciousness over and over again. With the feelings of both joviality and agony, he pursues the pleasure produced by these repeats and fulfill his unsatisfied wishes. Now we grasp the essence of Mr. Shen’s abstract paintings, and it seems that Mr. Shen’s self-expressions hold up a mirror in front of us. We see in the mirror that we are nodding to ourselves.
(Translated by Zhou Jin)
 

作者：Tang,Xiumin