In the composition of the painting Two People (Liangge ren) are a male and female figure in a sitting posture. The man in the front is holding a guitar in his arms, and appears ecstatic. A red female figure bathed in the light of the setting sun seems to reflect the mood of the young man, while the blue river and the red sunlight provide a contrast. Across the river there is a white horse that seems to be waiting for a call from the loving young couple to take them to a faraway place. Two People is probably a record of the painter's own experience, or a more general depiction of human nature itself. Regardless of its inspiration, Two People is only a symbol that uses the artistic vocabulary of expressionism: freedom, human nature and the transcendence of souls. This is a typically pastoral work, completed by Pan Dehai after graduating from the Fine Arts Department of Northeastern Normal University and arriving in Yunnan.
Like many artists, Pan Dehai, born in 1956, was fond of painting from a very young age. Before entering university, his taste for painting was derived from Russian painters, such as Repin whose style was imbued with historical narration and literary portrayal. For a long time, illustrated comic books by Hua Shanchuan and He Youzhi left an unforgettable impression on Pan Dehai. For most young people, the conditions of painters in the 1970s were limited, and it was a luxury to be able to use oil pigments. Moreover, very few books on painting techniques were available. Thus, before entering the university, Pan Dehai had never touched an oil painting. But the new era extended many new possibilities: book fairs enabled young people to see beautifully printed reproductions of world famous paintings in foreign publications, and some of his classmates had modernist publications at home that gradually became sources for their aesthetic judgment. Pan Dehai entered university in 1978. He and his classmates Ding Defu and Wang Changbai leafed through brand-new albums of paintings and discussed Western modernism. To understand Western art, he needed not only his own instincts, but also the philosophical tools to do so, and so the writings of Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Bergson and Schopenhauer provided Pan Dehai with spiritual nourishment. Internal demands required that the painter understand the conceptual background and historical context of Western art, and so, when most young people were keen and thirsty to read works of Western philosophy, literature and psychology, this seemed the natural thing to do.Among the different philosophical ideas, Bergson’s theory that time was presented to consciousness as ‘duration’ exerted an enormous influence on Pan Dehai. In his philosophy of life, Bergson showed no interest in ‘rational’ conceptual activities, and, indeed, he doubted the creativity of reason. He emphasized the movement of life itself, and the unknown element in the movement of life, namely, the real existence of life (élan vital). Unless life is free and joyful, there can be no creation. We cannot know how many steady logical ideas Pan Dehai and his group drew from the works of his philosophy of vitalism. However, those ideas from among the works of Western philosophers obviously awakened these young people's understanding of life. Before 1976, the Chinese philosophical understanding of life was subject to a unique political and ideological background, and public political goals were regarded as being rational goals for all young people. Yet this form of reason was subject to the discipline of institutional power. Liberal ideas were suppressed within this sanctioned view of reason, making it utterly different from the concept of reason originally espoused by Kant. Bergson's instinct theory was targeted at Kant's system, but young Chinese were unaware of the alien and totally different political and cultural background of Western philosophy. They drew ideas from often contradictory sources. For young painters like Pan Dehai, these voices were totally different from the revolutionary and political slogans of the past and the new philosophical ideas impelled them to look for a spiritual world previously unheard of. Like a fountain or inferno gushing from a mysterious abyss and spurting in all directions, life spreads limitlessly and miraculously produces new life. Pan Dehai accepted these ideas almost by instinct. When the awareness of the life force became a possibility in the political atmosphere, life itself was beginning to stir vigorously, and this aptly describes the actual situation in which most young artists found themselves in the 1980s. In his subsequent experiments with art, Pan Dehai has always followed this continuous line of life in his inner heart.
The university not only provided Pan Dehai with time and space for learning painting techniques, but university life was more an experience of change in those years, whether in lifestyle, viewpoint or ethics. Therefore, after repeatedly reading literature about south-western China and seeing the paintings by Yuan Yunsheng and others depicting the customs there, Pan Dehai was enchanted by the history and mysterious aspects of the southwest. He felt that if there were a mysterious place he yearned to visit, then that was Kunming:
When I was at university, the government was still responsible for assigning jobs to university graduates. Until I finished university, I had never been out of north-eastern of China. I had a strong desire to visit an unknown. I did not understand much about Yunnan, only knowing it was an area of ethnic minorities, with beautiful scenery. The sketches drawn by Yuan Yunsheng at Xishuangbanna in Yunnan made a strong impact on me. So I very wanted much to go to Yunnan.[1]
In the early 1980s, the Chinese people were again allowed to take an interest in antiquities and ancient things, which had long been regarded as the property of the landed gentry and the bourgeoisie, which should be smashed thoroughly. Following the emancipation of people’s minds and the dawning of the new realization that everyone has the right to believe in the actuality of his or her own feelings, ‘antiquities’ and ‘ancient things’ now became a key link to the past and a medicine for the soul. The so-called ‘stream of life’ (shenghuoliu) in the late 1970s and the early 1980s corresponded to such a feeling, and the pure and simple lifestyle in Tibetan and other ethnic minority areas became a new source of inspiration for Chinese artists. It is no surprise that at that time Pan Dehai took a strong interest in Chen Danqing’s series of paintings on Tibet, and when Pan Dehai settled down in the city he had dreamed of, he found it ‘simply better than he had imagined. In those years, Kunming was a quiet city. Old streets, old houses, local delicacies, ethnic folkways; everything conjured up beauty and novelty for me’.[2]
In fact, Pan Dehai, who had accepted modernism, came to Kunming by instinct. He had no friends and relatives in the city, and he was assigned to a local school where he worked as an art teacher. He began to search for possibilities. At first, he used his painting brush to express his vague feelings, imbued with the outlook on life and imagination of the world he had learnt from textbooks. When he heard of the existence of a wonderful sight, the ‘clay forest’ in Yuanmou, he heard an irresistible call:
I became an art teacher in a local school. In the first semester after my arrival, I heard that there was a clay forest in Yuanmou, so I went there with a friend who did photography. At that time I had only a vague idea of going there for a visit. I did not expect that the clay forest would impress me so deeply and that its influence on my earlier works would be so enormous.[3]
The color and shape of the clay forest and the terrain resembling a waste land shocked Pan Dehai. In this pristine natural Pan was keen sensitive to feel ‘the roughness and primitiveness of life’. His innate sense of mystery led to a more abstract feeling after he had encountered the clay forest, and this feeling directed him to use abstract concepts in his early paintings. Mao Xuhui noted that Pan Dehai ‘has discovered a holy land in the clay forest. There is a kind of melancholy beauty in a bare wilderness. There is nothing there, but in his eyes there is everything’. In succession, he painted the red clay forest, the grey clay forest, the pale clay forest, and in the end, the clay forest has disappeared, and there is only confusion and fantasy’.
While at university, Pan Dehai understood the broader possibilities of painting, and from foreign art books he understood the rationality of abstract expression. So in some of his works created in 1982, like his two abstract series titled No Title (Wuti) and A House (Fangwu), we can see his attempts to draw abstract things. Influenced by the abstract structure of calligraphy and symbols, he paid attention to the geometric relationship between natural objects. These experiments were an expression of his understanding of abstract art. However, it was nature itself that encouraged him to use what is known as ‘abstract’ language boldly and affirmatively. He completely disagreed that ‘abstract’ meant abstruse or unclear. On the contrary, ‘abstract’ is the reality of the inner heart. Towards the end of 1982, he began his Clay Forest (Tulin) series. The strong sunshine on the clay forest offered him an opportunity to fully display his abstract composition. He highlighted the texture of the clay forest in the sunshine and the abstract relations between the forest’s different structures. He was looking for an abstract contrast between the blue sky and the red clay forest. We can see that Pan Dehai's focus was not on the abstract forms, but on the moods they occasion. The composition of these paintings shows that the painter was full of passion for the mysterious and natural life.
Abstract expression is not isolated. Admitting the truthfulness of the inner heart and admitting the existence of human unconsciousness influenced China’s expressionist art and abstract art in the 1980s. In Kunming, which is located in the remote frontier area of southwestern China, the ‘abstract’ was derived from local natural conditions and social customs which often suggest time. Pan Dehai’s abstraction is, to a great extent, is a reminiscence of time. He does not focus on present reality, but on the imaginary past. His assumption is that the power of reminiscence is infinite, for reminiscence ‘enables you get away from the reality unconsciously and retreat into the bygone world. A look back at the past will make you excited, simply because past life will never return. In fact, the past is just like so many images; dim shadows dazzle your eyes, but these images remain clear, as clear as what happened yesterday. A person's spiritual life is like a running river, and its values can be depicted when the emotions are awakened, and the spirit and body attain perfect harmony. Spiritual existence is, in fact, composed of constant reminiscence. It seems closer to real life, making you feel present in a scene. On the contrary, the reality and the things before your eyes can make you feel strange, unreal and uncertain, so that you even act unconsciously, as though in a dream’ (1983). This is a unique psychological complex that makes Pan Dehai distinct from other artists in his way of thinking and understanding. Yet, what is the rich experience that needs to be recalled and represented through painting?
Indeed, it was this unique psychological complex that induced Pan Dehai to transcend present reality and encounter the unknowable past. Pan Dehai conjectured a reality, one that we cannot see in daily life. He was looking for this psychological reality and trying to decorate it with his imagination. He even believed that if he himself could not rely on such a reality, it would be difficult to represent the truthfulness and significance of life. In reminiscing that came close to ‘depression’, the painter believed himself to be ‘alive’. In other words, he could pursue ‘a real and true life that he is yearning for day and night’, and attain emotional sublimation and spiritual vigor.
We have noticed that it was a general vogue for young artists in the 1980s to think about life using terms drawn from philosophy. They discovered concepts in the translated works of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Freud and Sartre that they thought they could intuit. A basic human experience is that a word can open up the mind if this unaccountable word stimulates a thought. When Pan Dehai encountered terms such as ‘illusion’, ‘sub-consciousness’, ‘instinct’ and ‘insanity’, he was able to piece together feelings aroused by these words, and could describe his feelings as though in a reverie, impelling himself to use art to reproduce ‘the dim illusion of life in the memory’, and use abstract expression to depict the ‘spiritual inspiration and revelation’. (1983)
The year 1983 saw the production of the abstract series ClayForest, and it was also a period when Pan was reading all kinds of books. Sometimes, he would note down his thoughts on art, which might be comments after reading a book, or his meditations on art, exemplifying the painter’s desire to use words to describe his understanding of art:
Searching through chaos is pure progression from novelty or from the heart to nature, and is both a reflection of the self and an unconscious combination when seen from the outside. It is the place where fresh artistic feelings are generated, like millions of cells, suddenly undergoing change.
For the art of painting, stimulation is a must, a crazy state of mind is a must, a free spirit is a must, and a necessary restriction is also a must. The combination of these four elements is the precondition for the birth of a good painting. When one of the elements is missing, a painting can still be produced, but it will not be complete or eternal.
The concealed half or larger part of an object is more likely to excite me than its surface, for the surface only shows one side of the thing. Its exterior may look attractive, but is unlikely to be completely true. I seem to feel turmoil in my innermost heart, a resistance to the visual feeling imposed by the external world. Such a surface is lifeless, and no doubt, it makes people feel that they have been fooled or deceived. When I see a boat on the river, I am not content with just the part above the water. I always want to know the other part of it, the part below the water line, like something important hidden in the unknown darkness. For me, the real beginning of art is where the vision is broken and where the surface world ends. This seems to be the starting point of each of my paintings, and the entry to my search for myself.
From the above statements, we can sense the influence of Western art on him, and that influence is various and unsystematic. The artist simply remembers the ideas that he wants to remember, and these ideas have become the basis for his experiments with painting.
It was his ideas on art that led to Pan Dehai meeting his closest friend in Kunming. ‘Mao Xuhui's mother happened to work with me in the same unit, except that she had retired long ago. But we lived in the same compound. His mother had told him about me. One day, he came to visit his parents, and in this way we met. We came together naturally, in the name of art’.[4] In 1983, Mao Xuhui was also reading Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, August Strindberg, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, Schopenhauer, Hermann Hesse, Nietzsche and Sartre, as well as being an admirer and student of expressionist artists such as Oskar Kokoschka and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The meeting of Pan and Mao was a moment of instant recognition, in which they recognized each other as lonely fighters. Mao Xuhui said: ‘You must have a view of the world and express it, before you set a criterion for it’. Mao’s viewpoint was also that of Pan Dehai, namely, admitting the validity of the movement of life.
With his increasing number of friends, Pan Dehai came to find that he was no longer as lonely as before, and now had friends who shared his ideas and viewpoints. He abandoned his old inhibited lifestyle of ‘forcing’ himself to read books and painting at home. Although there was no possibility that these young painters could participate in official exhibitions, they could exchange ideas on art and experiences. Filled with artistic ambition and ideals, they were keen to from reading and discussion groups, to have the opportunity to see as many albums of paintings as possible, and to get to know modern art. Their passion for art is reminiscent of the young Vincent Van Gogh. Despite their low living standards, according to Pan Dehai's memoirs, ‘everybody had a small salary at that time. Most of the money was spent buying pigments, and we lived in semi-starvation’. Art for them was the only thing in life. After their ideas endured countless blows, it was time for them, as a group, to display their art to society. In 1985, after the end of the ‘spiritual pollution’ movement, the political atmosphere in China was once again clear. The wave of accepting Western ideas entered a new high during this period. Not allowed to participate in official exhibitions, these young artists, through their own efforts had begun to display their modern art. However, this is not to say these young artists of south-western China would have any success. Mao Xuhui had recorded the history of the ‘New Figurative Image Paintings’, which greatly influenced Pan Dehai and his friends on their artistic journey. One day in 1985, Zhang Long, an art student from East China Normal University in Shanghai, returned to Kunming during the vacation. When he saw the paintings by Mao Xuhui, Zhang Xiaogang and Pan Dehai, he was ‘very excited. In contrast, the paintings created in Shanghai are too insipid, too sweet, and lifeless’:
[Zhang Long] proposed that we stage a show in Shanghai. He could help us arrange the exhibition venue, but we had to share the expenses. So our most urgent task was earning some money. To that end, we got involved with interior decoration companies and engaged in remodeling houses and drawing up plans. Weput in a great deal of effort for a time, but made little money. Then a telegram came from Shanghai. As the exhibition venue had been arranged, we had to act quickly. We had to borrow money. Pan (Dehai) had 600 yuan, Mao (Xuhui) borrowed 300, and Zhang (Xiaogang) borrowed 200. The three of us packed our paintings into eight boxes and made two trips on a tricycle to the railroad station to arrange their shipment. Due to the urgency, we used an express service, which cost us 400 yuan. Both Pan and Mao asked their bosses for leave of absence before they went to Shanghai for the exhibition. Zhang was stranded in Kunming on business. We had to do everything related to the show in person, such as painting the advertising, printing invitations, advertising in newspapers, moving and hanging the paintings, and decoratingthe venue. At night we slept in the student dorm or classrooms at the Department of Fine Arts in the East China Normal University, and we had to evade the questions of campus guards on a daily basis. The happy time in the evenings was spent in the university beverage lounge with jazz and coffee. Apart from Zhang Long, Hou Wenyi from Shanghai also took part in the show. After graduating from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in 1982, she was assigned to work in a small town in Hunan province. She stayed there for a few years before she found a job in the Shanghai Institute of Culture and History. She was penniless too... She proposed that our show be named New Figurative Images and we approved it on instinct... Before the opening of the show, Hou Wenyi got another artist, Xu Kan, a sculptor who graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, to also join the show. He didn’t contribute much monetarily to the show. We only asked him to buy some paints. In June 1985, the exhibition opened at the Jing’an District Cultural Center in Shanghai. A girl presented us with a basket of fresh flowers. The rent for the venue was 30 yuan a day, and we were not to share in the take from admissions. On the first day, there were many visitors, old and young, including personages from Shanghai art circles, such as the late Guan Liang and Mr. Ada. The exhibition hall, with 120 works on show, was hot with such a big crowd. Some of the metal sculptures had to be displayed in the passageway. We were all shaking hands with visitors and explaining our works to them. Everyone felt that the exhibition was exciting.[5]
Until he participated in the New Figurative Images Painting Exhibition, Pan Dehai was still immersed in his abstract compositions. A timid man as he was in character, his heart was surged with the storm of unconsciousness. That year, he viewed painting as a kind of ‘slaughter’:
In a particular cultural background, painting should be a kind of violence, a slaughter and a bloodless war. It should have a beautiful and cruel feature, making a soul give out a truthful cry, a cry of both surprise and fear and a cry of both love and hatred, under the puncture of a fantastic power. (1985)
Following the exhibition in Shanghai, the New Figurative Images exhibition was also staged in Nanjing. The understanding of the exhibition displayed by people in this city greatly moved the participating artists, but the artist’s mental state akin to reverie would encounter reality. After the New Figurative Images exhibition was over, Pan Dehai once again discovered that the world was not as he wished. In particular, he discovered his own city was still quite unenlightened. The art exhibition was over, but he faced many artistic problems. The dynamic life in the reality offered new possibilities, and this prompted Pan Dehai to think: What should he do to develop his own art?
Pan Dehai, a man of few words, decided in August to go to Shenzhen after the first New Figurative Images exhibition was over. At that time, Shenzhen was a more favorable environment, having implemented the policies of reform and opening-up. The Chinese government selected a few cities like Shenzhen to experiment with the market economy. This meant that it was possible to earn more money there and provide an economic foundation for an art career. ‘At that time, Shenzhen was a place for making money. I thought I could earn a lot of money there and then settle down to my painting. But after I got there, I found it impossible to find time and be in a good frame of mind for painting, as I was doing odd jobs day and night. In less than a year I returned to Kunming’.[6] From the painter's memoirs, it would be hard for us to imagine what serious conflicts he had experienced, but it would seem to be some complex psychological experience. Pan Dehai’s experiences in Shanghai and Nanjing had enabled him to see a broader and a more complex world, and he needed to seek other possibilities, both in life and in art. Moreover during the days following the end of the exhibition, Pan Dehai discovered that the stimulus he felt prior to the exhibition had not brought him the glory he had hoped for. Life went on as usual, without any real change. At least that was how he viewed his situation and his art at that time. Interior decorating, design and ceramics were all jobs that seemed to relevant to his career as an artist, but in fact they were only a means of making a living, and had nothing to do artistically with his inner problems and his personal quest. [7]
So, after working in Shenzhen for less than a year, Pan Dehai returned to Kunming. He has not written anything about the dilemma he faced during this period, but he did not complain much about life even though his living conditions were far from satisfactory. On 20 November 1986, the day he returned from Shenzhen to Kunming, he wrote the following somewhat ambiguous note about his life experience:
Alone again, absolutely alone, and awaiting him was the abyss of pain and loneliness.
Starting again. Starting again a hundred times and then coming to the end, without any space for reconciliation. Life itself smashes life. A new relationship is taking shape, one without impurities. Man is so easily deceived and enslaved by emotions, always a slave, fooled and deceived by hopes. Every all a hope is attempt by some dazzling illusion to capture life and enthusiasms.
Think like a god and live like a dog. In anxiety and uneasiness, we hope that the world will produce miracles. The one that exists and the other half that doesn’t exist make you half-man and half-god. This experience is transcendental.
When there is absolute nothingness, life begins to breathe.
When there is absolute nothingness, the will, as the face of perception, calls out in the distance.
Absolute nothingness is either complete freedom or chains.
Life is a yoke, a trap and a gamble.
Into every state you enter you bring self-deception.
You often deceive yourself, and are deceived by human nature.
Why are you willing to be deceived? You know what lies ahead, so why do you go on recklessly or crazily?
This is possibly only a record of the life of the emotions in which Pan Dehai assimilates concrete life experiences as theoretical issues. When we discover that Pan Dehai begins to question ‘sensibility’, we know that he has started to apply rationality. It is hard to say that life experiences have much direct influence on art, but after his return to Kunming, and in the ongoing process of composing his abstract works, Pan Dehai began to acknowledge a more accurate direction. In 1986, art movements were emerging one after another in cities across China. Pan Dehai began to turn away his reading of Western works and paid more attention to concretely influential periodicals such as Fine Arts (Meishu), Jiangsu Arts Monthly (Jiangsu huakan), Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo meishu bao), World Art (Shijie meishu), and Art Translations (Meishu yicong). He took part in the second New Figurative Images exhibition, The Group Show of Artists from South-western China and, almost by instinct, decided that he must in a collective environment. In 1987, Pan Dehai began to experiment with the works on paper that became his ‘corncob’ series.
In 1987, the political atmosphere again became tense with the onset of the criticism of ‘bourgeois liberalization’. However, following repeated experiments with impressionism, expressionism, abstractionism, surrealism and Dadaism, art critics were naturally suspect of various phenomena associated with the so-called ’85 Art Movement. What on earth was the significance of imitating Western art? From 1987 to 1988, theoretical circles were discussing the issue of ‘linguistic purity’. In those years, people took notice of phenomena in the works of Xu Bing and Lü Shengzhong, and they analyzed Xu's ‘illegible writing’ as a fine example of linguistic purity. In fact, the market economy made social life more complex and provided a diversity of expression for artists. If we merely look at art as different styles, then Western art had completely entered the post-modern stage. Should Chinese art continue to follow the path taken by Western art? The logic of this question was in itself questionable, because the different social and cultural background determined China’s uniqueness. What mattered was not the style, but the way of looking at a question. If the ‘soul’ was allowed to chatter on and was not subject to analysis, then it becomes difficult to determine whether soul actually exists and what value it has. In other words, what on earth is the foundation for essentialism when reality provides so many post-modernist opportunities? Pan Dehai persisted in his essentialist quest, but his actions showed that he had already heeded the warnings posed by a craze for limitless abstraction.
Broken Corncobs Series No.1 (Baikai de baomi xilie #1, 1987) is the earliest work of the Corncobs series. Pan Dehai originally used watercolor in his experiment. Despite a clearly visible outline of a human figure in the composition, we tend to see the masses and clusters in the work as a section of a city wall in northern China. By applying the watercolor repeatedly, Pan Dehai hoped to visually create an ‘emotional complex’. This was an assumption, signaling the pursuit of the mysterious unknown. At the beginning, the painter was not clear about what mystery he should convey, nor what his discovery of his technique of particulate treatment even indicated in his process of experimentation. [8] He had kept on with his experiments on paper, and discovered that if he continued to split those masses and clusters, they evolved into numberless particles. If he then organized these particles into irregular images, usually a human face or body, the composition of the painting would reveal a mysterious world, one that was complex, bizarre and difficult to understand. In a watercolor painting titled Breaking off Corncobs: Rear Hill Series (Baikai baomi: Houshan xilie), completed in 1987, we can already see a mysterious and complicated world created from corncobs. We can discern human faces and bodies composed of corncobs, but the increasingly multiplying corncobs and the living things composed of those corncobs make it difficult for us to identify this world accurately. It was not until 1988 that Pan Dehai completed several more works in the Corncobs series with watercolor, for example, Broken Corncobs: August (Baikai de baomi: 8 yue) and Breaking off Corncobs: RearHill (Baikai baomi: Houshan). In these paintings, the shapes of human faces and bodies are clearly visible. The painter's intention was to symbolize elements of life using particles of different sizes. In 1989, strong decorative colors appear in the watercolor painting ‘corncob’ works, for example Rear Hill No. 5 (Houshan: 5 hao) and Well and Woman (Jing yu nüren), and these provide a contrast with other paintings that use more subtle colors. By now the painter understood that the retention of human forms was not a problem, and that the important thing was creating an abstract composition through his treatment of corncobs. Men or women, singly or in pairs, were simply a linguistic extension derived from the corncobs. A world of replicating corncobs created by brush strokes create visual hypothesis that the painter is in pursuit of life. In his ongoing experimentation, he became spellbound by the repeated act of rubbing and washing every particle.
At the same time as he was creating watercolor paintings, Pan Dehai also used oils to experiment with the treatment of corncobs. From Rear Hill: Two People (Houshan: Liangge ren), completed in 1988, we can see that the painter used oil differently from watercolor. He could only daub on oil paint, and the stickiness of the pigments made it difficult for him to repeatedly wash and rub, as he did with watercolor. Later, Pan Dehai used the thinnest pigment possible and increased the oil to dilute the pigment, in an attempt to achieve the rich and subtle effect of the color having been rubbed repeatedly. Until 1989, Pan Dehai also succeeding in depicting a mysterious world in the different compositions of his oil paintings using these motifs, but these works are longer abstract compositions of wild disorderly brushstrokes, but are a rational space composed of particles depicted meticulously by the painter. The mystery is represented not in an expressive way, but as complex images of life that are carefully arranged. Such life images are impossible to find in any Western paintings. In February 1989, when Pan Dehai submitted a triptych painting of Corncobs to the Modern Chinese Art Exhibition, the critics were surprised to discover the uniqueness and importance of the linguistic transformation effected by the Corncobs series. In 1993, the art critic Yi Ying made the following analysis of Pan Dehai's Corncobs series:
There is one question that puzzles us: What was Pan Dehai's motive in choosing corncobs as his image? Was it a sensory awareness of life or the creation of a visual form? To a great extent, the latter should be a determining factor. Like other young artists of the 1980s, Pan Dehai regards art as a weapon of criticism and as a tool for experiencing the value of life, so the value of art itself retreats to the back stage. Thus, the value of an artwork relied in the main on a theoretical manifesto, this being a period when ideology was more important than form. It was only when he created the Corncobs series that he found a symbolic form, and once he established his own position in visual language his philosophy found its destination. To put it another way, if Pan Dehai had always remained at the first stage of his development, then a deeper philosophy would not helped his art. In some senses, if we interpret Pan Dehai's works as a particular philosophical form of life, whether in the mind of critics or Pan Dehai himself, the Corncobs series thus represents a second stage in his career. However, even at this stage, Pan Dehai's primary concerns were not philosophical issues, but the procedures and techniques of creating forms. It was the latter that made him stand out among artists in the late 1980s.[9]
Critics stress that Pan Dehai's unique artistic language not only clearly demarcated the division between philosophical points of departure and artistic expression, but also clear separated philosophy from the expression of philosophy. The effectiveness of artistic language legitimizes thoughts and ideas. Thus, the image of life is not represented through abstract expression, but as the critic Li Xianting has described:
It seems as if you have removed the outer skin from the human and natural environment, and the exposed space like a thick cluster of cell, makes people feel the presence of a mysterious life.[10]
This is a description based on perception, and the critic tries to find an example of linguistic transformation that occurs when an artist maintains an essentialist stance. But, as Yi Ying observed, Pan Dehai had already embarked on study of artistic language. In 1989, Pan Dehai made the following notes describing this work:
The Corncobs series is art that resembles systems engineering that had just got started and the construction of each part was still at the planning stage. It was a vast system, characterized by diversity and integrity. It was a living body, in which each part and tiny item contained smaller parts within it like single cells and the whole comprised a symbiosis of self, birth, circulation and development. A typical feature of this system was that it had many eyes and many lungs that maintained a close relationship with the outside world and maintained its development. My current plan and intention in creating art works is to lay down foundations and make preparations one at a time so that I can build up this system. The first step is particularly important.
Between 1989 and 1991 most contemporary artists felt at a loss. The mood of the new generation of artists was a symbol of Beijing, but it was difficult to sway the artists of south-western China. The Cynical Realism of the time seemed like a foreign phenomenon that did not yet exert a strong influence. In Wuhan, Hubei province, Wang Guangyi's works of ‘great critique’ (da pipan) were still confined to his art studios for a small coterie to discuss. But all the new art movements were ready to appear on stage. In Kunming, Pan Dehai felt ‘depressed’ once the social recognition he gained in 1989 had worn off, and eventually he made the move to Beijing in summer 1991. In Beijing, Pan Dehai continued painting his Corncobs series, developing and extending it. He constantly tried various complicated techniques, such as beginning to paint with acrylic. The properties of acrylic materials are similar to those of watercolor, and the painter could wash and rub the paint with water constantly, until the originally sketched in outlines of the particles began to show through again and took on a subtle complexity. During this period, Pan Dehai continued to try to discover the hidden truth behind the image. In a note of April 1990, he wrote:
I often think about the following questions: Is there nothing else in the world in which we live apart from an image? Does this image explain the totality of the world? Does the invisible part, that part hidden behind the image, really exist? What is it if it does exist? Does it have another face? Can it represent the essential part of a thing? Viewed from another perspective, from the unique perspective of art, we know this world more truthfully and understand what it is that interests us.
Such logical thinking made no sense to those conceptualists, because the world is not divided between image and essence. In Beijing, the success and influence of the easy-going ‘cynical’ and ‘pop’ artists made it clear to Pan Dehai that modernism had had its day, and that the pursuit of essence was only meaningless chatter about such unverifiable concepts as ‘mystery’ and ‘image’. The new art realities also had an influence on Pan Dehai’s painting, and so, for a time, he used clear shapes and a number of roguish images in his compositions. However, Pan Dehai did not adapt to the prevailing spiritual style and he found he needed his own style for analyzing problems. He knew that ‘a style which lasts for too long is tantamount to suicide’ (1990), and at the same time, he was fully confident that he could change his method and style without following trends. He did this, almost unnoticed by the public. He wanted to tell people through his constant output, that his art was not unchanging. One important change was that the painter noticed from trends that ‘shapes’ can play a key role in identifying style. From the very beginning, the Corncobs was had developed and proliferated in a natural way, and the painter used a world of increasingly multiplying particles to symbolize the states of life. Gradually, the painter made the vague human forms more specific, with the eyes and nose more distinct:
If the image you depict is vague and hard to identify, it is more likely to be ignored. The choice of symbols is thus of vital importance. I have symbols for more than a decade, and it is no longer the standard image I originally used. New ideas have been constantly added to throughout this constant change, so it is no longer a simple matter of pure change.[11]
Pan Dehai realized that Beijing was important and as ‘an urban centre that, because of its cultural tolerance, had been a destination for artists wanting survive and develop their art’. But the city ceased to play a heroic role after 1992 with the appearance of the influential schools of Cynical Realism and Political Pop. Pan Dehai lived and worked in Beijing for eight years, but he had nothing to do with any of the contemporary art movements there. His friends thought he had disappeared. He himself admitted that during these years he was in a state of perplexity. His series of works titled Missing Person Notices (Xunren qishi) is a record of self-searching from his original modernist standpoint. However, he did not reject his earlier ideas about his art. It was just like he was constantly moving house. [12] And Pan Dehai never stopped adjusting and altering his art. His starting point was the external world. As though fixated he continued to ponder the feelings of ‘the authentic person’ (zhenzheng de ren), and such speculations sometimes made him crazy. In some of his works we can see a tendency to violence. Pan Dehai still imagined himself to be a youth, although he felt that youth was about to end. His Acne (Qingchundou) series of works expressed his deep affection for youth and its ardor, but they also signify a sense of helplessness.
Pan Dehai eventually returned to Kunming, not because life in Beijing was hard, but because he could not accustom himself to the increasingly noisy and maddening city:
By 1999, when I was about to leave Beijing, my life began to change for the better. I was producing more and more works, and I could make a decent living just by selling paintings. But I suddenly decided not to stay on in Beijing.[13]
Pan Dehai gives the usual psychological reasons for returning to Kunming. His friends, memories and emotions were there, as well as the sunshine and nature his soul cried out for. The relaxing life and the quiet ambience of Kunming were so different from the ‘fame game’ of Beijing.
In 1999, performance art filled a blank in the conceptual transformation taking place during this period. The institutional problems of art became more obvious as the market economy developed. In 2000, the Shanghai Art Gallery hosted a biennial art exhibition, and began to collect contemporary paintings. This, at least, proved that ideological conflicts had eased. Against such a background, Pan Dehai returned to Kunming and he noticed that the city, once familiar to him, has also undergone dramatic change:
After nine years’ absence, I found that many of my friends had changed. They had become fatter, older, and many had far less hair. I think this is what life means. These changes are also too ordinary and too common to be noticed. But here I was noticing these trivial details and I began to express them in my own way, as though I was holding up a mirror, and in the mirror was reflected some actor who had not been noticed, an actor who was fading away. I didn’t want to render these as sad images, so I depicted them with relatively serene expressions.[14]
In 1999, after Pan Dehai returned from Beijing to Kunming, he began to produce his series Less and Less Hair (Toufa yuelai yueshao). Now he painted no longer with acrylic and again took up oil pigments. In his acrylic works created in Beijing, we can see a basic technological progression from line drawing to coloring layer on layer and finally on to washing and rubbing. This was in fact a very complex process, yet Pan showed great interest in it, because through it he discovered a mysterious world. Back in Kunming, he did not feel any need to use the ‘washing’ method; he reused oil painting color, daubing it bit by bit, and arranging the particles in a relative order, so as to highlight the theme.
Pan Dehai always tried to avoid trends, yet assimilated the important feature in the trends, namely the need for every artist to have clear command over his own symbols, his own linguistic mode. While young and passionate, Pan Dehai had only believed in his own innate power and he used abstract brushwork to express this innateness. Later, however, he doubted people could realize their innate civilization without a special linguistic mode and so he used droll and humorous images, with his Fatty series of paintings constituting a steady output.
When Pan Dehai began his Fatty (Pangzi) series, he wanted to convince people that his ‘fat figures’ were both an artistic symbol and a sense of life in the new age. He even used the Fatty paintings to symbolize psychological problems associated with China’s economic take-off. [15] Pan Dehai believes that materialism has made people uncontrollably grasping, and so the Fatty series also embodies a critique. Like his earlier production of the Corncobs series, the inception of the Fatty series is his artistic vision he brought many years later to his earlier home, where he discovered that people and things had grown strange, and people's thinking and appearances had utterly changed. With the passage of time, his thoughts and feelings have developed, influenced by the changes his friends had undergone. He also uses the Fatty series as a metaphor for the increase in people’s desires in modern society, and his use of symbols, metaphors and ironies in the Fatty series lends itself to a wide variety of interpretation.
From the very beginning, people familiar with Pan Dehai’s art have asked a number of questions: Why doesn't the painter show the painful passion concealed within the works of the Corncobs series? Does his excessive use of symbols prove that his creativity is weak? Pan Dehai had in fact returned to his inner being once again. As a painter who has weathered the times, he could well retort: Why can't I paint what I want to paint? Why can't I give use visual symbols and allegory to document the changes among my friends? At its inception, the Fatty series had an abstract background, but the painter later discovered that these humorous figures could be combined with earlier visual memories, combining the scenes he sketched in the countryside in his early years, as well as scenes recording social turmoil and revolutionary history. It was no longer appropriate to find a typical visual basis for sensitivity; instead, a strong modeling shape must have an intrinsic theme.
In the Fatty series, people we do particles similar to those used in the Corncobs series. This visual element maintains his symbols of history and memory. However, Pan Dehai had made a determined effort to leave those metaphorical ‘corn fields’, and he was making it clear that he was creating metaphors with whom he could communicate. Can’t you see that ‘fatties’ from different backgrounds and environments connect with you in so many different ways? They too travel in boats, wear military uniforms and sit in horse-drawn carriages. Everybody has hardships and difficulties in life, to varying degrees. However, in this particular historical period, the market economy extended material possibilities, yet within the cultural system his new art encountered indifference. Such a background is extremely difficult for a liberal, lonely and solitary man to describe in words, but Pan Dehai uses his ‘fatties’ to resist his inner problems, and he offers these humorous pretty things as consolation.
When we look back at the painter’s works in the 1990s, for example, his series of works titled Missing Person Notices, Acne and Metropolis (Dushi), we can better understand his feelings. The painter never stopped thinking about real life, which made him impatient and depressed by life. He commented on the ‘fame game’ in Beijing: ‘Every day is a struggle for life, with very heavy pressure. People are restless and impatient, and have difficulty finding any peace of mind. Everyone seems to be in a muddled rush, renting houses, eating, selling paintings, visiting people and maintaining contacts. Everyone is deformed by this. Every week you have to go out several times. If you don't go out, you simply disappear’. Such an experience is understandable for anyone without a fixed abode. So Pan Dehai used ‘corncobs’ to create bizarre human heads, implying that it is difficult to describe a human being (Missing Person Notices); he placed ‘corncobs’ in the human brain to open up the cerebral world, and thereby exposing the contours of the soul (Acne)[16]; he used ‘corncobs’ to deconstruct people, depicting these frightful persons as a characterization of himself and his friends (Metropolis). However, his personal life had changed, and his material situation was not as problematic as previously, and he could pursue his artistic life in reasonable conditions. Psychologically, he has also found a certain peace. Life may be ‘eternal’, but the passage of time required that the artist had to opt for what most occupies his attention. This problem may explain why Pan Dehai wanted to evoke scenes beside a mill, beside a stable, beside the hearth, beside the railway track and on a truck. Pan Dehai has said that his paintings show humor: ‘I always like humorous things that are fun, and a joke often contains wealth of meaning. I particularly like earthy jokes that are simple in form, yet profound in meaning’.[17] Pan Dehai was trying to record the folk humor of today.
Pan Dehai does not belong to any trend:
As far as my own painting is concerned, after the ’85 New Wave I was no longer part of any trend. However, I always thought my paintings are good, and that there is nothing wrong with them. I cherish painting. And it is because of this that I have persisted to the present day.[18]
Indeed, looking at his works, critics find it difficult to apply conventional methods in assessing them. Pan Dehai provided a visual reference for understanding the history of people born in the 1950s. Since the late 19th century, people have often tried to understand art history through movements and genres. However, painters such as Klee, Chagall, and, later, Balthus, did not join any trend of their day. Like these artists, Pan Dehai is only concerned with his own artistic language. These artists all shared the belief that the soul is important, and, in particular, they believed that a unique style was enough to show the world.
From a symbolist standpoint, Pan Dehai’s ‘permeating particles’ embody an outlook on life. While other artists are sensitive to political and social movements, Pan Dehai stuck to the belief that a glimpse of the movement in an individual's life is enough for us to understand the era. ‘Think calmly, and you will see that trendy art will disappear with the trends. I stick to my own ideas and ways of painting’.[19] Unlike formalists, Pan Dehai’s real themes are the ‘loss’ of life and the ‘drift’ of the soul, what he called his perpetual pursuit of answers about life. This cycle of essentialism did not lead Pan Dehai into religious fervor, because through wit, humor and perseverance in the pursuit of life itself, he was able to adapt his attitude to life itself. Through the medium of his permeating and yet changing particles, he succeeded in constructing his own visual world, and succeeded in revealing the complexity of his changing soul. In this sense, Pan Dehai’s paintings embody the historical significance of the New Painting.
Monday, 13 August 2007
Notes:
[1]Jia Wei, ‘I am not part of the trends: A dialogue with Pan Dehai the painter’ (Wo buzai chaoliu zhi zhong: Yu huajia Pan Dehai duihua).
[2]Ibid.
[3]Ibid.
[4]Ibid.
[5]Mao Xuhui, ‘On the New Figurative ImagesArt Exhibition, the Artists Involved and the Southwestern Art Research Group’ (Ji Xinjuxiang huazhan he huajia yiji Xinan Yishu Yanjiu Qunti).
[6]Jia Wei, op. cit.
[7]Pan Dehai also noted: ‘Later, in 1985, I went to Shenzhen again, and at the Art Center of Shenzhen University, I made some more clay ceramic works completely different from before. It was a pity that the containers holding these works were stolen on the way from Shenzhen to Kunming, and the photographic negatives of them also were missing. Nothing was left’.
[8]Pan Dehai later recalled: ‘At first I was not very clear, and only the ancient tombs and the bricks of the city walls of Xi’an aroused my deep thoughts. Later, in the process of painting, I gradually became clearer and discovered the symbol provided by ‘corncobs’. Once I finished a painting, but I wasn’t satisfied with it for some reason. In the process of washing away the paint, I discovered a way of painting ‘corncobs’, and so adopted the ‘washing’ method. The inner life is invisible, and you need an appropriate way to express it’. In ‘From the Corncobs to the Fatty series: An interview with the Chuangku painter Pan Dehai’ (Cong ‘Baomi’ dao ‘Pangzi’: Chuangku huajia Pan Dehai fangtan lu).
[9]‘The World of Pan Dehai’, Jiangsu Arts Monthly (Jiangsu huakan), Issue No. 2
[10]‘The phenomenon of the Sichuan Fine Arts School in this decade of currents of thought’, Jiangsu Arts Monthly, no.2, 1991.
[11]Jia Wei, op. cit.
[12]Pan Dehai commented: ‘In the first years of my life in Beijing, I lived a very unstable life, moving house again and again’. Jia Wei, op. cit.
[13]Jia Wei, op. cit.
[14]Ibid.
[15]Pan Dehai said: ‘Particularly since the 1990s, the worship for money has thoroughly controlling people’s thinking and materialism has completely occupied people’s thoughts. Their crazy desires have grown out of all proportion, and they want to own everything: everybody wants to be the biggest and fattest person. In fact, I wanted to put my own ideas into the subject of the Fatty series of paintings, implying that society has given all people just one face, without individual personalities. Not their physiological likeness, but their conceptual likeness. This is a splendid vision of the collective unconsciousness’. A Series of Interviews (Xilie fanglu), Hong Kong, 2001.
[16]Pan Dehai commented: ‘The Acne series is the continuation of one I created in Beijing in the mid-1990s. It is my personal reflection on that those turbulent ten years of the Cultural Revolution. I wanted to recall those images of life that have survived, even though they are as dim as mist. In those years, we youngsters were like a group of aimless souls wandering in the wilderness’. Ibid.
[17]‘From the Corncobs to the Fatty series: An interview with Chuangku Painter Pan Dehai’
[18] Jia Wei, op.cit.
Translated by Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar