Zhao Nengzhi: The Story of Facial Expressions
The exhibition titled Sections (Qiepian), staged from 14 to 18 December 1994, in Chongqing’s Central District Teacher Training College, displayed works by a number of young artists including Yin Ruilin, Chen Wenbo, Du Xia, He Sen and Feng Shen. Among the lineup was Zhao Nengzhi. The venue was crowded and dingy, lacked special lighting and adequate space, and for the show, crammed with works only by young artists, no decent poster or catalogue had been prepared. Beyond the participants, the event went unnoticed, or even unknown, among the public. Yet today’s general public, more obsessed with spacious well-lit venues and attention to detail and glossiness, asks where the inspiration for so many of the important contemporary artists represented at that show came from. Zhao Nengzhi was distinct from many of his peers, and he remained persistent, coherent and true to an artistic internality in the pursuit of his goals, never affected by the surroundings and social climate, although like many others, he was keen to discuss the evolution of his art at length and even posit the negation of his latest work.
‘It was not until vocational secondary school that I took up painting, and that’s when my love of art began’, Zhao Nengzhi recalls.[1] Born in Nanchong, Sichuan province, Zhao grew up in a household of low to average income, and devoted his boyhood to studying in the effort to support the family as soon as possible. On being admitted to Nanchong Normal School in 1982, his ambition, as he explains, was to land a job after a couple of years at school in order to earn a living and relieve the pressure on his family because his father’s earnings were far from sufficient to feed them all.[2] Zhao cites as a major formative influence his teacher of fine arts at secondary school, who fired the imagination of his students and encouraged them to overcome their frustrations. After graduating, Zhao took up a teaching position at a local middle school and embarked on preparing for the entrance exams for the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. The examination took place two years later and he passed with a distinction in art, thanks to his secondary school study, but passed dismally in the section devoted to painting technique.
Despite the absence of Sichuan-based artists in the pioneering ’85 New Wave Art Movement, especially in 1985 and 1986, the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts still brimmed with energy and dynamism as late as 1987. In the wake of the 1979 Scar Art and the Southwestern Modern Painting movements, in which the institute was steeped, Zhao began to pay attention to the Northern group of artists including Wang Guangyi and Shu Qun, as well as to their manifestoes. He learned about the Huangshan Conference and saw slides recording modernist art events in other cities. Rather than naming particular figures and events that influenced him, Zhao recalled:
I am grateful that I did my college study at such a good time. Back then the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts had adopted a relatively open attitude, and many artists, from both China and overseas, came to deliver lectures, books of all varieties were available on the market, and instructors taught us something about contemporary art in the West. We all benefited from this. We were longing to understand the things that challenged our understanding, but even our extensive reading of a number of translated works gave us few clues, at a time when reading was all the rage and even considered to be hip. Looking back now, I think I was a typical ‘angry young man’ (fenqing) at that time.[3]
In the 1980s, being an ‘angry young man’ still had positive connotations, and conjured up associations with lofty concepts of existence, ideals, responsibilities and goals. Yet in terms of Zhao’s experience, his typical initial frustration being followed by a restoration of self-confidence under his instructor’s guidance, the gene of the angry young man was something that he inherited from the older generation. For a student with a growing passion for painting, the most direct influence was no doubt came from his teachers at the academy, his constant reading of Western writing and his understanding and assimilation of all the journal articles on modernism which he could access in the college. Put more simply, the major influence on Zhao during his college years was none other than the ongoing New Wave art movement in which crucial roles were played by his teachers Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing and Wang Lin, whom Zhao could access whenever he wanted. As a result, in the context of understanding history, reality, Western art and Chinese traditions, the spirit of the cynical ‘angry young man’ encompassed being both skeptical and rebellious, as well as maintaining spiritual coherence. An ‘angry young man’ (fenqing), as defined by Zhao, referred to youthful malaise, the self-conscious tragic persona totally disenchanted with reality, and a contrived hostile stance designed to maintain a distance from reality.[4] It is not surprising that someone of his mindset would eschew painting in the aesthetic folkloric style that then prevailed in south-western China.
In terms of experience, however, Zhao, born in 1968, had absolutely nothing in common with his graduate project supervisor Zhang Xiaogang, born only one decade earlier, in 1958. Having lived through a chaotic era and been sequestered in the countryside, Zhang embraced a much more political and historical perspective on the past and on the destiny of his entire generation, and felt that individual experience could not be disentangled from the implications of history. But these concerns were far from central for a young man who had just left home and school, and who had scant experience and knowledge of society. While his teacher felt obliged, or even had no alternative, but to rebel and cut loose from social reality, Zhao was a different story. In Zhao’s case, his intentions were idiosyncratic as he was also driven by instinct, but his intentions later also unconsciously steered his artistic career. In fact, his graduate project work documented everyday urban life rather than reflect on history.
After three years’ study, Zhao was assigned to a position as an art teacher in a vocational school in Nanchong. After having been introduced to art and philosophy, he felt overwhelmingly lonely in a small provincial town where he had no companions in his field and he resigned himself to living like his colleagues who found themselves ground down by repetitious monotony and sacrificed their lives for a school that was unsupportive of the personal pursuit of art. After two years, Zhao resigned and left Nanchong to explore the unknown.
Zhao travelled to Chongqing in 1992, and there he joined up with Chen Wenbo, He Sen, Du Xia, Feng Shen and Yin Rui. Unable to settle down, they lived off the glimmer of opportunities and painted in a single gloomy cramped apartment. Zhao managed to earn enough to survive by working as a casually employed artist in the advertising industry and taking the occasional relief teaching job, but in October of the same year Zhao was delivered an unforgettable blow when he went to Guangzhou for the Biennial, only to find himself excluded for being unable to raise the mere RMB 300 registration fee, while his companions including He Sen and Chen Wenbo participated in the show. [5] That glorious event in China’s contemporary art scene of the early 1990s passed him by, and he could only look on with regret. In those difficult days for Sichuan’s young artists, Zhao never lost faith in his art no matter how difficult life was. He kept on painting and devoted himself to pondering questions surrounding the meaning of art. In early 1993, he wrote to me:
We met once last October in Guangzhou. My name is Zhao Nengzhi, and I’m now living more or less like a drifter in Chongqing where I rent a room with Du Xia, He Sen and several others and we paint there. Enclosed are pictures of my recent series Street Vagabonds #1-6. I’d like to hear your comments which will be much appreciated.[6]
The letter closed with an inquiry about finding an artist’s agent. In June, Zhao again wrote to me:
I mailed you some pictures of my last year’s work, but have no idea if they reached you. Please kindly find slides of my latest stuff enclosed.
I intended to write about my ideas on these paintings. But after finishing the paintings, my ideas had begun to change. It’s better described as a general overview and critique of my old stuff. I’ve embarked on a new series, but I need to clarify a few things during the process of painting them. I’ll write to you again some time soon.[7]
Although this letter did not touch on any issues related to the circumstances of his life or the quest for an agent, it was clear that the artist was having a hard time as he pressed on with his art.
The series Street Vagabonds #1-6 (Paihuai jietou de renqun xilie 1-6), produced between the end of 1992 and early 1993, coincided with Zhao’s time in Chongqing where he saw many drifters on the streets. Although they came from different backgrounds, they were all washed up in the economic tides that had brought swift change to the dated economic system. Society was awash with drifters, and Zhao, too, was quite clearly one of them. This is why he could identity with the migrant workers hanging around the city’s streets and docks. As he wrote, these works ‘relate to my own encounters and reflect my own existence. At that time I felt like an outsider in Chongqing, and the city had nothing to do with me. I lived as if I were only floating through the city’.[8] It was still a risky business to resign from a life-term government job during the early 1990s, as demonstrated by the fact that many older artists chose to remain in the schools and units where they had guaranteed life-long employment. While the determination of Zhao Nengzhi, and others like him, to trade in stability for a floating life can be explained by their youthful energy and artistic self-confidence, in reality their lives and work were fraught with hardship. Their choice of the artistic lexicon of expressionism was appropriate for the situation in which these young artists found themselves. Prior to then, Zhao had painted works, including Two People Holding Lambs (You bao yanggao de liangge ren), in a style resembling expressionism; the figures are distorted and the hues are somber. The painter used a number of abnormal optical effects to delineate both the illuminated and the unlit areas of his figures and the brushwork in the illuminated areas was harsh and grudging; the palette was monotonous and unrelieved, there were blobs of paint on the faces, the males and females all had jutting foreheads and sharp chins, and the bright areas were broken up. We can, of course, regard this as the way the artist viewed his subjects, but the constantly repeated blobs of color acquire their own independence. Those blobs of color, perhaps unrecognized by the artist at that time, served as a subtle prelude to Zhao’s later series of works based on ‘facial expressions’ (biaoqing). Zhao’s days in Chongqing opened his eyes to another reality. In line with the logic of expressionism, he looked to social reality, and the models he used in his earlier canvases were replaced by the new subjects he found standing, sitting or squatting on the streets. They stare into the distance, with eyes wide open. Zhao’s instinct led him to these living scenes. ‘Before then, my stuff didn’t tell what was happening. They were isolated from reality. But from 1992 on, I started to confront real life. ‘[9] A photograph taken in January 1993 shows his series Street Vagabonds #1-6 propped up on a balcony and Zhao stands behind them with urban high rise buildings forming the backdrop. Complementing the cement blabs of the balcony, the figures in the paintings perfectly match the surroundings, and the expression on the artist’s face somehow echoes the characters on canvas. Like the environment, the works are dominated by gray tones, chaos, and aimlessness. Zhao had been consistent in the modeling and treatment of his figures, but now he more boldly emphasizes the figural configuration and the facial area, in particular. In a similar way, his repeated brush strokes emphasize the skeletal structure, and the resulting distortion enables the work to speak in an expressive and individualized language. Street Vagabonds depicts the individuals who make up this society, including the artist, and collectively they capture the different psychological aspects of Zhao’s state of mind at that time. In its expression, the series comes from that school of painting emancipated by the post-85 modernism, yet it is concerned with the urban milieu in which the artist lived. The reality the artist confronted was so dramatic that he became immersed in it, and the past, including his own, became history, never to provide him with subject matter. We should note that, at an early stage in his career, Zhao showed great interest in Giotto’s subjects: characters with no individual representation, but with mannered styling and ritualistic, generalized attributes. Zhao maintained that it might be possible to apply this treatment to expressionless figures.
The use of harsh and somber colors was common among the artists of Zhao’s generation. His classmates, including Shen Xiaotong, Xin Haizhou, He Sen and others, produced a body of work embodying indefinable sentiments, but none used color with any vibrancy. Shen Xiaotong’s Teahouse (Chaguan, 1988) and Xin Haizhou’s Kite (Fengzheng, 1991) speak in unrelievedly gray tones. This feature of their work may derive from their connection with the urban environment, but we also notice it among their teachers. The grayness and irregularity provide an outer shell for a reality that attempts to neutralize the bright and red aesthetic, but in the early 1980s, Zhang Xiaogang and Zhou Chunya were using a random and free brush to eliminate the logic of realism. Yet despite the shiny skies above his plateaus, Zhou’s series of works with Tibetan subjects were imbued with a heaviness deriving from the crude sheepskin garments and they have a harsh voice owing to elements like the leather coats, while Zhang’s Tibetan themes maintain a melancholy created by somber tones and, as revealed in works on themes such as approaching storms, the artist was focusing on an inner world.
In 1993, Zhao participated in the Chinese Oil Painting Biennial in Beijing and was delighted to win the Academia Award and a cash prize of RMB 10,000 for his work A Sultry Afternoon (Menre de wuhou). ‘The first thing I did was pay back all my loans. Then I banked the rest to cover my later living expenses. I imagined that I could now fully devote myself to art and no longer need to paint commercial advertisements, so I felt very lucky’. Of course, the year 1993 was very significant in the history of contemporary Chinese art, because China’s Cynical Realism and Political Pop made their debut at the exhibition in Hong Kong titled China's New Art, Post-1989 and later at other international shows. The impact of Cynical Realism and Political Pop reached artists working in China’s southwest; while these artists had their own points of departure, in terms of experience, taste and specific traditions, news from outside was always stimulating. Recognition from the international community not only signified a way out but also demonstrated the possibility of success. Of course there was a lot more to the totality of problems facing artists and this insight did not touch on the fundamental problems artists confront, but reality and real life experiences were impelling artists to give deep thought to their personal practice of art. ‘In 1993, my state of mind changed’, Zhao recollected, ‘I thought those things had little to do with me, or were removed from my feelings. I felt compelled to continue this series of paintings, but I felt bored and listless. I later burned all the stuff, because it made me feel uncomfortable. I couldn’t show it to other people’.[10] What had brought about this change in his thinking? Why did he feel no bond with his works? Why did the artist lose all enthusiasm for continuing to paint? The most personal reason was possibly that all those elusive images that represent a mix of Giotto and expressionism stifled the expression of the artist’s own ideas and feelings. These works came to arouse in the artist an excessive desire to be at a distance from them, and they now even aroused a sense of revulsion in him. But the more decisive reason why the artist had these feelings was that he needed a more effective and direct vocabulary to re-narrate the inner world known exclusively only to himself. How real is one’s mental state? When do those vague and abstract feelings lead to art rather than malaise? Generally speaking, Cynical Realism and Political Pop made a great impact on Zhao and those two related movements demonstrated that feelings should return to a concern for reality itself. Only then can an artist clearly understand what is really required. As shown metaphorically in his work titled The Man Watching TV (Kan dianshi de ren, 1993; originally titled ‘An Ongoing Show’, Chinese: Zheng zai shangyan de jiemu), we must be tuned in to the daily happenings around the world; watching TV is watching the world. It is an ‘ongoing show’ that unfolds daily, and the artist inevitably cannot avoid real life and the daily reality of the mass media. As his colleague He Sen noted, everyone has a role on the stage and must inevitably perform. Following that realization, he began to acknowledge the importance that an ever-changing reality has on art. Zhao has commented on how he began ‘to ponder the vocabulary of his art’ and maintained that ‘reasoning’ through to 1996. Fresh subjects began to appear in his work - body builders, women in bikinis, a man holding a red flag, a man in a suit giving orders, cars, fashion shoots. The whole gamut of urban signifiers and images appeared on his canvases. He even adopted collage techniques in a section of Fitness (Jianmei). His skies now also appear clearer and bluer. He made every effort to eliminate turbid emotions and images from his works. Zhao was quite clearly catching up with trends, which brought about a change of mood that could make his art happen. Compared with Cynical Realism and Political Pop that dominated exhibitions in north China and internationally, almost all artists based in the southwest, including Zhao Nengzhi, produced works that appeared gloomy and were characterized by muddy colors, rigid shapes and ambiguous references. In the new emotional treatment of his works, Zhao adopted a minimalism. As he described it, ‘I used to paint scenes that were so crammed with content that there was way too much to see, and you got tired looking at them. Now I eliminate everything extraneous, simplify the language and focus it. This was a result of reviewing my earlier work. It was like you had so much to say but the audience didn’t catch any of it. Now I want to be understood by the public’.[11] It is true that we can catch the meaning conveyed by the man with little red flag in his hand or the muscular man flexing, but his women striking beautiful poses have none of the ease and natural poise that figures on the canvases of Fang Lijun and Wang Guangyi attain. Nor does the composition measure up. But this was not the point Zhao set out to make. His exploration in vocabulary never sought to handle themes or images that were off the beaten track. Zhao was responding to the new situation in art and society, and he needed to respond by following the dictates of his heart.
At the end of 1994, Zhao together with his friends made a bold attempt to reflect the new reality. They decided to stage a show of their own in order to deliver the simple message to their teachers and the public: we are changing. On the front page of the photocopied brochure of the exhibition Sections, these young artists issued the following statement:
Sectioning is a means of observation widely applied in medical research. Scientists section organic tissue into thin slices for microscopic examination. By examining and studying the sections, scientists can understand the condition of the living organism.
Clearly, these artists believed their art examined society, but it was a different kind of examination from that of their teachers; they believed their micro studies were called for and that the macro narratives of their teachers were no longer necessary for examining the panorama of the era. Sichuan-based artists had long adhered to realism, but new, young voices now wanted to be heard; a new realism had come into existence. Zhao summed it up:
We all incorporated documentary elements in our works, rather than wanting to demonstrate any overt criticism or some other attitude. Nonetheless, such representation was rooted in a personal view, and it was rather biased.[12]
The poorly produced catalogue contained the ideas of several artists. Discussing Chen Wenbo’s The Expression of Fresh Meat (Xianrou de biaoqing), Zhao maintained that even though the artist was an onlooker he felt the urge to go beyond merely looking, and found himself caught in the dilemma of being either intimate or maintaining a certain distance between himself and his subject. Separated from artistic trends in northern China, these artists had been conscious of the ending of the macro narrative, of the risks in presenting a straightforward representation of reality, and of knowing that although the ‘truth’ might actually exist one could not simply examine it from an essentialist stance, and so they refused to reject their ultimate reliance upon the emotions and spirit that had begun in the late 1970s. What purpose then did their observation of details and ‘sections’ serve? Zhao acknowledged that ‘we cannot look on things with an absolutely detached eye’, and added that ‘we must effectively respond and truthfully express our feelings at the same time as we grasp diverse information and the situation in which the culture finds itself’.[13]
In the same catalogue, Zhao also explained that the point of departure of his own art was quite different from that of his teachers:
I deliberately selected from all those everyday images that crowd in on us and which we so much take for granted that we don’t even notice them, and I made these my materials. These included commercial calendars, news photos, covers of fashion magazines, body building photos, and lots of other glossy images. I captured these slices of real life and juxtaposed them within a single frame. Rather than a direct appropriation, this became a biased form of rendition. The images got mixed up, re-assembled, layered and distorted. I would then flatten them out or combine them in weird ways like sketches. As I see it, it is essential that individuality be highlighted in public. As a result, I have used this personal technique to rejuvenate familiar images, as well as to express my feelings.[14]
In this statement, Zhao touched on basic postmodern issues and methods: stereotypical images, appropriation, juxtaposition, hybrid assemblage and multi-layering. He was less concerned with understanding the nature of things. This attitude, stance and approach obviously pointed to reality and to some extent betrayed the influence of Cynical Realism and Political Pop. In this sense, Zhao Nengzhi during this period was less modernist and more post-modernist in his thinking. He had minimized his gray and cryptic personal sentiments, and added the hustle and bustle of the everyday world. If his work of 1993 still contained a residue of expressionist sentiment, as for example in A Sultry Afternoon and Why (Wei shenme), two pieces which the artist himself later destroyed, the year 1994 kicked off with little individual emotion evident in his work. He created doodles of the city, as in the backdrop in The Three Dots of the Female Body (Sandian de nürenti), and he listlessly re-created and re-presented boredom, in Birdman (Niaoren), also destroyed by artist. Yet in a number of works, such as Female Swimmer (Nüyongzhe), another work destroyed by the artist, Move Forwards (Xiangqian) and Embarrassment (Ganga), we sense that the artist is hemmed in and confused. Abstract blobs appear at the top of these canvases, and they go unidentified. The product of some inner depression, these blobs lie in waiting for the artist to translate then into another form. In all these compositions we can discern the vague pictorial manifestation of the complex from an earlier time - an attempt to enhance those earlier blobs of color. In these works inspired by pop art, regardless of the color of the figures or nudes, Zhao consciously or unconsciously sought to use these blobs of color to enhance the attributes of his figures. Common Space (Gongtong kongjian, 1994) depicts a pink lady whose body is composed of blobs of color and the face of the man with the open mouth is little different in treatment from his earlier work. We can see that, despite the updated visual content, as well as the color changes consistent with elements of pop images, Zhao Nengzhi still stubbornly and fixedly maintained his skewed complex of emotional signifiers.
There must be some reason, causal or accidental, that made Zhao suddenly lose his interest in the mundane world in 1995, when he painted few human figures and floating white clouds. From Daydream (Bairimeng), Dreamwalk (Mengyou), and Pink Dream (Fenhong de meng) to Encounter (Xiangyu), the drifter remained a constant theme in Zhao’s works. Zhao still suffered great anxiety at the end of 1995 and had no clear path to follow. Due to his nature and unique thinking, his eloquence could not help convince him to abandon his interest in over-materialized subjects. He rapidly discovered that his work would be reduced to a cliché if his focus on reality had no basis in an internal rationality. He went through another perplexing period and hit the streets again, wandering about and randomly shooting photographs. During the process of collecting these new images he discovered bizarreness and weirdness. He reaffirmed the significance of one’s innermost being for art. Disregarding the stimulus provided by fashionable trends, the artist was determined once more to nurture his aberrations, wild speculation and what can even be described as his psychological delusions. The themes of drifting and uncertainty again became major subjects of his paintings, while his photographs captured these subjects at casual moments in time. These random states he then integrated in his artistic compositions. Thus, in a single painting of this time we see three figures that can be interpreted as the juxtaposition of the one character in three different instants. Zhao Nengzhi had once used fuzzy hues and strokes to express his perplexity, but now he used white clouds as symbols because these provide clearly outlined shapes. In combination with the naked figures floating in the sky, they clearly document uncertainty during the creative process. In his Dreamwalk series comprising four works, Zhao places his protagonist among differently colored clouds in each separate painting, namely red, blue, green or yellow clouds. The colors in the four works signify the infinite and varying colors of the clouds in the artist’s imagining. In Encounter, we see the artist faltering and as a result of his experiment we have a uniform grayish blue figural composition and another composition in which the figure is in altered colors. Even until he painted the triptych titled Pink Dream, Zhao had not yet clarified the focus of imagery in his aberrational wild paintings and he was content to let subconscious guide his brush as he used blobs to render light or portray clouds, while his spiritual themes manifest the shocking, the elusive and the illusionary. In that same year, Zhao Nengzhi also found the human figure superfluous, and he shifted his entire focus to the head. In Self-portraits #1-3 (Ziwo mianxiang, 1-3), the artist gradually merged the mass of clouds with the body. Where the light areas meet the determined and strong strokes, the shading is treated in the same way as the clouds in the background as the artist begins to master the technique of painting very thinly. Even though his clouds were subject to changing color, Zhao had already embarked on the path of exploring spiritual dimensions by thoroughly dispensing with the surfaces of physical objects. Zhao described the facial lumps and shading as conforming to his definition of ‘mutating elements’ (bingbian yuansu), which were changing micro images that the artist felt heralded the advent of new possibilities.
Zhao’s creative output followed a zigzag course through 1996. He did not seize the opportunity to develop the possibilities extended to him by chance in his Self-portraits #1-3, but continued to grope among his long-standing themes of bodily and physical nuances, textural effects, symbolic presentation and abstract patterns.
However, the year 1997 was significant for Zhao. He had not only cropped his figural compositions to close-ups of the head, but he sometimes even focused on details of the head, and he was already using the word ‘facial expression’ (biaoqing) in his titles. Some painters pay little attention to the titles of their works, but for an artist with a keen internal eye, the use of the word ‘expression’ as a title signified a turning point for this questioning artist as it focused on the issue of how one expresses the world of the soul. It could, in the first instance, be merely a question of essentialism, but when the concept of ‘expression’ becomes the focus of an artist’s attention then the question of strategic artistic language emerges. Zhao Nengzhi made this clear in his speculations on the nature of art in the previous year, 1996:
The significance of art consists of whether the stating of the proposition provides us with a new, distinctive language and a means of narration that succeed in defying our commonplace vision and thoughts. Easel painting boasts a long history and rich traditions. As long as we adopt an artistic and conceptual vision, rather than view things from the perspective of the ‘painting’, then we can sidestep a succession of problems and are free to choose a feasible point of inception for our art from the available range of all visual data. We no longer face ‘the easel painting’ in the conventional sense, and ‘the easel’ becomes a medium for concepts (guannian).
Concepts should, by right, refer to language and its usage (language and its usage being a form of questioning of existence), rather than to the things we speak of, their status and their meaning. Meaning is not a concept, although it does facilitate explanation and acceptance. In my recent work, I have been sorting out the elements of narration and description in my search for visual sensibility rather than expression. I believe art is an independent thing. Painting is painting; it doesn’t document, comment or narrate. It can only rouse man’s memory of visual shapes, colors and perceptual qualities. It is about observation, not speculation, about the visual not the logical. It is a representational not a descriptive form; it rejects not only the elements that are easily categorized by a particular ‘explanation’ but also the meaning that is subject to misunderstanding. It seeks the ambiguity in language, and the ambiguity and the possibility of expansion in meaning. I believe that art should challenge recognition.
My perspective leads inwards rather than outwards. I have more interest in looking into myself than knowing what’s outside. My art conveys a greater measure of self-reflection. I have made my basic theme self-contemplation, and thus placed myself in particular contexts to examine the naked self, whether spiritual or physical, and to engage in a dialogue with my own body.
I was thinking of introducing some ‘documentary’ element into my work, to document things in a manner similar to documentary film or photojournalism, but such documentation is neither objective nor realistic. It documents the subjective and the spiritual, but never accurately. Hence, my works are often composed of several pieces, each of which deals with particular nuances at particular times.
We can see that Zhao Nengzhi’s position was now very different from that of 1994. His attention was no longer directed at the surface text of the material world and he had entered new depths in which he was pondering and picturing specific self images. But these depths afforded him a passage towards what is innermost and facial expressions led him to the phenomenal images that would prove unique and pictorially significant, if successful. In 1997, apart from a few fuzzy nudes, Zhao spent most of his time on facial expressions because he felt that internality called for a unique type of expression. To begin with, he selected colors that emphasized the drift of a facial expression (Facial Expressions #1, #2), but if this task was completed carelessly he ran the danger of repeating his earlier expressionism, in which the open mouth and the lolling tongue provide the only emotional expression in a face. This technique also sabotages the internal elements that are the very facial expression. Zhao tried to use as little color as possible in his later experiments, and he went as far as presenting the zoomed-in images in black and white so that the compositions resembled snap shots. To diminish the influence of the elements of physicality, he made the paintings appear fuzzier, and he used smaller and softer blobs of paint. In 1998, Zhao continued on in the same direction. Facial Expressions #18 and #19 extend the face horizontally so that the works seem to be compressed and the heads pressed down. Until 1999 Zhao used such simple techniques to consolidate his facial expressions, until he succeeded in creating and stabilizing thoroughly clear and lucid facial expressions that emerged from the heart of the artist.
In reply to a question concerning what he was attempting to say through his facial expressions, Zhao Nengzhi explained:
We are confronted daily with people and faces of all types and kinds. What would happen if our attitude and vision changed? What if the details were blown up to super size? That is the key to our observations and thinking. It is as complete strangers that we attempt to engage with other people’s inner being. The sense of freakiness and the pimply lumps you pointed out are part of my own technique for explaining my take on things. They form my artistic vocabulary. In other words, I am constructing my own methodology.[15]
For the Facial Expressions series, Zhao simplified his palette and the colors were almost reduced to black, white and gray. He abandoned strokes and texture. They were all now superfluous for him.
The series titled Facial Expressions was interpreted in very different ways by critics. Zhu Qi explains the works as ‘an injury from an unknown cause’; Lu Hong described Zhao as a confused, melancholic, pessimistic and lonely member of ‘generation X’ (xin renlei); Fu Xiaodong described Zhao as exemplifying the ‘implicit sensuality’ of the psychology of the 1970s generation; Li Xu described his work as ‘a spiritual portrait of Chinese contemporary society in the early 21st century’; and Feng Boyi wrote that he was a symbol of ‘helplessness and fracture’ in the face of reality. From 1998 until the present day, Zhao’s ‘facial expressions’ have changed in their composition. More recently, he has again admitted elements of ‘narrative’ into his art, and he now hopes to use mental expressions exclusively to tell the stories of the inner world. In accordance with the artist’s own views, he has stayed away from the ideology that is predominant in others’ work. He is concerned with individualized vocabulary as well as individualities, and he does not agree with the literary interpretation of art works. He is even opposed to stereotypical and symbolic signifiers and signs. In discussing the inner world, Zhao constantly emphasizes the importance of language and discourse. He has been through his fair share of harsh experiences: trouble earning a living, establishing a social identity, yearning for love and respect, hoping for a more successful art career and life, and nurturing the artistic expression in which he believes and his expectations for the future. Only when free to make a choice can an individual fully appreciate the complexity and challenge presented by the ensuing problems.
In 1999, Zhao moved from Chongqing to Chengdu. He has described this:
I liked Chongqing every much. But after years living there, I felt embarrassed because I had forged no clear identity for myself in that city. Was I an artist or an unemployed drifter? For those of us who were kicked out of art school, people thought of us as drop-outs who had taken advantage of living in the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. It made me feel uncomfortable. So my artist friends, like Chen Wenbo and He Sen, and I all chose to leave, one after another in 1999. I went to Chengdu.
He produced many variants of Facial Expressions in Chengdu. ‘Chengdu was nice and quiet, and it attracted many good artists. We were all friends, but lived independently. We talked about art, we dined and drank together, we hung out, we gossiped…’ Nonetheless, Zhao eventually set up a studio in Beijing in 2005. He decided to live in both cities, traveling between the two so that he could secure a better environment and way of working.
It is sad but true that Zhao’s artistic success derives from his ‘facial expressions’. Convention dictates that courtesy, respect, education and status are requirements for everyday life and these are related to hierarchies, discipline, social position and modesty. Zhao Nengzhi’s faces do not address these conventionalities. He relentlessly and impolitely confronts us with faces of terror, corruption, uneasiness, repression, anxiety, perversion, madness, self-torture and self-deprecation, urging us to respond and react. As we all know, an individual can never anticipate the changes that reality will bring about, and these are the root of suffering and hardship. In line with his fate, a vagabond can only stare at the sky or scratch at the ground, but an artist is able to translate these complex feelings into images or items which others can understand. Success in this will benefit the artist in many ways, but success per se has nothing to do with art. When the night comes and you leave the gallery, when you see off the audiences and friends who came for your work, when you find you are alone on the way back to your room, when you come across the filthy vagabond in the dim streetlight again, will you feel any different this time around? An artist is the most ordinary person, and his happiness comes about by being able to present through civilized means the complexity of his inner being and so communicate with others. Zhao expresses it well:
I didn’t find it a big deal living through the hardest times. But when I look back, it hasn’t been easy, really. The world is enormous, and an individual is insignificantly small. Once you’ve been to many places, you realize that you can never encompass the world. You have to choose a place. But where you choose is only a tiny corner. So it is crucial that you don’t limit your inner world to a particular place, and you have to completely open up.[17]
Outlining the micro world and underlining individuality is the direction in which art is moving in the new millennium. Zhao Nengzhi has been doing this for a long time, and does not regret abandoning the macro narrative. He has gradually come to believe, through constant self-examination, that history comprises countless numbers of psychological micro cells. Each micro world or state of mind can provide historical evidence that is even more subversive than any description of monumental events in the outside world.
Revised on the flight from Chengdu to Beijing, Wednesday, 2 May 2007
Notes:
[1]Liu Chun, Dialogue with Zhao Nengzhi (Zheng Nengzhi fangtan lu) (December, 2001)
[2]Ibid.
[3]Ibid.
[4]Ibid.
[5]‘Before going to Chongqing, a friend and I set up an art class teaching children to paint. As far as I remember, it was a summer; we each made 1000 yuan after one month’s work. Then I collected some clothes and several of my paintings, and took a bus out of Nanchong. I survived on that money when I was first in Chongqing. Later my friend loaned my some money so that I could live for a whole year there’. (Liu Chun, Dialogue with Zhao Nengzhi, December, 2001) Between 1995 and 1996, Zhao survived by teaching.
[6]Letter to Lü Peng.
[7]Ibid.
[8]Liu Chun, op. cit.
[9]Ibid.
[10]Ibid.
[11]Ibid.
[12]Sections catalogue, photocopied work, December 1994.
[13]Ibid.
[14]Ibid.
[15]Liu Chun, op. cit.
[16]Ibid.
[17]Ibid.
Translation by Dr Bruce Gordon Doar