Living on the Surface By Su Lei
How to record the relation between art ideological trends and the society in past twenty years? What does it do with future?
As a traditional artist with strong realistic approach, Wang Fenghua is free from focusing on spiritual depicts on portrait and showing off realistic techniques that of usual critical realism, yet keeps making effort on seeking the visual intersection that integrates chaotic cultural trends, empty mass mentality and capitalistic social reform, thus to set up a systematic and multiple superimposed contemporary social documentary.
Since then, the artist has put his focus of work on the landscape research presented in city culture. Being used through monochromatic and realistic oil painting then to monochromatic photography——purifying real situations with real and unreal technique, the industrialized broken landscape emphasizes the cultural ideological trend of thought in the past twenty years and social mentality at the height of the materialization of the huge social surface with movement. In this chaotic combination, the unification between landscape in glass curtain wall and diaphragm’s light and shadow effect also strongly suggest that there’s a kind of similarity and potential attachment to social emotion and material changes in variety of cultural ideological trends.
In the beginning of capital formation it is destined to be a rootless diffusion system. In order to meet the needs of its own extension, it has to create corresponding cultural lubricant. This cultural system riches in permeability, superficiality but meanwhile is good at destruction and self-destruction. It makes a mess in denotation but internally set up a unified coexisting order. While it magnifies cultural connotation system, it also has to bring in all of individuals and social landscape.
Postmodernism is not a fracture but an extension from Modernism without lyrical part. Using his own experiences and concepts, Wang Fenghua always focus his sight calmly on the core of social change and restores the reality so as to provoke people’s thinking towards survival situation. Just like Blue Isolation Series, blurry reality landscape and clapboard are also located coordinately in the picture. It seems that it keeps repeating a fact: the Lyrical Era full of nostalgia has been lost, how can we access to a rootless, brilliant real world?
