Image and Writing
Author: Pi Li
In the year 517 of the Hegira, Umar is reading a treatise entitled The One and the Many; a malaise or a premonition interrupts him. He gets up, marks the page which his eyes will not see again, and makes his peace with God, with that God which may or may not exist and whose favor he has asked for in the difficult pages of his algebra. He dies that same day, at the hour of the setting of the sun.
—Jorge Luis Borges, A Personal Anthology, page 94
Although what we can see in Zheng Lu's work is a symphony of shapes and characters, spaces, light and shadows, one can easily imagine the tremendous workload among the characters' transcriptions, trans-printing and re-grouping, as well as the cutting, welding and polishing of metals. Zheng Lu may be one of the few artists who keeps their hands dirty while making art, which no doubt is a precious thing. Art since the 20th century, from the early avant-garde to the later conceptualism, seems to have already experienced a complete cycle: from canceling motifs, back to the media nature of art itself, then moving towards an emphasis on reality and conceptuality. Today, we appear to have already entered an era of pan-conceptualism: we pay attention to what the artists are saying, but rarely care about how they say it. We see concepts as objects, and techniques as containers: the former is fundamental; the latter is incidental. The pursuit of a conceptual foundation, on one hand, has made art obtain its focus on the philosophy of the world and reality; on the other hand, this has pushed the system of today's art production into a quagmire of utilitarianism. When we are so pleased with the artists' narratives of conceptualism, we more or less ignore the necessity of an artist's techniques and the existence of his bare hands. Thus, we find the artists’ hands are getting cleaner; therefore, the art is getting easier. Perhaps because of this, we see numerous solo exhibitions, group exhibitions, biennials, triennials, art fairs and auctions going on on a daily basis. We are surrounded by a flood of catalogues and irresponsible criticisms.
About the arguments among concepts and techniques, objects and containers, essentials and non-essentials have different notions in different eras. As the postmodern visual fiesta comes to its very end, Masaaki Kanai, the new fashion director at clothing brand MUJI, says that when sharing MUJI's mission, his goal is to create normal products. He compares MUJI's 30 years of work to making a bowl more like a bowl. He reminds me of the philosophical search for the lingual noumenon, on-going since the twentieth century. Ludwig Wittgenstein once said, "Don't think, just look!" Along this trajectory, Michel Foucault made his own famous conclusion: "Do not think you are speaking words. The words are speaking you." Perhaps Zheng Lu's bare hands should be a powerful reminder at this moment which, in an era of excessive conceptualization and imagery, we should perhaps use the research of techniques to investigate an artists' theories.
Some critics often utilize the relationship between the imagery and the words in Zheng Lu's work as a point of entry, thus attempting to outline the artist's conceptual path. However, in my opinion, Zheng Lu's work seems more of a narrative of narratives. He employs texts, characters and later constantly appearing appropriated images. Ancient poems, calligraphy from his father's generation, Republican era Buddha statues, an opera cornet, all remains of the countless narratives of others. What he does is to integrate different narratives of language and imagery from different periods of time, carefully applying the characters and their remains onto precise and delicate forms. This carefulness actually encompasses many layers of meaning.
First of all, Zheng Lu’s sculptures, both in form and content are a process of writing transfer. The process of turning text into characters, transforming characters into positive and negative space, then applying this space onto forms, and transforming words into light and shadow, is a process of constant expansion and transference that echoes the traditions of imitation and emulation particular to Chinese art. In contrast with Western art, imitation and emulation have special significance. Throughout the calligraphic tradition, all of the great masters through time have emphasized the understanding they gained through the imitation of classic texts. This is not unlike the concept of performing the music of others in Western music, experiencing different expressions to find one’s place in and about the world. In this process, as the shape transforms, the artist cuts and edits the text, and thus the text is reshaped and edited by the form. This progression of transferred writing is a re-positioning of the artist in regards to himself, text and object. The copying and imitation in traditional Chinese art is based on the concept of the “attaining of knowledge through the study of things” in Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism. If one were to say that the inclination towards conceptualization in contemporary art leads to the rationalization of art, then Zheng Lu's uniqueness or significance under the current artistic reality is that the essence of his practice is not a traditional visual method, but that, in this era of image overload, he persists in this method of writing transference that is fundamentally about discussing non-intellectual knowledge and wisdom, as well as the relationship between this kind of knowledge, wisdom and himself. In other words, his methodology also contains the possibility of a Chinese traditional discourse in the present, and the possibility for the artist to settle down.
The texts and images chosen by Zheng Lu often intentionally maintain a certain correspondence, just as there is between the characters and the hollow spaces where they have been cut out, and between the images and their lighting effect. When these emerge in the physical space, the object produced by the work and its shadow, the solid characters and their hollow outlines, and the artwork and the shadows it casts across the air, form three pairs, or six elements that comprise a fascinating visual and meaningful space. What I find the most enticing is the relationship the artist presents between the images and characters. From the artistic and social angles, the past is a history led by words, but since the era of modernism, with the invention of photography, images began to take the absolute lead. Nowadays, contemporary culture is no longer a printed culture, but a visual culture. The non-stop reading of texts only seems to belong to the realm of a few intellectuals. Daniel Bell once said the reading of texts allows us adjust the speed of acceptance, give us time to think, but images make us accept and experience passively, leaving us no time to think and differentiate. In Zheng Lu's works, the characters appear in textual form and the meanings surface after the regrouping, providing us with an opportunity and space for imagination. But the forms of the artworks and the forms of the characters themselves that are indicated by these characters constantly force us to return from the imagination to the visual. This is precisely the contemporary nature of Zheng Lu's works: the experience presented by his works is the exact feud between image and text that plagues every intellectual today. We are irresistibly dragged forward by images, but we fight to find contemplation and realization along the way so that we may breathe.