All That Is Solid Melts into Air - On Zheng Lu’s Sculpture
Author: Wu Hong
Shitao said, “brush and ink change with the times.” This rule, however, seems difficult to apply to sculpture. That is because, beyond approaches to modeling, there are many consensuses regarding “sculptural feel” that are connected to historical materials and techniques. If you say a painting lacks a “painterly feel,” you may be affirming the artist’s subversion of traditional aesthetics about painting. If, however, you say a sculpture lacks a “sculptural feel,” you may be bringing the artist a great deal of humiliation. The reason lies in the fact that what we mean by painterly feel is in fact traces of an artist’s visible personal style, while the sculptural feel refers to an archetypal image that has accumulated in the collective unconscious over time.
Sculptures in early times were mainly made of stone. Stone carving, with its hard and brittle material and limited processing techniques, led to our consensus on what constitutes a “work of sculpture” that, aesthetically speaking, emphasizes mass, volume, and a sense of wholeness. Once this consensus was elevated to the level of formal aesthetics, it became this field’s collective unconscious archetype. According to Michelangelo, what remains when one pushes material off the mountaintop is sculpture. This legend has no historical basis, but having been repeated and stressed by teachers to their students one generation after another, it became the golden rule for sculptors. Concealed beneath this legend is our reverence for mass, volume and a sense of wholeness. Therefore, if you rashly comment that a sculptor’s work lacks a sculptural feel, you are killing the sculptor.
Developments in stone processing, metal casting, and, above all, modern metal welding have brought great freedom to sculpture, but nevertheless, certain traditional aesthetic notions remain deeply engrained. In speaking on the aesthetics of sculpture, Matisse, who made a revolutionary contribution to painting, stated “The sculptor must feel, in making it, the particular demands for volume and mass. The smaller the bit of sculpture, the more the essentials of form must exist.”
As far as Western modern sculpture is concerned, after the genius Picasso revolutionarily dispelled the myths of volume and mass in sculpture, and after Antoine Pevsner, Alexander Archipenko, Ossip Zadkine, Barbara Hepworth, and Henry Moor advanced their understanding of “negative form” and “negative space,” the substance that constitutes so-called negative space is still wrapped in a solid metal mass.
From the perspective of modeling aesthetics, Zheng Lu’s works, however, counteract such notions of volume and mass in traditional sculpture. His motivation comes from the material conversion of traditional Chinese calligraphy slats from his early life. After the metal plates are hollowed out around the written Chinese characters, our psychological perceptions of their material properties change, turning the heavy steel plates into something light and transparent. The next development is another “substance” that emerges from this dissolved “negative form.” The psychological effect this “substance” has on us is multiple. Is it eternal or ephemeral? Is it real or unreal? Is it deconstruction or construct? Is it three-dimensional or flat?
If his early works, which were carved out from thick steel plates, still retained a sense of mass on the edges, in his recent works, the large quantity of thin stainless steel sheets has dissolved this sense of mass as much as possible. The purpose behind this change in his choice of material is clear: to present the paradox of “formless form.”
This effect emerges from his use of the stainless steel material. The use of stainless steel in artistic sculpture arose from the development of stainless steel sheet processing and welding techniques. This artificial product of modern industrial conditions has been widely used in outdoor sculpture art for its high ductility and resistance to corrosion. This has particularly been the case in the last twenty years in China, with the rise of the urbanization movement. In this top-down movement, with its ideological pursuit of “modernity,” this artistic material, at once cheap and easy to handle, has been overused in public sculpture to the point of vulgarity. As for indoor conventional sculptures, on the other hand, aside from some conceptual usage of this material, we seldom see its modeling potential fully utilized and incorporated into the artwork.
A balance must be found between thinness and hardness to ensure the artist is dealing with the thinnest possible plates that can retain formal solidity. Meanwhile, the stress from welding the metal makes the visually fragmentary and broken surface especially hard. This leads to a schism in our visual psychology of this metal: is it broken or intact? Is it serendipity, or inevitability? Is it appearance or essence?
In addition, as stainless steel is well-suited to post-processing, the glossy, polished surface, and the clean, crystalline feel of the cut steel further diminish the solidity of the sculpture’s mass, which leads to a new contradiction between the empty space and flowing air in the volume, and the outward appearance of “substantive” presence.
Among Chinese sculptors, Zhan Wang is considerably skilled at handling stainless steel as a material, but he mainly views the material from the angle of its embodiment of the times, using it to lampoon the artificiality of the philosophy of life in the industrial age. In Zheng Lu’s works, the material takes part in the modeling aspect of his work, and extends to a reflection on the aesthetic system of traditional sculpture.
Therefore, we can see how, as Zheng Lu’s works have grown increasingly mature, he aspired to use the language of sculpture to convey the concept of “nothingness.” The concept of nothingness here differs from the exploration of “negative space” by modern Western sculptors mentioned above in that “negative form” or “negative space” is still related to substance, “subtracted” substance, to be exact. The concrete object ceases to exist, but the space, volume, and mass “it” used to occupy remains. In Zheng Lu’s works, however, “nothingness” belongs to the realm of the spirit, and is the philosophical expression of a worldview. To summarize, his experimentation, in everything from modeling to the use of material, is aimed at nothing more than expressing this worldview in his own voice. As Karl Marx said when describing the decline of Western culture and morality in the Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air, and all that is holy is profaned.”
Zheng Lu was born into a family steeped in traditional culture. Many of his elders took jobs that had to do with words. Also, judging from the poems his father wrote in his early years (which are another element in Zheng Lu’s works), we can see his family is ideologically “orthodox.” Furthermore, Zheng Lu’s own experiences, from his undergraduate training at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, to his postgraduate studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, brought him into contact with the most “orthodox” system of training in sculpture. His departure may be attributed to his participation in an exchange program at the Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. I once attended a lecture by the dean of that school’s sculpture department when he came to Beijing as an exchange scholar at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is himself a multimedia installation artist, and his works have absolutely nothing to do with traditional notions of “sculpture.” We can imagine what a shock it was to Zheng Lu’s values built on traditional sculpture aesthetics.
We can thus consider this a thread which may take us further into Zheng Lu’s inner world—the “staunch” values he received from his family, or from his professional training, and how, when those values came under doubt, challenge and subversion, his confusion may have led him to “nothingness.”
In our inner world, the most effective way to adapt to the external world is often to search for another force to balance against the force we are facing, in a form of inner self-regulation. This is how the material world maintains equilibrium, and this is how the human mind finds inner peace. Zheng Lu’s method for finding equilibrium is in his artworks, by giving something “melting into air” material form, like an elegy, “fixing” a “frame” if this change in a visual, material state. In this sense, Zheng Lu’s works are poetic and melancholic.
Along these lines, we can also see how Zheng Lu’s use of the written word in his works is inevitable. This is of course due to the influence of his family, but another factor seems to be more decisive—words possess “meaning.”
Words are language in tangible form, ideas in material form. Zheng Lu’s use of words, therefore, arises not just from formal needs, but also from the need for “meaning”; here, words are merely the tangible form of said “meaning.” The various methods of dislocation described above, from modeling to material, all reflect his conflicting mindset about “meaning.”
I quite like the artwork To My Father. The words are from an ode his father wrote to Mao Zedong in his early years, brimming with the mainstream values and emotive judgments of the time. The words of this poem are shaped into the form of a round Mao badge. What this shows is that the “meaning” here takes place not in the grand narratives of the era, to which he has no immediate connection. Instead, his interest lies in the relationship of continuation and rebellion of worldview between himself and his father. Those seemingly absolutely correct, unquestionable and “solid” spiritual tendencies become, in this work, light, transient, and fragmentary visual imagery.
His skeptical inquiry is not confined to the realm of his own experience, either. The words he lifted form the Universal Declaration of Human Rights become another interpretation of Western universal values. As everyone knows, the Declaration of Human Rights is the basis of Western social values, and its unassailable status grants it a certain form of “sacredness” in Western social value judgments. But when it comes to the idealization of its internal logical basis, and the limitations of conditions, people choose to have a selective memory, trying not to question the over-idealization of its logical basis. The kind of “equality” described in “All human beings are born free and equal in rights,” in a stratified, privatized society, however, is only conditional and idealistic. Such over-idealized expression invariably leads to double standards of judgment. In Zheng Lu’s works, this paradoxical logic is easily expressed through intertextual methods of positive and negative characters.
“No object is sharper than flowing water, no mirror better than still water” (In Appreciation of Still Water by Bai Juyi). These characters comprise another work about universal fluidity and stability, eternity and transience, materiality and spirituality, essentiality and phenomenality—these are the basis of logic in our world outlook. Moreover, throughout history, the “primal questions” of whether these paired concepts are complementary or contradictory have given rise to a rich array of “knowledge” phenomena from the perspectives of literature, philosophy and religion. The modeling language in some of Zheng Lu’s works deals with these “primal questions” with reference to literary, philosophical and religious “knowledge phenomena.”
Therefore, we cannot simply equate the use of characters in Zheng Lu’s works with the verbal expressions “inscribed” on objects. To the contrary, the “meaning” of a word is connected with its “material” property in that “a word” is both a carrier of meaning and an element of modeling. The unity of “form” and “meaning” is reflected in the materiality of a word. It is the “material” use of the word that highlights the conflict between the word’s “legibility” in its original sequence and its “illegibility” in the works.
We know that emphasis on “context” is the foundation of linguistic research. A text becomes meaningless if it is isolated from its context or trapped in a “vacuum.” This very meaninglessness is what makes it possible for us to interpret it in different ways in different contexts. Not long ago, the meaningless phrase “Jia Junpeng, your mother wants you to come home for dinner” became exceedingly popular in cyberspace. Without a supporting context for its meaning, it became a linguistic game across the country. Different people put it into different contexts for different purposes. While subverting its contextual meaning, this event became a language spree in which “meaning” experienced limitless proliferation in different contexts. Psychologically speaking, it is a “participatory” spree, a textual spree in which “meaning” is shared through language.
The use of characters in Zheng Lu’s works cannot be simply identified with mere verbal expression in the form of “inscription,” because words in his works have their “original” sequence of meaning, and their “contexts” change when they are turned into modeling elements in material form. In addition to material “modeling” elements, they are also language symbols whose “signifier” and “signified” are in a state of constant change. When it is a sequence in the meaning of “language,” their meaning is established, but the meaning becomes chaotic and multiple when it is existence in the sense of “word” or “material.” The conflict between stability and fluidity is thus elevated into the framework of linguistic discussion, more than modeling aesthetics and logic.
Unexpected Gift from Heaven, Double Car Crash and Elephant in a Peaceful Land are all works in this linguistic regard. The conflict between “practical” meaning and modeling meaning becomes more evident. The “formal meaning” of “喜” (“happiness”), a character with particular significance in folk culture, as a modeling element, and its “practical meaning” are contextually substitutive and opposite. “An elephant in a peaceful land,” as one of the ten ancient auspicious patterns, features an elephant with a vase on its back. The characters are from the words in the Qian hexagram in the Book of Changes, which is the best of the 64 hexagrams in the text. It expresses “peace.” The image of an elephant carrying a vase, however, is turned into a precarious shape found only in circus performances. In this case, the iconographic meaning of this work is precisely the opposite of the linguistic meaning of this auspicious pattern. Here, the object (signified)→language symbol (signifier) is the first phase, which is about the abstract meaning of language; denotation (signifier) → symbolic meaning (signified) is the second phase in which the signified meaning is “delayed” and “mutated” when language is put into use. If we “play it back,” i.e., symbolic meaning →denotation, denotation →object, a fallacy arises. This is an important principle of arbitrariness in Saussure’s linguistics.
The characters in An Impression of Hong Ren’s Landscape explain the technical term “vacuum coating,” one of the techniques employed in the work. Words in the upper part are used only as modeling “material,” but these “material” words in the lower part are treated with “vacuum coating,” so words become “linguistic” material with the directive function of symbols. In this case, the work reveals vividly and artistically that there is not always a connection of necessity between the material form of the word (signifier) and its meaning form (signified).
Again, from what Li Daoyuan wrote in The Original Preface to the Commentary on the River Classics, “Water is the most abundant matter in the universe…even learned scholars cannot reach its depth or understands its mysteries.” We know that “water,” in his understanding, like “the Tao,” follows the rule that “the names that can be named are not the true names.” This water does not have a regular form or remain in the same place, and its ultimate knowledge is beyond the human intellect. Water in Dripping, however, gets a solidified form after being “materialized,” and the solidified material is exactly the words interpreting the mystified passage about water in The Original Preface to the Commentary on the River Classics by Li Daoyuan. The material form of words is again detached from the meaning form.
When Zheng Lu once asked me earnestly in a talk if his works could still be called “sculptures,” I told him it was not a problem as long as it was an “excellent” work. The material, the technique and the space involved in a sculpture facilitate the transition from a sculptor to an installation artist, but, in turn, the aesthetic modeling features of sculpture, formed over a long time under the influence of material and space in sculpting, will be a handicap to a sculptor who wants to make breakthroughs in modeling. When talking about the Cross-Legged Maitreya statue in Cave 13 of the Yungang Grottoes, many people are amazed at the figure of a strong man standing between Maitreya’s left arm and left leg, with one arm overhead holding Maitreya’s gigantic hand. They are impressed by its exquisite sculpting. As a matter of fact, this sculpting is merely in response to the qualities of the material, which make these techniques the most appropriate and natural approach here. Zheng Lu’s progress based on his creativity in the use of the language of sculpture is in line with the art form’s evolution.
In summary, by incorporating new materials and new techniques in his works, Zheng Lu deconstructs established standards about volume, mass and tension of form in the aesthetics of traditional sculpture, introduces the Eastern concepts of “nonbeing” and “nothingness” as sculpture language, and furthermore diversifies the aesthetics of sculpture. Moreover, based on his understanding of linguistics, particularly the relationships between “language” and “word”, “signifier” and “signified,” he introduces the “word” into sculptural form and semantic logic both in terms of material and language. In his artistic representation of the dualistic relationship of unity and contradiction between the two categories, he reinterprets the conventions or rules, thus motivating the viewer to participate and interact both on the level of “form” and of “meaning.”
Early morning, August 20, 2009
Tongzhou, Beijing