为什么是绘画？为什么是非聚焦？
Out of Focus - A Dimension for Painting
Out of Focus - A Dimension for Painting
颜磊：将行为变成行动
“严格地说，我并不属于任何媒介所规定的艺术家。从996年开始我作了一些同当代艺术问题有关的作品，在涉及这个问题的时候，我并没有选择固定的模式和媒介，这同时也是我对传统的表达方式的厌倦和以当代艺术名义标榜的实质却是现代主义品位的质疑所导致。”–颜磊
从某种意义上讲，颜磊获得2002年中国当代艺术奖的最接触艺术家奖既是一件“黑马事件”，同时也是一件众望所归的事情。而他的获奖不断地提醒着人们他的几件作品。1997年，他和洪浩以IeInay Oahgnlh（他们二人姓名拼音的逆序书写）的名义向全国的艺术界人士发去了卡塞尔文献展的邀请信。无数来自卡塞尔的邀请信一时成为国内美术界所热衷的话题，而这件恶作剧式的作品却也迫使人民在被戏弄之后保持了少有的缄默。他们做的是隐藏这件作品所催生的笑话，作为报复，他们将这封信视作一个恶作剧，而不是一件作品。也许当时人们更习惯在各种学术刊物谈论中国艺术家的命运与国际文化权力，却不习惯处于同样目的的检测出现在身边。2000年当梁洁华基金会邀请了一些著名的国际展览策划人和基金会主席来到中国的上海、广州、杭州、北京、深圳和香港的时候，颜磊又雇佣了一些不明身份的人用单色画法复制了那张国际策划人在中国园林中的著名合影。
如果仅仅只是将颜磊的作品看作是对于国际艺术界的挑战，那么显然低估了这些作品的意义。因为颜磊并非要反对那些他本身无法改变的国际艺术现状，相反，他觉得这些现状就是现实，他的工作是在质疑这种现实的同时寻找到一种更能适合这种现实的语言方式和工作方式。作为对国际文化的现状思考，颜磊采取了两面作战的方式。一方面他抨击了国际艺术界对中国艺术的畸形关注方式。比如在“我能看看你的作品吗？”（1997）中，他用表情严肃的间谍技术工程师的照片替换了那些策划人和画廊老板。而另一方面，他又机敏地挑战中国艺术界的陈规陋习，比如用“去德国的展览有你吗？”这样的句子改写文革时期为国争光的宣传画。
国际文化现状的现实使颜磊意识到问题的复杂性，即如果我们无法寻找到一种行之有效的语言方式，那么中国乃至所有非西方国家的当代艺术就有可能永远地被圈定在一个虚假的框架之中。甚至那些调侃国际艺术现状的作品也可能成为杂耍、小打小闹，被西方人微笑着接受，而这样的艺术家也只能成为一个弄臣而已。也就是在这样的出发点上，颜磊开始了对中国当代艺术中的象征创作方法论的思考。对于他而言，只有摆脱中国当代艺术中的象征主义创作方法论，艺术才能获得前所未有的张力，同时也和旧的中国当代艺术样式和语言形成距离。艺术的创造只有具有生活的“真实性”才能获得新的力量。而弥漫在当代艺术中的象征主义思潮，使得对艺术的阅读变得简化，使得艺术成为能和生活简单对应的东西，从而失去了某种穿透力和广泛性。和象征主义相关的是艺术创作中的表演性，艺术家的生活和真正的现实生活之间的矛盾状态。在这种状态下，艺术创作更多地成为一种借助符号创造、图式修正来完成的“表演”，它们甚至不和艺术家本人的生活发生任何关系，不形成任何作用。
作为年轻一代的艺术家，颜磊从改写艺术媒介的创作意义和“生活化”两个方面开始了自己的寻找一种更有穿透力的语言的道路。作为对象征主义的挑战，颜磊首先开始的是突破媒介的限定性。他说：“严格地说，我并不属于任何媒介所规定的艺术家。从1996年开始我作了一些同当代艺术问题有关的作品，在涉及这个问题的时候，我并没有选择一种固定的模式和媒介，这同时也是我对传统的表达方式的厌倦和以当代艺术名义标榜的实质却是现代主义品味的质疑所导致。” 颜磊选择了在当代艺术家看来过于商业化的平面媒介。他开始拍摄照片，而所有的这些照片却都是一些缺乏统一主题性的图像，它们以系列的方式出现，但是主题的缺失却使这些作品系统变得无比强大。出于同样的目的，颜磊发明了一种单色绘画的技法：他将自己收集的图片按照不同的亮度勾勒出若干的区域，依次标注出不同的号码，然后培植不同灰度的颜色。于是只要将一定编号的颜色涂在一定编号的区域就可以完成一件作品。他创造这种技法的目的是为了雇佣任何人来完成具有“颜磊风格”的单色绘画。同时，他所挑选的用于描绘的图片往往也是无意义拍摄而成的，它们包括各种都市市场、饭后的餐桌以及风景等等。颜磊试图从绘画的行为和题材两个方面彻底消解艺术家存在的意义和工作的合理性，同时消除的也包括绘画题材和方法在内的象征意义。对于有着浓厚绘画传统的中国而言，这些奇特的画面同时意味着观念上的挑战。而创造这种技法的原因在于艺术家对当代艺术中象征主义倾向的深恶痛绝。
而作为对“表演性”的拒绝，颜磊开始沿着一种更加生活化的轨道展开自己的创作。他在自己各种展览会上开设二手店，将自己的东西以廉价的方式销售给观众，从而完成对自己空间和精神空间的双重清理（“二手店”，1999），或者用粉红色的灯光装饰香港某个艺术家居留项目的宿舍，以调侃艺术家的生存状态（“红灯区”，1999）。从1998年开始，颜磊移居香港，并且在三年的时间里搬了5次家。这种生存空间的位移，使精神和物质上对空间的要求成为了他现实生活和艺术创作中思考的主要线索。他用从住所到街上的一段楼道所经过的8个门，以及门与门之间实际距离和门的不同尺寸所提供的数据，按照原大比例复制这些门框并用军用迷彩布覆盖，从而形成一个类似的登机通道的可伸缩通道（“国际通道”，1999）。他即将这个通道视作是一个连接内外空间关系的通道，也将它比喻成自己作为艺术家从工作室到展览的“国际通道”。在这种怪诞方式的背后隐含着艺术家对当代社会中伴随空间位移发生的心理位移的思考。在圣保罗双年展上，他的作品包括雇佣别人完成的以北京的中央商务区的风景为题材的单色画和按照自己位于中央商务区住宅的平面图铺设的地面。他试图通过位移自己的生活空间，来检测都市生活赋予个体在视觉、空间和心理上的新体验。
颜磊是一位眺望型的艺术家，他所关注的不是图式，也不是意义，而是创作方法论本身。他试图通过这种创作方法论方法改写中国当代艺术语言脆弱、单一、局限的一面。所有的这些改写沿着一条基本的轴心进行着，即将行为变成行动。于是艺术不再只是对现实的反映，而是能够真正改变我们生活的一个手段，改变我们视线的一个角度。也正是因为这种改变，颜磊的作品获得了一种前所未有的力量，这种力量体现在他可以自由地使用各种新潮与陈旧的语言和资源却不为它们所吞噬，在各种标准和规定性面前，他始终保持着充满着报复快感的微笑。
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皮力
2007年
In a certain sense, Yan Leis winning the award of Most Outstanding Artist of the 2002 Contemporary Chinese Art Awards was at once the appearance of a “dark horse” and what everyone had wished. And his winning the award served to remind people of several specific works. In 1997, he and Hong Hao sent members of art circles across China an invitation to the Kassel Documenta Exhibition under the name Ielnay Oahgnoh. This was a combination of his name – and that of Hong Hao – in Pinyin written backward. The countless letters of invitation from Kassel became a hot topic in the fine arts community and having been tricked this hoax made people keep a rare silence. They concealed the joke implied in this work and, as revenge, regarded the letter as a hoax, not a work. Perhaps people were more used to discussing the fate of Chinese artists and international cultural power in various academic periodicals at that time than to experiencing a test for the same purpose.
In 2000, when the Annie Wong Leung Kit Wah Art Foundation invited a number of well known international curators and chairmen of foundations to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, Yan Lei hired some anonymous people to make a monochrome painting of the group photo taken during the trip in a traditional Chinese garden.
It is obviously an underestimation of Yan Leis works if one regards them as a challenge to the international art community. For Yan Lei does not intend to oppose the status quo of international art, which he cannot change; on the contrary, he regards the status quo as the reality. His work questions this reality and at the same time seeks a language and approach to work that is more suited to this reality. As a reflection on the status quo of international art, Yan Lei adopts a stance against two sides. On one hand, he attacks the international art communitys abnormal attention to Chinese art. For example, in “Can I Have a Look at Your Work?” (1997), he replaces the curators and gallery owners with pictures of serious-looking engineers of spy technology. On the other hand, he issues a keen challenge to the outdated practices of the Chinese art community. For instance, he revises Cultural Revolution posters calling for people to do credit to the motherland with such sentences as “Have you been invited to participate in the exhibition in Germany?”
The reality of the status quo of international art has made Yan Lei conscious of the complicated nature of the issue, i.e., if we cannot find an effective pattern of language, then contemporary art from China and even all non-Western countries may be confined to a false framework forever. Even those works making fun of the status quo of international art may end up to be mere comic shows and trivialities, which Westerners smilingly accept: such artists will only end up as buffoons. It was from this point that Yan Lei started his reflection on the methodology of symbolism in contemporary Chinese art. To him, only by shaking off the methodology of symbolism can art achieve an unprecedented tension and keep a distance from the form and language of earlier contemporary Chinese art. Artistic creation cannot gain new energy without “truthfulness”; whereas the symbolist current permeating the contemporary art simplified readings of art and made art something simply corresponding to life, ridding it of depth and a broader outlook. Symbolism relates to the acts that artists put on in their work, or to contradictions that exist between the artists life and real life. In this situation, artistic creation frequently becomes a “performance” completed through a symbolism applied to adaptations of appropriated compositions; such has little to do with the artists personal life, nor does it produce any real effect.
As an artist of the younger generation, Yan Lei hit the road in search of a more penetrating language in two aspects –- rewriting the meaning of art in terms of the medium used, and “turning to life.” He began with breaking through the limitation of the medium as a challenge of symbolism. He said, “Strictly speaking, Im not an artist as defined by any medium. Since 1996 I have done some works related to contemporary art issues. I didnt choose a fixed pattern or medium where these issues were involved. That was because I was bored with traditional means of expression and I began to question the essentially modernistic taste that claimed to be contemporary art.” Yan Lei chose a graphic approach, which in the eyes of contemporary artists is over- commercialized. He started to take photographs, all of which lacked a unified or sequential theme. The lack of a theme makes the system of the works incomparably strong. For the same purpose Yan Lei invented a technique of monochrome painting: he delineated different areas in each photograph according to the different depths of tone, and marked them with numbers. Then he matched these with different shades of gray. Thus a work could be completed by applying a color of a certain number to an area of a certain number. He invented this technique so that he could hire anyone to complete the monochrome painting in “Yan Leis style.”
Meanwhile, the photographs he chose for this purpose had been taken without any meaning attached. These photographs included various city scenes, a dining table after a meal, landscapes, and so on. Yan Lei tried to completely eliminate the meaning of an artists existence and the rationality of his or her work. Eliminated at the same time was the symbolic meaning arising from either the subject matter or the method of painting. To China, a country with a rich tradition of painting, these strange pictures constitute a challenge in concept. And the reason for the invention of this technique lies in the artists bitter resentment of the tendency of contemporary Chinese art towards symbolism.
Rejecting “acting,” Yan Lei started to work along a track closer to everyday life. He set up a second-hand store in various exhibitions, selling his own belongings at discount prices to visitors. In this way, he cleansed both his own and his spiritual space (“Second-Hand Store,” 1999); he decorated a dormitory of artists in Hong Kong with pink lights, making fun of those artists state of existence (“Red-Light District,” 1999). In 1998, Yan Lei migrated into Hong Kong and moved five times within three years. As a result of these shifts of his space of existence, demands for spiritual and material space became the main threads of reflection in his real- life and artistic creation. On one occasion he duplicated the frames of the eight doors along the corridor leading from his home to the street, space them a distance apart according to the real distances between the doors, and cover them with military camouflage, forming a flexible passageway resembling a boarding gate (“International Passageway”, 2001). He regards this passageway as a link between the internal and external spaces, and compares it to the “international passageway” he has gone along as an artist from his studio to exhibitions. His works include a monochrome painting with the landscape in the Central Business District of Beijing as the subject matter, which was done by someone he hired; and a floor laid after the layout of his apartment in the Central Business District. By shifting his own life space, he attempts to test new experiences in vision, space and psychology that metropolitan life provides for the individual.
Being a forward-looking artist, Yan Lei pays attention neither to composition nor meaning, but to methodology. He tries to use this methodology to rewrite the weak, monotonous, limited aspects of contemporary Chinese art. All the rewriting proceeds along a basic axis, which turns behavior into action. Consequently art is no longer a reflection of reality, but a means able to change our life and alter the angle of our vision. It is because of such changes that Yan Leis works gained an unprecedented power, which is presented in his freedom of using various fashionable and outdated languages and resources without being swallowed up by them. Faced with various standards and rules, he retains a smile of a vindictive pleasure.
Pi Li
Translated by Karen Smith
2007