The Rejection of Concepts and Faith in Perception
Impressions on Ma Yun’s Painting Exhibition
Yu Jian
Ma Yun called me one day, talking about how Ingres had said that by the time he’d finished painting, the era had already passed.
This was about Ma Yun himself. Compared to the art of the New Wave, Ma Yun’s paintings are not very fashionable. In a time when everyone was chasing the new and unconventional, Ma Yun was pursuing the classical spirit.
On another day I saw an introduction to Monet, talking about one of his water lily paintings which contained over ten thousand brushstrokes. Ten thousand brushstrokes. That takes a lot of fervor and persistent imagination. Ma Yun slavishly imitates that, restoring the tune of days long past. For Ma Yun, the likes of Rembrandt, Balthus, Giacometti, Morandi and Freud will never be outdated. That’s cultivation. What Ma Yun admires most is the path of artistic common knowledge. In our era, common knowledge is truth. Since ancient times, truth has always been the path that turns its back on the times.
The overarching trend of contemporary art is the primacy of concepts. In the 19th century, western painting began to break through the hegemony of classicalism. A revolution requires a powerful target. Only history can provide passion and momentum for mankind’s many non-historic impulses for reenchantment. Modern art is rooted in a new understanding of art, but it is not just about the establishment of novel concepts. More profound are its revolutions in painting methods, techniques and artistic language. That which is most valuable is always historic, rooted in time. It is not merely a spatial invasion. Great artists are not very revolutionary when it comes to the relationship between art and mankind. Whether it is Picasso or Rembrandt, they were all good at universal human nature. No matter how warped, the image had to look better. It had to be able to enter homes and not just museums.
Oil painting is not a Chinese tradition. Deeply influenced by isms and concepts, art in the twentieth century here was seen either as a tool of ideology or as a tool of private self-awareness. Concepts, be they mainstream or private, are merely different paths to the same end; artworks are merely ladders reaching towards concepts. How to paint is not important. What you paint is very important. Meaning has more of a market than language.
Contemporary art cannot gain entry without an explanation. The understanding of a work of art is not through the artwork itself, but through the introduction at the entrance. Hell is other people. Behind all of this, the invisible hand is no longer some spirit; it’s the market. Artists’ consideration of the market has surpassed that of art itself. Art is secondary. The movement of artists to get rich first over the past decade has effected the total disenchantment of contemporary art. Art is no longer experiential and enchanting. Art is growing smarter and smarter, and the trick is in maintaining the modernist predicament, making the art stock market profound and unknowable, leaving rushed third-rate artworks in a bad state among currencies.
Ma Yun paints slowly, turning his back on the times. He is obsessed with the enchantment of art. This is playing the old tune. No one plays that tune anymore, making him an oddity. In the galleries of today, when compared to everything around it, Ma Yun’s art looks like some sort of earth-shaking avant-garde. When an era is overrun by the search for the new, the old tune becomes the vanguard.
Ma Yun’s work stands out in the crowd, commanding respect. It’s as if among row upon row of curtained doors and plastic barrels there flashed a murky view of a hometown garden in the summer sun. He has retained long lost memories, and sings the praises of those ancient colors and the things that move us. After all this time, it turns out that painting was once a world so close to our own.
Ma Yun’s paintings need no explanation. All you have to do is look at them. They look wonderful, and hold up over time. They are rooted in the fundamental experiences of mankind rather than fantastical ideas. Ma Yun loves life with a passion, so the things that he likes always come from the everyday world. This lends his work an air of universality, or more simply put, makes them pleasing to behold.
Ma Yun is still obsessed with feeling and refuses concepts. What he ponders is how to paint.
Once he’s been pondering for over thirty years, we can start talking about his paintings.
Color and boundaries are the themes of his work. Color is an infinitely alluring woman, one which Ma Yun is completely infatuated with. His choice of what to paint is merely an offering to feeling; he doesn’t care about what it means.
He tries to shatter the boundaries of the experience of things, rearranging the boundaries of the world within poetic perception. This rearrangement is not destruction but a part of nature.
Ma Yun’s internal perceptions are Chinese. They are perceptive, indistinct, illogical and poetic. He does not criticize reality. He sings the praises of the world of everyday life.
Dancing between color and form, it transcends the meaning of appearance, conception, value, order and habit, freely forming arrangements through feeling, creating a sense of fantasy that transcends reality yet does not depart from universal form.
Look good. It seems that this is all that Ma Yun asks of his artworks. This ‘looking good’ is temporal and historical. In Ma Yun’s artworks you can see a temporal thread, for instance, in his obsession with Wyeth’s poeticism, the influence of Balthus and the nourishment he drew from Buddhist art and Chinese painting in his early period. Ma Yun is not averse to time. He does not wish to burst out across space. Art is a history, not a cosmic ark. There was a period of splendor three years ago, with the Plum Blossom, Black Bird, Woman series, voluptuous and elegant. Ma Yun is skilled at placing extreme perceptions into a single picture, unconcerned about the natural relationships between forms, creating new relationships between things, new boundaries, but since these boundaries are not rooted in a pursuit of perfection, they do not stand out, do not capture the gaze. It is as if the world was always like this. Each day is new, but only in that it once again arrives at ancient beauty. This batch of paintings has already scattered into the four winds, ending up in private collections. The collectors seem almost embarrassed, as these paintings are not fashionable, as they present aged concepts, and do not require explanation – flora and fauna, beautiful women and scholar’s rocks – but they have a strong feel to them. To collect Ma Yun’s paintings you need sophisticated appreciative abilities. Ma Yun follows his feelings, so it is difficult to define him in terms of style or with an icon. He expresses many kinds of perceptions. He is a poet.
His latest masterpiece is Dog Standing on a Grey Stone. That dog appears to be jumping out of reality and about to land in the metaphysical. It is a dog on the path to transcending itself. Ma Yun has always straddled the border between reality and irrationality, uncertain. This is where his charm lies.
Ma Yun will be hard pressed to become famous in this day and age. His ambitions outstrip this era. He is waiting for those cheering clouds to pass.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Frankfurt