The end of the 20th century and of the 2nd millennium and this first decade of the 3rd are dominated by the self-contrary tensions of a double movement: globalization and tribalization. On the one hand the technological development and telematics (the integrated use of telecommunications and informatics) tend to unify every type of industrial and artisanal production, the economy as well as culture. A strong interdependence conditions the development of society, placing it under the sign of standardization and also of multiculturalism. A horizontal trend guides the productive forces and attenuates any attempts at differentiation of product and, consequently, of the relevant producer.

　　The globalization that transforms the world into McWorld (in Benjamin R Barbers ironic term) threatens the character of identity and eliminates the attempt to personalize existence: a structural standardization of the economy determines a structural standardization of behaviour. Here then we find the response, often reactionary and regressive, of tribalization, the resurgence of nationalisms, of fundamentalisms and of the values of the settled lifestyle. Territorial regression inevitably leads to the rule of the law of blood. In response to the macro-event of technological development, man responds with the micro-event of his or her own existence, linked to the resistance of the settled and to the negation of the threatening micro-events of neighbouring individuals.

　　The strategy of Zhang Yu is situated in this gap. It affirms the right of his imagination, removed from the logic of this dichotomous extremism of globalization versus tribalization. He adopts the tactic of cultural nomadism in order to remove himself from the perverse consequences of tribal identity. At the same time he lays claim to a production of the symbolic against the commodification of an economy that is now global. Thus he affirms a right to diaspora, to multicultural, transnational and multi-media crossings. He removes himself, then, from any logic of belonging through a basic choice that tends to deny the value of space, habitat and related circumscribed anthropology, in favour of a value of condensed time in the form of the artwork. This artist stoically chooses a cultural nomadism. In this sense the work acquires a utopian value in the etymological sense of the word, that is, the preference for a non-place, a dematerialized elsewhere that requires neither settledness nor definitive occupation.

　　Zhang Yu, by means of various languages, develops the concept of decomposition, the positive emancipation from a unique choice of form, the affirmation of slippage and spill-over in complex works. Painting, sculpture, photography, video, music, design and architecture intertwine in the production of installations that can exist in any space, but without the risk of total integration. The nomadism and the stylistic eclecticism that govern the form help the self-affirmation of a progressive decomposition both of the spatial unity of the moment of production and of the temporal unity of the moment of contemplation.

　　The work functions as a mixer that creates interaction between the various languages and dematerializes any traditional aesthetic category. It acts on the public with the alienating force of a reality on the move with the capacity to affirm its own lack of adhesion and consensus.

　　This character is the natural product of a tradition which runs, in East and West, from the historical avantgardes to the trans-avantgarde, the awareness of an autonomy of art that cannot operate on the principle of identification. Contemporary art makes the most of the overcoming of traditional barriers, to access the speed of pathways that play on the principle of contamination. This principle works against the danger of standardization that is a result of telematic globalization. On the one hand it employs the idea of spill-over and of cultural interaction, and on the other it affirms the entirely individual right of the artist to produce improvised and surprising forms that flow from an imagination free from any hierarchy.

　　This art works on a further level of decomposition in that it affirms the creative value of the I as opposed to the quantitative value of the We. It presents itself to the viewing of the settled public with the traces of its own movement, the signs of a crossing which render the viewing positively alien in contrast with the familiarity of the televised images that daily invade the domestic space of mass society. Nomadism implies the complexity of multiple references, the memory of numerous plots that sustain the artist, a complexity of a form projected against the spectacular simplification of the bombardment of images from the little television screen.

　　The ambivalence of the work constitutes the signal of resistance by this artist against the reality that surrounds him, the formalization of the hostility of an art that refuses to perform any informative service. Indeed, he wishes to disrupt the trend of a universe functioning on the basis of the myth of information. Nevertheless, Zhang Yu poses to himself the question of communication, a necessary recognition of the telematic apparatus that controls the world. By this means he absorbs into his work the spurious diversity of differentiated languages, while modeling it outside of any logic of immediate consumption. Communicating necessarily implies the adoption of techniques and materials that are not divorced from the context in which we live. It implies the submission of the formal scheme to a discipline capable of developing a contact with the public. Here then we find art setting itself the problem, after so much isolation: how to avoid the danger of an abstract globalization and the international use of the art system, in favour of a balanced communication remote from any hints of tribal collusion.

　　Such hints of collusion always imply belonging and the idea of a consumption that, in various art forms, intercepts the search for consensus. The balancing of form guarantees that art does not become a mere utilitarian object, and vouchsafes for it the possibility of preserving a character of passage that signals a journey broken only by short stops.

　　The art of the end of the 20th century and of the new millennium must necessarily affirm the value of nomadism, the destiny of an excellent unstoppable movement, so as to bear witness to its own structural attitude, which is destructuring and self-contrary.

　　Only thus can Zhang Yu demonstrate the credit that he accords time, deep-freezing a better one in works that show in a brilliant and exemplary way his faith in history.

　　“The Fingerprint is a concept. The Chinese born before the 1960s typically think that it is a form of signing a contract in the old China.

　　The signing of the contract depends on the imprint of the finger on it. Here its importance is emphasized, as is that of human life.

　　Here the contract is a power. Here the fingerprint is a symbol.

　　Here the concept of the fingerprint is a cultural action that has to do with the body.

　　The vision of the fingerprint is the product of thousands of red prints on rice paper. Due to the plasticity of this paper, the force of the finger changes its original structure, on its surface nest-shaped sculptures are born, as well as the natural charm of the light that enters and dissolves the original meaning of the fingerprint, which acquires a visual materiality.

　　Ultimately the fingerprint transcends form and concept.”

　　- Zhang Yu

　　Time and space become dimensions that are traversed horizontally by the sign, the imprint of the finger on the surface, and by its capacity of measuring. The space is two-dimensional, flattened in its lines that match the linear development of the temporal dimension. Here the line undoes the circularity of representation and dissolves any condensation in favour of an uninterrupted permutation that is fully decanted on the surface of the painting. If the painting is a cutting of a more ample space, the time also is a subtraction of a continuum that is experienced and ineluctably postponed from time to time, from painting to painting.

　　Time is articulated by the rhythm that arises from lines that inscribe it as movement and pause. The movement is provided by the progressive passage. The painting also shows the pause, the void, the gap that occurs between two measures. Thus time is a temporal dimension that simultaneously accommodates past and present, future and transpired event.

　　Between full and void, between sound and silence, between imprint and pause, time inscribes its own grand total, in so far this is the sum of all the fingerprints and all the pauses, and the pause contains a further space that is the space that it creates of the gap, also the mental gap, between one number and the next.

　　Between repetition and difference Zhang Yu entrusts the task of repetition to the pause, and that of difference to the fingerprint, and vice versa, depending on the point of view, spatial or temporal. However, both elements are taken as the unit of measurement, perceptual counterpoints of the invisible passing of time.

　　Time and space then are mutually positioned in a frontal differentiation: time as virtuality of absence (the pause), and space as contextual presence of flagrance and absence. The pause follows its geometrical recurrence that employs the fingerprint as the sound that prepares the silence. Zhang Yu has seized the profound and dramatic sense of the temporal continuum, with its progression that tends towards the infinite, and as such is beyond the scope of individual existence. The infinite is all that is not measurable through direct experience, it is the present continuously moved forward and postponed in the successiveness of the painting. “The synthesis of time constitutes the present in time. It is not that the present is a dimension of time: the present alone. Rather, synthesis constitutes time as a living present, and the past and the future as dimensions of this present. This synthesis is none the less intratemporal, which means that this present passes. We could no doubt conceive of a perpetual present, a present which is coextensive with time: it would be sufficient to consider contemplation applied to the infinite succession of instants. But such a present is not physically possible: the contraction implied in any contemplation always qualifies an order of repetition according to the elements or cases involved. It necessarily forms a present which may be exhausted and which passes, a present of a certain duration which varies according to the species, the individuals, the organisms and the parts of organisms under consideration.” (G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (1994, translated Paul Patten) pp76-7) –

　　What is truly always present in Zhang Yu’s work is the pause, the gap that separates the fingerprint and allows it to advance toward the future. It is what is never present, in that it is never constant in its own quantity: this becomes the difference that traverses space rather than time. When it begins to move against time, the fingerprint also becomes repetition, as it enters into an irreversible and unstoppable continuum.

　　In this manner Zhang Yu demonstrates how the procedure of painting is the standardization of an anthropic state that tends toward the infinite, in the sense that the previous painting no longer corresponds to the previous time, but only to the instant of the last fingerprint, followed by the last pause.

　　Zhang Yu confirms the capacity of art to transcend any Confucian convention in the name of Zen/Chan and of Daoism, affirming the value of difference, without moralizings, yet at the same time taking part in the collective flux of history.

　　Achille Bonite Oliva.

　　Translated by Wen Zai/Archibald McKenzie 2010 12 25.