Zhou Wenzhong’s Recent Paintings from 2011-2012
Shin-Yi Yang

I had the pleasure of meeting Zhou Wenzhong in 2003, when I was curating “Migrant Workers”. A decade has passed, yet I still have mix feelings towards his works, they are both familiar and unfamiliar to me, I believed many people who know his works would acquire similar feelings. The reason partly being the distance he has created between himself and the hustle and bustle of the contemporary art world. But there is a deeper connotation to this, the factis that his potential is so unpredictable; people yearn for the surprise factor in his works. In retrospective of his artistic career, during his college period in Nanjing, Mao Yan did not leave much of an impression on this taciturn student. Subsequently, it changes in the later part of his career. In a series of works he had created in the past (‘Garden Game’, ‘Idealistic Jocosity’ and ‘Morning Glow’), we have seen him translated the complexity of human nature and the growing pains of youth into these powerful and gloomy works. Underneath the humanist façade, the sensitivity, the passion and the absurdity are manifest through the arts of this Nanjing-trained artist. However, after the ‘Morning Glow’show in 2007 Chinablue Gallery, when audiences are starting to recognize Zhou Wenzhong’s unique painting style and strong personal characteristics, he suddenly decided to leave Beijing and returned to his home town in Yangzhou.

In contrast to the resourceful art scenes in Beijing, Yangzhou is a small southern town, and contemporary art scenes are practically non-existing. The subject of art does not appear in everyday conversation, due to the fact that Yangzhou is a traditional civil society, therefore, the choice of being an artist in a place such as this becomes something very personal and needs courage to follow through. On the other hand, the weight of the reality has concealed the art from view, nevertheless, the artist had been provided with a chance to live a life outside the survival game of the big city. Art critic Zhu Qi wrote about Zhou Wenzhong’s earlier works and commented: “From ‘Garden Game’, to ‘Idealists' Night’, they evoke the deeper meanings of human condition and sense of emptiness which only this generation could understand. Furthermore, they even confronted the despair in reality with the desperate situation of the imagination. If, as noted by Zhu about Zhou ’s earlier works, the way Zhou presented pain and violence in his art is the reminiscence of video games. Therefore, in my opinion, the years he spent in Yangzhou had matured his creativity, also had enhanced his personal uniqueness.

Browsing through Zhou Wenzhong’s latest oeuvre, the most striking thing, which captures my eye, is the solidity in his works: as if the entire painting is carrying a cumbersome amount of weight. This characteristic is rarely seen in contemporary artists. The question is: Where is this sense of weightiness or solidity coming from? Is it brought out by the paint itself or the colors he used? By exploiting the materiality of the impasto paint has supplied stimulation to the senses, or the content of the work is enhanced with the use of color’s cultural symbolism, and the visual sensation brought in through saturated colors. Since the rise of 85’ New Artistic Trend, Chinese Contemporary artists have often used these techniques in their works, and occasionally would be seen in Western Art history. For example, red would often be associated with violence and it is symbolic to specific Chinese historical era, these association would be granting the piece of work with a heavy coat; The same with Francis Bacon, he usedlarge red canvases with small amount of black to create his famous Triptych. However, the emotional factor of Zhou’s works provides me with an alternative answer, which suggests the heavy weightiness in his works does not come from imitating the paintings of the past.

After careful examination, I have concluded that the solidity comes from at least two different painting elements: First is the construction of the composition. The artist’s latest works have been a collection of shattered compositions, even reversed, but never a straightforward narrative. Here, a shattered composition is utilized as a visual language, instead of a collage compiled with superficial elements. Collage is a technique first experimented by Picasso and the Cubism; then Dadaism continued the technique to reveal the happening and the anarchism of arts; at the end, it is reduced to a modus operandi used to create surrealist settings through simple juxtaposition. The shattered compositions in Wenzhong’s works indicate a significant difference from collages.

His compositions are often being divided by numerous diagonal sharp slashes, buildings, roads, pipes, electric poles and branches. These materials are tightly inserted together, which is transformed into sturdy inseparable structures. The same method is applied to the characters in the works, and many of them were brutally amputated. The technique he uses to create the composition is incomparable among the Chinese artists. But why does he do it this way? In an earlier interview, the artist mentioned:”The narrative is only an introduction, therefore, it is impossible to provide the viewer anything else, it is only to convey the overall impression. The real life should be able to provide people with richer emotion, and not something singular.”. Once again, this reminds us of Yangzhou, from this wealthy town, we could strongly sense the most prominent aspects of Chinese contemporary living environment: the co-existence of urban and rural.

The spacious buildings of last century’s planned economic era have become artists’ studios, industrial pipe lines are crisscrossing through the rust filled residential areas, and the modernization process has pose a complex relationship between cities and towns. It is not just a simple integration, it also could not be summed up by the conceptual materialism, it is more about the sense of survival, or perhaps is to understand the experience happening around here. This might of explains the reason Zhou Wenzhong uses his artistic sensitivity to capture meaningful objects (ie. buildings, pipes etc.), this breaks the linearity of time and space.

The subject matter of the works is the second element that results in the solid quality of the artist’s works. In the past two years, Zhou’s works can roughly be divided into two main categories: One is the bold reference to current social events, andthese social events are all tragedies of extreme cruelty. Such as the inspirations for ‘Intersection’ came from an article in the Southern People Weekly. Although many of the works do not have direct association with an actually event, but from the imageries of the characters one would sense the artist’s concerns toward reality. The characters are ‘strangers’ in a civilized society: the slipped pedestrian, the cruiser, the scavenger, the maintenance worker and the amateur singer on the sidewalk, or a patricide and a person on open trial. Another category is closer to people’s inner self, the viewers are transported from the street back to the next corner or to their windows, works such as ‘Breathing Sunset’, ‘Fire’ and ‘Rainbow’, are more abstract, more symbolic, and profoundly expressing deeper meanings.

Compare with his earlier works, the recent subject matters are completely different. Before 2007, there was work such as:’ An Imitation A Wang Shikuo's Sketch No.1’, which was inspired by national history and cultural memory, however, most subject matters were imaginary. Something worth noting is that no matter which subject is chosen, the difficulty of the work would be more challenging than the pure fantasy one, but one thing is for certain, the rudimentary realism could not reach the inner pain of people. However, Zhou had taken the initiative and chose this difficult challenge. Apart from the method of creating the canvas previously mentioned, one other reason for his works to touch people’s heart is because they are not the simple depictions of realism or the demonstration of the ugliness or darkness of social events, or even the cruelty of human nature. Through these works the viewers could see compassion, as well as the dignity of the despaired: these characters are constantly in an extreme emotional state; desperation or on a verge of madness; sign of screaming, suspicion or self-doubt, but still not paralyzed (even in‘Shallow Sleep’). The artist filled the canvas with tension, but due to the presence of dignity, all the expressions of emotion are metamorphosed into strong colors and brushstrokes. Some places have sand and signs of scratches, all of which enhanced the weightiness of the composition.

At this point, it must be said that any artist who could have achieved what was described above, he should be greatly valued. But if so, it would not impress me. What I am more interested in is Zhou’s personal characteristics. Since 2007, what we know about this artist has been fragmented, after a period of time, he still remains a mystery. Why are there pipes and Chinese landscape paintings in his works? Does it indicate that he is an artist of ‘Chinese natured’? In my opinion, the conventional angle of definition and interpretation are not suitable for him anymore.

To Zhou Wenzhong, the solid quality in his work does not come from cultural symbolism, nor the heaviness in the material used (ie. German Post-war Master Anselm Kiefer used ‘ash’ as material). Ever since Douglas Crimp proposed the death of paintings (The End of Painting, 1981), to think painting as a flat visual form has no longer holds any value for discussion and criticism, therefore, artists should steer their artistic creativities towards installations, videos and interactive works. Nevertheless, in the past five years, the trend has gradually pushes its way back towards paintings, although no one can predict the future development in paintings, but the critics and the art world have decided once more to recognize the value of paintings. Perhaps searching through the newest upheaval of Chinese Contemporary art world, it would be possible to contribute an answer to the question. In Zhou’s works we can see the expression of emotion without any concealment, it is not a form of theatrical tension or stage effects, but a long standing of survival experiences. The perceptual experience of an art work actually means a basic artistic proposition: what is artist’s experience when he sits in front of a canvas? Zhou Wenzhong’s latest works tell us: it is the anxiety when he faces the canvas, the sensitivity towards survival, and the discomfort and abruptness of reality. These are the fundamental artistic qualities of this artist, and they are pure, not placed strategically. Contemporary often forget this problem, yet it is so basic that it should not be ignored.