颜磊：自由廊坊
Yan Lei: "Free Langfang"
Yan Lei: "Free Langfang"
保定毕业后，他花了几年时间，考上杭州的中国美术学院，1987年如愿以偿。“刚进校时，我基本上只是一个学习制作版画者。只是通过图书馆才完全改变了我的视野。突然，我们就找到了途径发现世界上其他地方在发生着什么”。
杭州的中国美院，当时是肖峰当院长。对于那些后来被公认为重要艺术家的很多人而言，他都是一个孵化器。颜磊同住一宿舍的是后来的艺术家兼策展人邱志杰，颜磊也帮助他同一个工作室的更年轻的艺术家刘炜，他也向年轻的教师，录像艺术家张培力和吴山专学习，同时还同唐宋和刘安平是朋友。但是，这其中最重要的还是他的个人老师梁全，他刚从旧金山艺术学院回国。
颜磊1991年从杭州毕业。当时有出国的念头但没有机会。所以他到了北京，在北京青年报作了一阵美编。他尝试了不同的方式，包括一些挑衅性的行为表演。但是，作艺术家一直感到孤独。“想得到一个展览机会都是一个大问题。没有画廊，作一个艺术家要谋生没有任何体制上的保证。”
“不过，艺术家注定就是孤独的”。他说，“1991－1997年我真的感到孤独，不过这对我对艺术的理解有非常大的影响。”
1990年代，中国的艺术状态发生了很大的变化，从默默无闻到引起了全世界的好奇。越来越多的批评家、策展人和收藏家到中国来了。因为很难仅仅通过艺术方式就找到自己的出路，所以几个少数的两边走动的中国人对那些有可能获得国际注意的艺术家产生了很大的影响。不过这种情景却遭到了很多艺术家的反感。
“我同圆明圆和东村的艺术状态没有太多关系”。他说，“那是些做作的波西米亚生活风格。我弄不清楚，是不是有些人搞艺术主要是给外国人看的。自然，这就直接导致了这样一个问题：我们搞艺术到底是为了什么？是为谁？”
不过，在此期间，颜磊完成了几个关键性作品。这些作品为他后来的绘画铺垫了道路。“分享？”（1996）颜磊挪用了一个普通教科书上的绘画，这副绘画带有毛时代的大字报标语。“你在将要去德国的展览里吗？”类似的! 还有“我可以看看你的作品吗？”（1997）“他们在学校里教绘画的方式是让学生临摹。”他说，“那就是那张他们让每个学生都要临摹的画。”1997年，他化名Eil Nay和Aoh Gnoh（同艺术家洪浩的名字有关）炮制了一封当年卡赛尔文献展的邀请信，发给中国一些杰出的艺术家和批评家。“其实也没什么啦。”颜磊说。这个作品产生了很多效应，有人对别人说他认识Gnoh先生，说他是非洲的策展人。
1997年，颜磊移居香港。这些娱乐性的反艺术世界的反讽，发生了某些变异，它们被添加到了艺术创作本身复杂的知识论批判中。同样的破除偶像行为还在作品中，但是已经超出了中国艺术家这个狭隘的范畴。现在颜磊将焦点对准了普遍性的问题：在21世纪，绘画意味着什么？
特醇系列（从2004年开始）铺满了多种颜色图案，它们从抽象的彩环绘画中发展而来。这些彩环绘画又是对被挪用的形象进行的解构。“我不认为我改变了自己的方式.相反，我把自己的方式带入到绘画中。毕竟，绘画只是你所看到的照片中的形象的无心的再现。精心制作绘画这个过程本身就是多余的。”
彩轮已经被以萨卡牛顿发展为他的可见之光的研究中的一部分。是歌德赋予这个彩轮以精神和人文主义的联想。这个方式由于约翰尼斯伊腾的作品而成为西方现代主义的经典。伊腾是在德国魏玛的包豪斯教书的色彩理论家。
但是颜磊用这种彩轮来表明色彩理论本身是如何地虚假。“艺术的价值体系完全是任意构造的。今天的很多艺术都是骗人的，甚至是人为操纵的。”
“特醇”中被解构的彩色图景来自于他的彩环系列。“特醇”用的是三联画的形式。其中的中间一张有一个彩轮。其他画作上的色彩构造都以那个特定的彩轮为基础。“在这个体系中，有数以百计的颜色，将这些颜色混合起来的方式无穷无尽，这些效果差不多是随意地创造出来的。”
特醇绘画中的图像都来自这个基本的形象和他自己的照片。他复制了一些绘画，包括毕加索1905年“吹笛的男孩”（在2005年拍卖到1点零5亿美元），还有被俘获的大猩猩刚果的作品，刚果的作品在1950年代享有一个短暂的时髦，甚至毕加索和米罗等人都收藏了它 的作品（刚果的作品也破了拍卖会的记录。成交价高出预期的十倍，也是第一个被拍卖的非人类的作品）。在阿姆斯特丹， 颜磊复制了一些绘画，这些绘画因为自己的展览而被移走了。在蓬皮度中心，他用他在美术馆门口发现的一个中国肖像画画家，象征性地替代了乔治蓬皮度巨大的毛一般的图象。
这些挪用都是他所亲历的冒险性的个人化事件：一张画画的是艺术家唐宋的腿，他喝得大醉猛踢一个北京画廊的门。 这些照片被扫描并分成二十个不同的层面作成一个图像。就像“编号绘画”系列所运用的复制品一样。他将这些转换到画布上由其助手来完成绘画。色彩是随意的，取决于三联画中的彩轮。颜磊坚持使用直接的未被调和的颜料以便尽可能地清除人的痕迹。“很多人说在我的作品中看不到艺术家的意图。进而言之，你甚至不会将它看做哪个艺术家的哪个作品。对于那些试图表达意义的艺术家而言，戈雅差不多代表这条路的终结。”
在这些作品中，颜磊超越了对艺术世界政治的娱乐化批判，而去探讨基本的艺术问题：艺术同无可置疑的霸权实践的关系（西方色彩理论，1950年代美国人发明的“编号绘画”是大商业对“艺术为人民服务”的挪用）；全球资本主义将艺术作品吸纳为平等的贸易形式；在信息主宰时代的图像的功能，等等。在一个充满谎言，机器复制和被操纵的艺术世界里，诚实显得难能可贵。
我们站在颜磊廊坊的工作室的窗前，冬日之光渐渐暗淡。他在这里的助手洪梅，开始在一个巨大的画布上上色。她来自廊坊周边的村庄。有着典型的中国农民的红彤彤的面孔和长辫。她会在想什么呢？
我们坐车返回北京吃晚饭。“这刚好是一个过程。”颜磊说，“有一种方式，能够到达充满刺激性的不追求任何意义的作画状态。”
“全都如此凄惨吗？“哦”，他说，微微一笑，“它使我进入到艺术世界。否则我就不会有这个身份了。我曾说过荒谬全是坏事吗？”
降落伞
降落伞 1967－2007
1967年出生在美国纽约，1992-1997年在报纸《纽约观察》任”每日艺术”专栏记者。1997年转移到香港，为《国际先驱论坛》做关于中国、日本、东南亚当代艺术方面的专题研究，同时为《华尔街日报》做食品方面的专题。他同时为大众感兴趣的及艺术杂志投稿。他正在撰写一本关于”北京和亚洲青年文化”的书。他目前还是”艾未未的新中国研究”项目的执行官。 1998年至今，他担任巴塞尔艺术博览会的顾问及亚洲战略发展策划总监。
After finishing in Baoding, he spent several years trying to get into the China Art Academy in Hangzhou, succeeding in 1987. “I was basically a printmaker when I arrived. Just having access to their the library totally changed my perspective. Suddenly we had a way to know about what was happening in the rest of the world.”
The Hangzhou academy, then with Xiao Feng as dean, was an incubator for many who would later be recognized as major artists. Yan Lei roomed with artist/curator Qiu Zhijie, put up the very young Liu Wei in his studio, learned from new teachers like video artist Zhang Peili and Wu Shanzhuan, and formed what he calls “a little gang” with Tang Song and Lu Anping. Perhaps most important was his personal tutor, Liang Quan, who had just come back from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Yan Lei graduated from Hangzhou in 1991. “I wanted to go abroad,” he says. “But I didnt have the guanxi to make that happen.” So he moved to Beijing, working for awhile as an arts editor at the Youth Daily newspaper. He experimented with different approaches, including some highly aggressive performances. But there was always the artists isolation. “Just getting a chance to exhibit was a big problem,” he says. “There were no galleries. And no system for making a living as an artist.”
“An artist cant develop without some loneliness,” he says. “It was all the loneliness I suffered from 1991 to 1997 that allowed me to develop. But most artists in China dont think about that. Money for them has become the most important thing.”
The 1990s saw the Chinese art scenes emergence from near-total obscurity to curiosity on the world stage. More and more critics, curators and collectors traveled there. Since it would be impossible to find their way around the art scene alone, a few Chinese go-betweens wielded enormous influence over who might get international attention, a situation which was obviously resented by many of the artists.
“I was frustrated by the art scene in the Yuanmingyuan and East Village,” he says. “It was sort of a contrived bohemian lifestyle, with gullible foreigners as the audience. This led, of course, to the question, why are we making art? And for whom?”
This frustration led to a few key works that paved the way for his later paintings. “Participating?” (1996) appropriated a generic textbook painting with slogan, in Mao-era dazibao, “Are you in that exhibition thats going to Germany?”. Similar was “”May I See Your Work?” (1997) — “They taught painting in my school by making students copy,” he says. “And this was a painting they made everybody copy.” In 1997 he forged an invitation letter to that years Documenta, signed “Eil Nay” and “Aoh Gnoh” (for the artist Hong Hao), and sent it to prominent Chinese art artist and critics. “Some of them didn’t think it was funny,” Yan Lei says, with more relish than regret. “I’m not sure if some – Yan Lei pointedly refuses to name names – ever forgave me. One even told people, I know this Mr. Gnoh. Hes a famous curator from Africa.”
In 1997, Yan Lei moved to Hong Kong, and these amusing anti-art-world pranks morphed into something more, a comprehensive epistemic critique of art-making itself. The same iconoclasm was there, but rather than the narrow problems of the Chinese artist, he focused on a universal issue: What does painting mean in the 21st century?
The “Super Lights” series (from 2004) overlays multiple color schemes developed in his abstract color ring paintings onto deconstructions of appropriated images. “I didnt feel I was changing my approach — rather, I was bringing my approach into painting. Painting after all is just a mindless re-presentation of an image you might see in a photograph. The process of making that painting has become superfluous.”
The color wheel was developed by Isaac Newton as part of his research into visible light. It was Goethe who gave the color wheel spiritual and humanist associations, an approach that was made canonical in Western modernism by the work of Johannes Itten, a Swiss color theorist teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany.
But Yan Lei uses the color wheel studies to show how color theory is itself phony. “Arts value system is highly arbitrary. A lot of art today is deceptive, even manipulative.”
The deconstructed color schemes in “Super Lights” come from his Color Ring series. In this system, there are hundreds of colors, and by mixing these colors pretty much endless possibilities. The effect is basically created by a very random process.”
The images in the “Super Lights” paintings come both from found images and his own photographs. He copies paintings ranging from Picassos 1905 “Boy With Pipe” (which sold for $105 million at a 2005 auction) and a work by “Congo”, a captive chimpanzee whose paintings enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1950s, to the extent of being collected by artists like Picasso and Miró (it also broke records at auction, for making ten times the estimate and as the first non-human work ever sold). At De Appel, Yan Lei copied the paintings that were removed for his own exhibition. At the Centre Pompidou, he symbolically replaced the huge Mao-like image of Georges Pompidou with a Chinese portrait painter he found in front of the museum.
The appropriations are interspersed with personal events witnessed in his adventures in the slums of Beijing’s art scene. One painting depicts artist Tang Song’s leg after a notorious incident in which he drunkenly kicked through the door of a Beijing gallery. The photographs are scanned and broken into twenty different layers to make a map of the image, much like the sheets used in “paint-by-number” kits. He transfers this to canvas and then paint is applied by his assistants, acrylic for its coldness. The colors are arbitrarily derived from the color wheel in the triptych. Yan Lei insists on using paints straight from the jar, unmixed, so as to remove the human touch as far as possible. “You dont see the intent of the artist in my work. But then again, you dont see it any work by any artist any more. Goya represented pretty much the end of the road for artists who tried to mean something.”
In these works, Yan Lei has gone beyond amusing critiques of art world politics to explore fundamental issues of art: Its relation to unquestioned hegemonic practices (Western color theory, “paint-by-number” — which was invented in 1950s America as an appropriation of “art for the people” by big business), the absorption by global capitalism of artworks as a form of tradable equity, the role of images in an age of pervasive information. And if honesty is even possible in a world of deceit, of mechanical reproductions and manipulated artifacts.
We stand by the window, in the fading winter light, in the studio Yan Lei still keeps in Langfang. His local assistant, Hong Mei, starts coloring a large canvas. She comes from the cold, stony villages around Langfang, with the ruddy face and pig-tails of the Chinese farmer. What must she be thinking?
We return to the car to drive back to Beijing for dinner. “Its all just a process,” Yan Lei says. “A way of getting through the irritating meaninglessness of making a painting.”
Is it all so bleak? “Well,” he says, smiling, “it gets me into the art world. And a certain status I wouldnt otherwise have. Did I ever say absurdity was totally a bad thing?”
Jonathan Napack
Jonathan Napack 1967－2007
Born in 1967 in New York City. From 1992-1997 wrote the “Art Diary” column in The New York Observer [newspaper]. After 1997 moved to Hong Kong to write about contemporary culture in China, Japan and Southeast Asia for The international Herald Tribune and about cuisine in Asia for The Wall Street Journal. He has also contributed to both general-interest and art magazines. He is preparing books about Beijing and about youth culture in Asia, and is currently editorial director of Ai Weiweis new China research project. Since 1998, he has worked for Art Basel as their advisor and strategist in Asia. He recently accepted a similar position with Botschaft Basel, a new art foundation.