Group Exhibition hiart Center, Beijing
On March 2, 2024, the group exhibition "Portraits — Vages of the Young Generation" will open at Yi Yuan Tang (Beijing). This exhibition will feature 31 artists: Fu Meijun, Gao Zhenxi, Ji Xin, Ga Rang, Jiang Xiaoyu, Jiang Yu, Li Mingshan, Liang Manyong, Liu Bing, Ma Mingze, Ning Ziyi, Peng Jinlong, Shi Yin, Shi Lei, Su Hang, Su Yuming, Sun Yu, Tong Ziyun, Xia Yu, Xin Luoting, Xue Ruozhe, Yan Bingqing, Yang Yueqi, Yao Hao, You Yong, Zhang Jiong, Zhang Shujian, Zhang Xuwei, Zhang Zhongge, Zhang Ben, and Zhou Yuyue.
Pliny the Elder (Caius Plinius Secundus), author of the first-century AD work *Natural History*, traced the origin of portraiture to the human act of capturing a shadow: a young woman, by faint light, traced the silhouette of her lover cast upon a wall before his distant departure. This act, considered the archetype of the portrait, suggests that portraiture is an art pursuing "likeness," itself a projection of the true form.
Thus, a portrait is not merely an image of a person, but an image of all things. The twentieth-century philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas believed that philosophy is the awakening of a pursuit for the portrait. The faces of the younger generation represent precisely this philosophical awakening in their questioning of life within their era. It is an examination that, through the portrait of the collective Other, transcendently reveals the "invisibility" beyond the portrait from the "visible."
This "portrait" of "invisibility" is a representation that transcends totality, termed by Lévinas as the "face of the Other." It encourages us to look beyond the grand generational portrait toward one that transcends generations. Although we use "the younger generation" as an intention of the times, and it has already manifested the era, inevitably, behind these artists lies a revelation of the pursuit of "likeness" to the "face of the Other" that surpasses generations.
This almost instinctual drive is like the young woman tracing her lover's shadow, which was in truth an attempt to capture the shadow of love. In the view of Thomas Aquinas, who moved beyond the Greek philosophical traditions of Plato and Aristotle, and from the deeper root of the collective unconscious, portrait painting is ontologically the tracing and capturing of the shadow of God. Each specific portrait concretely exposes the relationship between myself and Him. Viewed from the perspective of the era, it is the relationship between the collective of the era and Him.
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