Visible Time
Wang Guangle ( de )
Young Chinese Artists, The Next Generation, Prestel Verlag, 2008-9
Wang Guangle’s thesis piece at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts – 3 to 5 p.m. (2000) – earned him first prize in the annual academy contest.
It also powerfully established the theme of his later work. In this three part series (oil on canvas), the artist shows an empty room, darkened by a curtain. A single, narrow chink between the wall and the fabric lets in a beam of light. We see how the light’s angle of incidence changes, captured in the painting at irregular time intervals. Here as well as in subsequent works, Wang Guangle visualizes time at once in its duration and fickleness. In the delirium of big-city progress – where the present means nothing but a stepladder to the future – the Beijing based artist makes a plea for the irretrievable significance of the here and now.
The Terrazzo series connects thematically to 3 to 5 p.m. The first picture (Untitled, 2003) shows a beam of light falling on marbleized flooring named after the Italian city of Terrazzo. This affordable mixture of concrete and other materials was much loved in the artist’s own home province, but in recent years it has increasingly given way to other materials considered more modern. “My memories of my home are bound up inseparably with this material. When I paint it, I feel freed from specific forms – I can virtually look inward.”
In the paintings that make up the rest of the series, the light beam is nowhere to be seen. A diffuse timelessness permeates the veined surface. “I was unhappy with my fi rst works. I had indeed marked a specific time point in the image, but what I wanted was to convey the experience of time itself. And that should in turn be reproducible for the viewer. Therefore I left the light beam out.”
And it is precisely this tangible sense of time that characterizes Wang Guangle’s painting process. With the finest brush strokes he recreates the seams in the concrete around the inlaid pieces and splinters of stone. The pictures that emerge possess a delicate ornamental aesthetic in gray and green tones, sometimes even in soft rose. In the minimal contours the viewer can readily imagine his fixed gaze as well as the sharp concentration in Wang Guangle’s handling of the brush. Millimeter by millimeter the canvas fills itself, becoming the archivist of the artist’s lifetime. Often taking numerous months of work, he transforms a stone structure into a “picture structure.” “When I paint, I frequently have the feeling that I am writing calligraphy which I enjoy immensely.”
For Wang Guangle, painting becomes ritual, such as when, in 2004, he spent three months painting a Terrazzo image on the wall of a house doomed for demolition (The Wall, 2004). It is the act, not the product, which is the intent of his work. “For me, the most important thing is not the ‘what’ of painting, but the ‘how’.” A comparison to Buddhist sand mandalas would be appropriate – blown away by the wind as soon as they are finished – and Wang Guangle himself affirms the connection to Buddhist thinking. “I believe that something exists beyond the world of appearances.” The intensity of contemplating a picture, analogue to the demanding process of painting, posits a spiritual counter-trend to the daily haste that throws away every moment and is totally preoccupied with distant goals, either self- or externally defined.
The existential element in Wang Guangle’s work reveals itself again in his Coffin Paint series, begun in 2004. An old tradition in his home province of Fujian inspires the series; when someone feels that his life nears its end, he orders a casket, paints it in red lacquer, and keeps it on the second floor of his home. Every year that he still finds himself alive, he paints it again. There could hardly be a clearer application of the ancient saying “Memento Mori” – “Remember that you too shall die.”
On the basis of this ritual, Wang Guangle adds a layer of paint – twice daily, morning and evening – that more or less covers the canvas. The tone scale varies from monochrome to two or more colors. Since each application begins a little further removed from the edge, and is allowed to drip along the outer edge of the frame, the works attain a nearly plastic dimension. The association with a coffin is intended as the center of the canvas builds up the thickest layer of paint, classifying his Coffin Paint works close to sculptures.
In a variation on this technique, Wang Guangle applies every layer of paint the same distance from all four sides of the canvas’s outer edge. In the center of his piece 041230 (2004) he has achieved a kind of suction affect. “Viewers have already told me that this work makes them think of a time tunnel.” In another variation from 2007 (070506 and 070508), the paint surfaces are applied in the form of a circle, reminiscent of a tree’s annual rings.
The aesthetic affect of the coffin paintings, depending on the choice of colors, can range from a buoyantly cheerful, dramatic, or even gloomy aura, all the way to a contemplative gesture that invites the eye to wander. Wang Guangle’s monochrome white or black compositions are particularly intense. They become reflective surfaces, mirroring the attention almost unavoidably back upon the viewer.
Wang Guangle’s works are simultaneously timeless and current. They refresh a traditional Chinese phenomenon that is best articulated in Chinese landscape painting. While it is the nature of Western painting to deliver moments in time, Chinese landscape painting often features the same person several times within the same picture. The viewer is thus invited to simply follow the figure’s wandering. Such traditional and other similar stylistic motifs achieve what Wang Guangle’ paintings achieve abstractly and conceptually: making the passing of time visible.
The interview with the artist took place in April 2008 in Beijing. I want to thank Zhao Chong for his efforts as a translator and adviser.
In: Young Chinese Artists. The Next Generation, Editors: Christoph Noe, Xenia Piëch und Cordelia Steiner.
Prestel Publishing September 2008
Hardcover, 296 pages
310 images
