5年前在大都会博物馆,一场“Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China”将当代水墨的概念植入人心。展览里,水墨的出现,多作为一种媒介,服务于艺术家的各种观念,其具体的表现形式和水墨传统大相径庭。中国艺术展厅在那段时间同往常风格迥异——大幅的观念或实验性水墨作品替代了馆藏的壁画,造像,和古代书画。大都会的此次展览将当代水墨带进了杜尚以后的当代艺术世界。然而这样的百花齐放总是让人觉得缺了些什么。反观其它媒介的绘画,从文艺复兴的登峰造极到“绘画已死”后的百家争鸣,画家对色彩,构图本身的探索和创新从未止步,一次又一次的用作品震慑人心。而水墨这个已有数千年历史的材料,难道已经失去了它作为艺术品本身的活力吗?
--About Zheng Taijun's Solo Exhibition in Shenzhen
Contemporary ink, as an important genre of contemporary Chinese art, was widely accepted after the exhibition "Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art five years ago. Ink, as a medium, was highly conceptualized throughout the exhibition. The manifestation of it on paper was hardly recognizable as close to traditional Chinese ink art. 'The MET successfuly introduced contemporary ink as such to the contemporary art world through the exhibition. Yet such thriving of the genre is rather incomplete when compared with paintings of the entire contemporary painting scene, where people never ceased to explore the painting itself.
The ink painting of Zheng Taijun might fill the blank. Zheng lives in Wutong Mountain located in Shenzhen, China. He paints each day from the dawn to the dusk with the company of birds, insects, and the beautiful mountains. The open space allows him to experiment with large scale works and therefore, 'landscape' or 'nature' becomes a lasting theme in his compositions. As the artist put it, the presence of nature proves that what is experienced will never leave him and will somehow make its presence in his paintings. Here, abstract expressionism was well articulated through ink. The suppleness of ink, the swiftness of execution it offered, its 'disoriented' quality and the opportunity it afforded the painter to renegotiate relationship between full and empty space, blacks and whites or liquids and solid ground prompted him to undertake a large number of productions in all sizes.
The ink washes were empowered to express the desire. They are drawn from their own substance and the void: there is no driving idea, no drawing or design, nothing but the desire, or, more precisely the intention of painting. They are so strong and lively that even after the painting is finished, they are still flowing. The movement not only flowed with the artist's desire but catches the viewers' inner self. The practice gave life to the literati painting tradition that has long been lost in China. It resembles the album of Shitao, and the splash ink painting of Zhang Daqian in the way that they all perfectly embody the Qi (breath) of the artist. As if the past was never gone and the future is just about to come. Like the scientist finds a new chemistry reaction in the lab, the collision of past and future makes the beauty of contemporary art.
The present exhibition is not a retrospective: it brings together a significant number of large scale paintings and installation works of the artist. "Art is what artists do." The exhibition was curated to allow the audience to see Taijun's daily practice as a sincere artist. The four pieces of installations invites the audience to the artist's world and to sympathize with the artist. The paintings continue to take on 'abstraction' as its expression. The curator, together with the artist, experimented with various choices of works demonstrating new pictorial ideas, formats, motifs, compositions. Contrast, color choice, translucence, empty and full space are all subject to infinite possibilities of reading by the viewers. So please just listen to what the works themselves have to tell you.