Group Exhibition Art Granary, Beijing, No. 22, Nanxingcang, Dongsishitiao, Dongcheng District, Beijing
Character-Image Art
Xia Kejun
Chinese, as an unique language that materializes the thinking of One-Character, One-Character is intuition gestalt of One-Word, One-word is One-World, One-world is One Place ( Ort).
Chinese writing restages the genesis of the ancient Chinese civilization (Huaxia). Its logogrammatic structure warrants a unique duality to Chinese civilization:
In a broader sense, Chinese text-based art, after its layered expansions from traditional engraving to calligraphy and freehand style, enters into the discourse of Modernism through a transcultural dialogue with Expressionism, abstract art, Surrealist automatic writing, and graffiti, as well as virtual electronic writing, which transforms into the modernist vision of “Character-image Art.”
“Character-image Art” originated from the distinctive graphic structure of Chinese character (akin to the notion of Bildschrift proposed by the German linguist Wilhelm von Humdoldt). After the intervention of modernization, this art form engendered in itself a protean manifold characteristic—a kind of animated Art of Morphology:
1. Legibility: keep similar sense of remains with object but with unsimilar abstraction transform.
2. Morphology: illusion Imagination of Morph and keep regeneration, instead of form or fixed gestalt.
3. Poeticality: a rhythmic, animated expression of individual’s emotion and correspondence with cosmos.
4. Plasticity: the increasing expansion of conceptual spatial writing, as well as the virtual electronic writing.
For the past 40 years of contemporary art, aside from the calligraphic nature of painting, there is a burning necessity for us to map out the genealogy of contemporary art that is based Chinese text-based art consists of an internal modernization that can be traced back to the “fake-make characters” in the works of Gu Wenda and Xu Bing in the 1980s. From there, “Character-image art” or “Fake-make Art” sustains the malleability of Chinese characters, but also expands the nuances of calligraphic strokes and mark-making gestures. Its abstract form of writing, in keeping with the elements of character-image-gesture, renders it universal abstract while continuing the cultural heritage of Chinese culture. This bestows upon it an alchemical quality in embryo that is ever-changing, alteration and transforming with Black-Blank color, recasting a transcultural intertextuality within it.
“Character-image art” could be seen as a kind of Morphological art of “fake-make”, a philosophical expression of will, and a message that symbolizes the vitality of its medium.“Character-image Art” could be seen as a kind of Morphological art of “fake-make”, a philosophical expression of life will, and a message that symbolizes the vitality of its medium. Character-image Art possessed the ability to construct an alternative path of an international artistic language.
Facebook
Instagram
WeChat 微信