Truth and Reality
Author: Shao GuanghuaTranslation: Lin Zi
In the Origin of Art (1936), Heidegger mentioned that the goal of the artist is to create a void, fission, amidst the existing beings (Dasseined), hence opening a clear field in the wood, Lichtung. He also mentioned that when art as Dasseined, truth places itself into the work, and the artist's job is to help things move towards "revealing", make things no longer stay in “concealment”.
When the viewer walks into the venue of Xian Dong Hall, a kind of vanity comes to their sights: white walls, black paintings, obscured figures, and fuzzy shadows reflected in the works. A space opens up between the viewer and the work, but there are no flamboyant colors, no images to grasp or to taste, but a patch of ink stays in a self-sufficient place without any haste to be contacted with the viewer, evading the gaze from observation, and laughing at the camera lens used to capture images from them.
Walking in the exhibition hall, the viewer seems to experience a night walk, with their eyes wide open, trying to distinguish some kinds of landmarks from the darkness before them.
Over sheets of spun silk that are repeatedly stained with thick ink, the tangled flowers are visible because the ink depicted them is darker than the surrounding ink, hence brighter. In the 未命名 (2022) series, ink stays in a mirror-like status quo. The viewer can see the blurred figure reflected in it with the surrounding scene. With a close observation, the mirror-like surface is not a perfect one, but with potholes, scratches, and lines spreading beneath it – a resemblance not of the mirror, but a real human face.
To observe the Untitled-Flower(2021) series is like to see the real world through an ink filter: the red flowers and green leaves of a plant under Bu Yunjun’s management turn to all blank ink-colored images. The light-and-dark contrast is consistent with the vision of real plants in natural surroundings, and the vibrant colors in plants are reflected by various intensity of ink. In this series of painting, the contrast and color are not followed the customary cognition of ink painting, but they follow, at the same time, the underlying logic of it- objects are represented by the intensity and wetness of the ink itself without the involvement of colors from mineral pigments.
Furthermore, the 未命名 (2022) series further pushes the rule about ink painting to the opposition. Although the artist uses ink as the basic material to build the mirror-like surface, he does not comprehend it as a means of color representation, the artist wants to explore the material itself by repeatedly daubing on the board, drying, grinding and a series of unconventional ink painting methods.
In this process, the physical properties of the ink itself are constantly revealed. When two kinds of main raw material of carbon and gelatin reveal themselves in a new way, at the micro level, ink drying and grinding, forms a smooth mirror-like surface. After absorption, scattering and multiple reflections form unique grayscale texture, ink, after polishing, turns to a media that temporarily hides behind the scenes. The light reaches a critical point between staying and leaving.
It is obvious that Bu Yunjun has fully considered the physical characteristics of ink when he chose it as the material for his work. The very existence of Chinese ink is a paradox which consists of light-absorbing carbon and light-reflective gelatin. There is light in ink, and light shows in ink, hence ink negatively employs light. One thousand years ago, Su Shi (1137-1101) had already seen this point, hence specifically wrote "Light without blackness, solid for the waste; blackness without light, mundanity with no spirit, I prefer not to use them." In the context of ink painting, ink is also in a contradictory state of both presentation and negation of objects, which is an excellent place for Bu Yunjun to intervene.
In the two series of work here, we can see how he exploited the richness of this complication. Untitled-Flower(2021) series pushes the underlying logical of ink painting to perfection, as he imitates ink painting in a place where the ink stays in a critical place between its fullness and fully concealment. Spun silk and ink are both typical material of traditional ink painting, but under Bu Ynujun’s hands, they reveal a rare rebellious temperament, as the object is no longer a thrown being into the world, but a self-evident revealment from repeating observation. The series of works that polishes ink into mirror are even more unconventional. Bu Yunjun, subversively employs the material of ink, bringing the new possibility of ink art into a form.
Duchamp, who once declared that painting is dead, spent eight years creating La Grand Verre (1913), a work opposes all paintings. In his interview, he did not consider La Grand Verre (1913) as a painting as he said that there is a lot of lead, and a lot of other stuffs. Duchamp is so far away from the traditional definition of a painter, someone who uses brush, palette, turpentine… all of these had been lost in his life, just as Bu Yunjun is also far away from a conventional sense of an ink artist.
Although he turns his back to ink painting tradition with such a bold rebellion, Bu Yunjun stands with a sly smile, claiming that his work is still belongs to the category of painting, despite of his 未命名(2022) series, same as Duchamp's La Grand Verre (1913), is "not-for-vision", but, in his own words – “a resistance of figure".
"... My work eventually becomes how to tear apart these concrete figures and places something else in those cracks. The resistance to figures becomes the focus of the work, which are the basis of these series of painting."