没有世界观的面孔：董文胜个展

艺术家： 董文胜

策展人： 左靖
展览开幕： 2009年4月26日下午17：00
展览日期： 2009年4月26日 – 6月20日
展览地址： 伊比利亚当代艺术中心
北京市朝阳区酒仙桥路4号798艺术家区E06
总监： 夏季风
出品人： 高平
主办： 西班牙国际文化艺术基金会｜伊比利亚当代艺术中心

T: 86 10 5978 9530 / 5978 9030 info@iberiart.org www.iberiart.org


NO WORLD-VIEW FOR THE FACE: SOLO EXHIBITION OF DONG WENSHENG

Artists: Dong Wensheng

Curator: Zuo Jing
Opening Reception: 5:00 pm, April 26, 2009
Dates: April 26—June 20, 2009
Address： Iberia Center for Contemporary Artt
Beijing, Chaoyang district, #4 Jiuxianqiao road, 798 Art District E06
Director: Xia Jifeng
Producer: Gao Ping
Organizer: International Art & Culture Foundation (IAC) of Spain
Iberia Center for Contemporary Artt

T: 86 10 5978 9530 / 5978 9030 info@iberiart.org www.iberiart.org


展览简介：
高世强是近来中国当代艺术创作中出现的“学者型”艺术家之一。他的一系列作品，包括装置、摄影和实验电影，对现实的思考和体认较之同龄人显得更加广阔和复杂，并呈现出一定的系统性。他的近期作品摆脱了狭隘的意识形态纷争，把对中国历史文化的思考带到了一个新的高度。

董文胜的创作也是自由地穿梭于摄影、装置和实验电影之间，他通常利用中国传统文化的元素进行创作，作品风格斑斓腐朽，气息潮湿，充满诗意。长期以来，董文胜用视觉论述的方式，以跨越文化疆界的语言，致力关注传统文脉与当代社会全球化进程的纠缠、个体精神感知对现代化城市建设理念的对抗。作品同时亦涉及了时间、存在等哲学命题。

作为近年来最活跃的青年艺术家，高世强参加过包括“上海双年展”、“广州三年展”、“光州双年展”、“中国艺术三年展”在内的几乎亚洲所有最重要的双三年展；董文胜参加过纽约P.S.1当代艺术中心、维也纳美术馆、瓦伦西亚现代艺术博物馆等国际重要艺术机构的展览。

本次展览是两位艺术家在北京的首次大型个展，将展出艺术家创作的多件新作。



A brief introduction of the exhibit:

Gao Shiqiang is one of the recent “scholarly” artists in the field of Chinese contemporary art. Gao’s work, which includes installations, photographs and experimental films, carries a sense of broadness and complexity towards the reflection and bodily experience of daily life—such qualities are rarely found amongst his peers. His practice also hints at a systematic way of conceiving works. His recent pieces move away from the narrow confines of competing ways of thinking, and in turn, he brought a way of conceiving Chinese history and culture to new heights.

Dong Wensheng’s work also freely crisscrosses between installation, photography and experimental films. His work frequently includes elements of Chinese tradition with a strong link to characteristics related to the region of Jiangnan. His highly individualistic pieces often transpose the viewer into a paradoxical realm that hovers between the traditional past and the contemporary present; Dong is interested in infusing his spectators within a state of tragic psychological sadness.

Gao Shiqiang is an active young artist who has participated at numerous important Asian art exhibitions, such as the Shanghai Biennale, the Guangzhou Triennial, the Gwangju Biennale, and the Chinese Art Triennial Exhibition. Dong Wensheng has exhibited at a number of important international institutes, such as the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), the Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna), and at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (Valencia).

This exhibition is their first solo shows in Beijing that also presents a number of their recent pieces.


前言
左靖

继“这里发生了什么”影像档案馆开馆展之后，伊比利亚当代艺术中心推出了“地点上的时间”高世强个展和“没有世界观的面孔”董文胜个展。这两个个展试图将当代艺术最新的一些变化呈现给观众，即生于1970年代的艺术家开始成为当代艺术的重要书写者：他们对媒介的使用更加宽泛，其中，影像和装置成为他们最重要的语言方式；他们对历史开始进行全面的重新审视并流露出复杂矛盾的心态；他们不讳言自己对于传统的迷恋，并试图接续自身传统的文脉，这个传统包括古代的传统和现代的传统；他们以破坏旧的宏大叙事的自觉与勇气试图建立另一种想象之中的新的“宏大叙事”，并将承受其可能失败的命运；他们试图整合人文领域的各类知识，并对它们进行断片式的理解，呈现出某种独特的学者艺术家气质；对新价值的追索和确证充满热情等等。

高世强出生于1971年，现任教于中国美术学院综合艺术系。1995年，高世强与陆磊、高士明组成了一个创作小组，展开了他们自称为“情境雕塑”的艺术实践。这一时期他们的作品与各种复杂的情境形成互文关系，被赋予了更多的心理的、社会的、以及文化上的象征意义，从而试图摆脱对观念性的过分依赖。1996年，他们以录像装置作品《可见与不可见的生活》参加“第一届中国录像艺术展”。几年后，高世强赴上海读研，直到2003年回到母校任教，开始独立工作的他与朋友陈晓云、陆磊、吴俊勇、孙逊、倪柯耘等一起开启了杭州影像运动，一个在今天看来极为罕见的群体性的“当代艺术运动”。同时，他的创作进入了第二个阶段，即“影像雕塑”阶段。这一时期他创作了大量的实验短片，基于美院的教育背景，这些作品与其说与实验电影史有关系，不如说它们是以当代艺术的方式被结构起来的，并在创作方式上呈现为一种“古典回归”。自2007年至今，高世强的创作进入到一个旺盛期，即第三个阶段，作品以电影为主。题材涉及古代传说在现代的变体（《十八相送》）、私人生活与历史记忆（《大桥》）、共运史的个人感怀 （《红》），以及剧场试验（《革命》）和具有人类学电影意味的试验（《晕氧》和《地点上的时间》）。在保持原有的实验性外，作品的形式向更传统的艺术电影回归，并呈现出某种精英主义倾向；在内容上对历史与现实的思考和体认较之同龄人显得更加广阔和复杂，并呈现出一定的系统性，把对中国历史文化的思考带到了一个新的高度。高世强的作品摆脱了狭隘的意识形态纷争，折射出了后社会主义时代戏剧性的转变，即从国家与集体的综合体向以个人理念和目标为核心的空间转变，在这种转变中，属于这一代人自身的传统和价值观被悄然塑造。

与高世强试图建构一个庞大的问题体系不同的是，出生于1970年的董文胜把目光聚焦于对江南美学的再发现。在我看来，这种再发现是对“后传统”社会中传统的认识与追怀，一定程度上是在进行某种意义的文化“复古”，从而避免一种陷于无望的“自我撕裂”。“江南”在当代艺术领域是一个看起来貌似地域性的课题，但它与中国传统文脉的联系最为直接，因此，它的价值和魅力愈来愈被重视中国精神传统的人们所关注。董文胜迄今为止的所有作品都与他生活的江南小城常州有着最为密切的关系。他的创作自由地穿梭于摄影、装置和实验电影之间，巧妙地利用了中国传统文化的元素，如“园林”、“石头”、“刺青”、“骷髅”、“青苔”等等。从早期的后花园系列、静物系列一直到最近的以人体骨骼为主要媒材的系列摄影作品，他已经从对发生于特定情境中的神秘感、超现实性以及古怪的性活动的特别关注中走了出来，从而去思考更为抽象的问题，比如时间、存在、虚无等哲学问题。董文胜的实验短片则充分昭示了江南美学中阴柔的一面。作品《惊蛰》所流露出的对逝去传统的哀悼的情绪，可以明显地看出，它是受到了中国1930年代郁达夫小说中那些新旧交织的文人的苦闷心态的影响；而《梅雨》和《小暑》则是与性的初萌和生命的成长有关的两部短片，朴素的纪实镜头中充满了江南特有的濡湿诗意。他的更为重要的影像作品《石沉记》几乎以自然主义的手法表达了传统文脉与当代社会全球化进程的纠缠，以及对现代化城市建设理念的对抗。值得一提的是，董文胜个展的名称“没有世界观的面孔”，出自于赵汀阳的著作《没有世界观的世界》。在赵著中，一种不同于西方世界观的中国的“天下观念”被构建起来，这也正好暗合了董文胜企图建立一种植根于中国传统思想之上的新的价值观的抱负——这可能是这一代艺术家所苦苦追索的光荣与梦想。

二○○九年四月十二日



Foreword
Zuo Jing

After “What Has Been Happening Here? : Inaugural Exhibition of Chinese Independent Film Archive (CIFA)”, Iberia Center for Contemporary Art is presenting “‘The Other There’: Solo Exhibition of Gao Shiqiang”, and “‘No World-View for the Face’: Solo Exhibition of Dong Wensheng”. These two solo exhibitions attempt to showcase some of the most recent changes occurring in the contemporary art field – artists born in the 1970s are becoming prominent and are rewriting the history of contemporary art. The range of mediums they employ have broadened. Among these mediums, video and installation have become their most important languages. They are re-examining history as a whole and in the process reveal their complicated and conflicting feelings regarding the subject matter. They do not hesitate to show their obsession with traditions, and they attempt to pick up the knowledge tradition, which derives from both ancient and modern times, from where it has been left off. With conscience and courage to destroy the existing macro narrative, they attempt to create their own grand narratives based on their imagination, and accept the possibilities that these narratives may subject to failure. They attempt to integrate knowledge from various fields of humanities and digest them in fragments, and a unique scholarly quality thus taking on in their art practice. The last but not the least, they are passionate about the search for and verification of new values.

Gao Shiqiang was born in 1971. He currently teaches at the Department of Experimental Art of the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. In 1995, along with Lu Lei and Gao Shiming, Gao Shiqiang co-founded a creative group and began an art practice that they called “Situational Sculpture”. During this time, symbolic meanings concerning psychological, social and cultural aspects began to emerge in their works due to interactions with various complex contexts and intertextual relationships with them, thus seeking a departure from being overly dependent on conceptualism. In 1996, with video installation The Visible and Invisible Life, they participated in “Phenomenon/Images: The First Chinese Video Art Exhibition”. Several years after, Gao moved to Shanghai to pursuit his master's degree and later returned to his Alma Mater for teaching in 2003. He began to work independently and started the Hangzhou Video Movement with his friends Chen Xiaoyun, Lu Lei, Wu Junyong, Sun Xun, and Ni Keyun, among others. This is a group-based Contemporary Art Movement that is extremely rare today. At the same time, his creative works had entered a second stage – “Video Sculpture”. During this period he created a large amount of experimental short films. Given his educational background in the Art Academy, instead of relating these pieces to the history of experimental films, it is perhaps more accurate to view them as works constructed by the means of contemporary art. These works also present a “return to Classicism” in creative techniques. From 2007 to present, Gao's artistic career have entered a third stage - a thriving phase dominated mostly by films. The subject matters he explored range from an ancient folklore mutated in the modern time (Butterfly Lovers), personal life and historic memories (Big Bridge), personal reflections of the Communism Movement (Red), theatrical experiments (Revolution), as well as experiments that hint towards anthropological films (Faint with Oxygen and The Other There). While preserving the experimental nature of his works, the form of these pieces is returning to traditional art films and displays a tendency towards elitism. In terms of content, the recognition of and reflection on history and reality presented in these works are broader and more complex than many other works created by artists of Gao's generation. With tendencies to be systematic, Gao’s works bring the thinking on Chinese history and culture to a new height. They break free from the narrow disputes of ideological arguments, and reflect the dramatic changes of a post-socialist society – a transformation of a country-based and community-based collective to a space with individual rationales and personal goals at its core. And during this transformation, Gao's generation is inwardly constructing personal traditions and value system of their own.

Different from Gao Shiqiang’s attempt to construct a large-scale system of inquiry and questioning, Dong Wensheng (b. 1970) focuses on the re-discovery of the aesthetics that originates from the Jiangnan region. From my point of view, this re-discovery represents a nostalgic yearning and recognition for tradition in a “post-traditional” society. And in a certain sense, this re-discovery is a meaningful process of cultural “restoration” in an attempt to avoid the “state of self torn by desperation”. In the field of contemporary art, the word “Jiangnan” seems to be a word that is associated with a region or with a geologically-related subject; but essentially, “Jiangnan” is directly and integrally related to the contextualization of the Chinese tradition. Its merit and charm is increasingly being regarded as significant by those who are interested in the geist of the Chinese tradition. Up until now, Dong’s work maintains a close relationship with the city of Changzhou in the Jiangnan region where he’s living. His practice crisscrosses freely between photography, installation and experimental film, and he ingeniously uses elements that symbolize what one would consider as representations of Chinese traditional culture, such as “garden”, “rock”, “tattoo”, “skeleton”, “moss”, etc. From the early backyard garden and still life series, to the more recent photographs that utilize human bones as his main subject, Dong’s work has evolved from focusing mainly on the mysterious, the surreal, and sometimes the bizarrely and sexually-charged situations, to an abstract meditation on philosophical questionings such as time, existence, and nothingness. Dong’s experimental short films fully capture the soft and effeminate qualities of the Jiangnan aesthetics. His work Jingzhe (The Awaking of Insects) conveys a tragic lament to the fading of tradition; clearly, this work is influenced by the sad and depressing literary figures—who existed in the mist of the clashing interweave between the old and the new—as typified in the work of Yu Dafu, a prominent writer and poet of the 1930s in China. Meiyu (Plum Rain) and Xiaoshu (Slight Heat) are two short films that focus on the topics of sexual awakening and the growth of life. Their documented scenes are captured in an austere fashion that fully exposes the poetic “wetness” of the region of Jiangnan. Dong’s most important video work—The Moment of Stone Sinking—uses a naturalistic style to express the entanglement between a contextualized tradition and a globalized contemporary society that is under development. This work also touches on the urge for resistance towards the constructed ideology of a modernized city. What deserves to be mentioned above all is the title for Dong’s exhibition, No World-view for the Face, comes from Zhao Tingyang’s book No World-view for the World. In Zhao’s book, a type of Chinese “view beneath the heaven” is constructed that differs from the world-view of the West. This coincides with Dong’s attempt to establish a new kind of root and value system in the re-thinking of traditional Chinese thoughts—perhaps this is the dream and the glory that are being sought-after by artists of this generation.
April 12th, 2009

小轰雷

刚看了布展现场,值得期待!

开幕展看了，牛X！

刚有耳闻，怎还不传点图片上来看看。