HOW展览｜蒋志个展“回旋曲”策展人前言发布

蒋志个展“回旋曲”围绕他长期以来对具象主题和抽象情感的关注，在四个展厅中展出艺术家创作生涯中代表性作品和全新创作的绘画、雕塑和摄影作品，表达艺术家对爱情、悲伤、无常和以游戏为创作方法的最新见解。

游戏在人类的美学和感知领域一直扮演着重要角色，丰富着人类对知与不知以及何以为知的探索。作为一位持续探索的成熟艺术家，蒋志的艺术一直围绕着他熟悉的人与物，不断编织新的叙事，将他作品中反复出现的主题——孤独的身影、暂时的花朵和生命逝去的遗迹等等，持续深化发展成为表达温柔、情欲、危险和对抗的故事新编，吸引我们持续深入地接近它们，长久耐心地体会它们。

游戏概述

从2010年的作品开始，撕裂感成为蒋志作品中吸引视觉的焦点。以”挽歌”系列为例, 画面当中的主人公总是被无数细丝撕拉着，这些细丝的拉扯是折磨？是惩罚还是救赎？难以确定。“挽歌” 散发的清新优雅的气质，与蒋志的另一组代表作 “情书” 相得益彰，这些摄影作品展示瓷花瓶里娇艳的插花正在被火焰吞噬，温柔又悲伤地散发出紧张危险的气息，又不加掩饰地营造出图像的崇高感。

在我们初识的2016年初，他的工作室里累积着他过去六年里创作的各种油画作品，核心关注的是我们如何生产和消费视觉图像的问题。蒋志观察到人眼观看的电脑屏幕图像只是片刻的闪烁和碎片，由此出发，他开始从“挽歌”和“情书”系列中灼烧的情感吸引力和与动作相关的语汇中脱离出来，朝向技艺和主题都更加精致和强烈的方向进展。

游戏现状

2012年以来，蒋志开始在聚酯纤维布上绘制油画，替代以往在亚麻布上的创作。纤维布被绷在金属框架上，形成与制作版画相同的平面，在此之上蒋志以淡蓝色和白色为主描绘出形状自由的作品背景。在完成方法上，蒋志的纤维布上油画与被安迪·沃霍尔推广的创作丝网版画的方式异曲同工，对画布涂抹、挤压、喷射、稀释、摩擦、摔打、锤击、颠震……有了同时在正反面创造出两个画面的空间。这种双联画的产生终究与文艺复兴时期的双联画不同，因为在蒋志这里，两幅画面的生产是同时发生，相互关联的，它们彼此缺一不可，但艺术家只选择了其中的一面向我们展示。

“皮袋骨”、“去来”等系列作品可以看做是在“情书”作品形式上做出的更加犀利的转化。“化身”中的具象形态与随后出现在蒋志绘画中的树叶主题，和最新发展的雕塑作品中的弧状肢体互为关照。早期画作中对线性的探索也在纤维布上的油画作品中演变成彩色纹身装饰，并且，“挽歌”中撕拉的细丝再次出现，只是它们已不再构成威胁，而是围绕在站立者四周，似乎是在对身体姿态的纠正。

2017年，蒋志创作了一幅名为 “白夜”的摄影作品，在照片中一个烧焦的人类颌骨咬在一块闪闪发光的冰块上。显然，骷髅作为具象艺术中表达生命终结的集大成者，在结合了死亡提醒的寓意的同时，为我们带来触及情感的双重震撼。“白夜”回应了死亡无所不在的经典典故，同时，通过镜子将反射和回应作为反复使用的方法，延续在“镜中”、“未成之偶”等作品。这些色彩丰富，清晰又复杂的摄影画面，引导观众进入珍宝盒一般的画面中探寻和观察，从小商品到儿童玩具，风格奇妙的多种物品彼此映射，是游戏作为元素在这个展览中的生动表现。

回旋曲：游戏

以游戏做为方法，需要表演者极度的真诚意志。展览呈现出来的是近二十年来蒋志在艺术探索中的坚持和韧性，令置身其中的我们禁不住感叹：让艺术家一次次面对这些有关生死，有关人性处境和生存状态的难题时不妥协的勇气。做为演奏这些主题反复回旋呈现的艺术家，这个展览是蒋志交出的诚恳答卷。

策展人：路博安

"Please Play On", highlights Jiang Zhi's long attention to a recurring repertoire of figurative 

subjects and gripping emotion. Woven into four rooms, new paintings, sculpture and photographs provide an update on the artist's insights into topics of love, lament, impermanence and play.

With a storied role in the study of aesthetics and perception, play has long hovered between the comfort of knowing the burden of determining how and what we know. Aristotle used play to rehabilitate Athenian image making arguing that its capacity to inspire experimentation is a critical tool in developing our ability to create, innovate, and understand. In the field of hermeneutics, interpreters of meaning, both faith based and secular, see play reinvigorating expression and preventing repeated fallacies from becoming truths. 

At mid-career, Jiang weaves new narratives around familiar characters - the conflicted solitary figure, endangered flowers and remnants of life's passing among others. His ongoing play with these consistent but evolving sources of inspiration does all that we can ask of visual art. The works seduce us with tales of tenderness, eroticism, danger and repulsion. They compel us to look closer and longer. 

Game Summary

In 2010 Jiang Zhi's artworks began pulling upon their protagonists often in different directions. 

Countless fine filaments in the "Elegy" series run in and out of their central figures with unflinching menace though we cannot be certain what they are trying to accomplish. Torture or suture? Punishment or surgical improvement? There is a crisp elegance to the "Elegy" works as with the artist's next celebrated body of photographs, "Love Letters", in which flame consumes foliage - often precious flowers perched in porcelain vases.

Sublimely rendered, the impending danger within these works compete with a sense of tender 

mourning. Those sentiments are balanced so as to fix the position of the photos within the 

cannon of art focusing on the end of human life. They share an uncensored view of loss with Hans Holbein's supine Christ or Marc Quinn's "Dead Dad" without need for the umbrage and eroticism of Rubens or Yu Hong. A historical record of violence favored by the likes of Goya and Yue Min Jun is also deemed unnecessary. Their gestural expression contrasts with more visceral depictions of fleshy harm by painters such as Francis Bacon, Zeng Fanzhi and Jenny Saville though Jiang's more recent sculpture and painting showcase a clear shift in that direction.

His studio in early 2016 (the occasion of our first meeting) was dominated by a variety of oil paintings on canvas produced over the prior 6 years. The works tackled a fascinating question of how we both produce and consume visual imagery beginning with Jiang's observation that photographs of images on a computer screen display flickering and fragmentation unseen by the human eye. 

Painting and later photography's role in replicating human perception has long been central to discourse on aesthetics. Jiang's oil paintings from the last decade, build upon brush work and structural studies seen in artists such as Qiu Ying and late Cezanne and in so doing invite comparison to transformational art movements of the 20th century - cubism and minimalism in particular. In employing painting to expose divergent perceptions of digital screens through the lenses of the human eye and and the camera, Jiang also peers with prescience into issues currently commanding attention such as man/machine singularity and implications of AI as a tool, a threat or both.

The ambitious objectives and dizzying technique of these canvases omit much of the searing emotional pull of the "Elegy" and "Love Letter" photographs. Works entitled "Sorrow", "Ecstasy" and "Immortality" handle deep sentiment with the cold precision of a coder. In giving other paintings in the series titles such as "Not Found" and "Content Control", the artist appears to come to a similar conclusion. A separate body of oils on canvas in the 2016 studio, "The World is Yours as Well as Ours", initially pursue a similar computational linearity but have enjoyed a longer production run. They go on later to feature decidedly more organic and gestural vocabulary.

Current State of Play

Paintings in the current exhibition are the product of a novel approach to the medium that the artist developed in 2019. Still using oil, he shifted from a cotton canvas to polyester and for important reasons. The canvases are stretched taught on metal frames to produce lithographs rendered, mostly in pale blue and white which then serve as amorphous maps for the paintings. The artist brushes oil onto their surface in a manner popularized by Warhol but doesn't stop there. 

He extrudes oil paint by pressing it from the opposite side of the stretched lithograph ultimately creating two images - one on each side of a single platform. These dual images, unlike double sided paintings of the Italian renaissance, are necessarily interconnected. Produced simultaneously, neither could exist without the other even if most often the artist elects to show us only one side.

From the start the products of this new method departed from the formal precision of the earlier canvas paintings. The surface of the main images are often thick with material. Linear gestures remain exquisitely considered but seem to have been given permission to stray. The polyester oils reduce the distance the artist maintained from his subject matter in the "Elegy" and "Love Letter" works. As the stories told by these paintings unfold, the audience begins shifting from observer to player inviting a more direct confrontation with the emotional violence they contain. 

The oils in the current exhibition draw us closer still to the raw sentiments that inspire their creation. Works such as "Skin Bag" and "Going and Coming" take the form of the "Love Letter" photos and morph them into gritty confrontations. "Avatar" portraits sport appendages in shapes inspired by the foliage appearing in the artist's later canvas oils and from the arcing limbs found in his new sculptures and photographs. Linear explorations appearing in earlier canvases now form colorful tattoos decorating characters in the polyester paintings. Tearing filaments from the "Elegy" photographs reappear in these works not as menace, rather serving to correct the posture of their subjects by bringing them to erect attention. 

If the artist was previously the polished "maitred" in your favorite fine dining venue, smashing plates and spilling wine has now become the signature of his service. The reward for those who dare not look away is better proximity to the carnage. There is more than enough beauty to entice us to fill our stomachs. The cost comes in exposing our glutinous longing.

Not long before Jiang Zhi began developing his polyester oils he produced a photograph entitled "White Night" (2017) in which teeth on a charred human jaw bone glimmer in reflection of an imposing block of ice. No doubt he understood that the incorporation of skeletal remains was a leap into the epicenter of figurative art's enduring attention to end of life. Art categorized as "Memento Mori" (reflecting on death) packs an emotional barrage with dual constancy. New shock accompanies each encounter with our finality even though we always know it is coming. For Jiang, "White Night" is novel in its direct reference to this practice and sets forth a specific line of inquiry which continues in the "Mirror" photos, the "Unmade Idol" polyester oils and his sculptures.

Calcium and carbon remnants of life appearing first in "White Night" and thereafter in Jiang's art across various media align them unambiguously with other works of "Memento Mori". Beyond skulls, teeth and femurs, the "Mirror" series also feature an abundance of images of life passed or passing incorporating bleached corals, dead fowl, decomposing waxen fruit and the discarded sanctuaries of nautilus, conk and cicadas.

Colorful, crisp and complex, these photographs command viewers to engage in a detailed accounting of each of their elements. Embedded within is a healthy dose of art reference and artful distancing. The subject matter and stark geometric elements take a perspective on horror similar to the paintings of Francis Bacon. The use of mirrors and ambitious structuring invite comparisons with an approach to realism elevated by Velasquez, Caravaggio, Manet and Courbet. Jiang's bright curio boxes are, if nothing else, unambiguously playful - a point punctuated by the artist use of deft comedy in the last work of the series ("Mirror" no 7) by incorporating commercial toys marketed to humans and their pets.

Playing On

Play can result in meaning but it comes at a cost. Players must establish their goals with brutal honesty each and every time they enter the game. A high score, the search for universal truths or the notion that the game is an end unto itself may appear to be comforting objectives but sadly they decompose over time. When the honest search for meaning is abandoned, language can be weaponized and the repetition of familiar imagery can demote it to a boring shadow of lost inspiration. Proper play requires that participants determine for themselves what it is they truly need and Jiang's willingness to face this terrifying question has for nearly two decades produced work of uncompromising beauty and directness. Luckily for us Jiang Zhi remains in the contest once again delivering a single player masterclass in gaming with integrity.

Curator: Andrew Ruff

蒋志个展「回旋曲」

当前正在展出中

📍

HOW昊美术馆3F展厅二