QU Fengguo graduated from the Stage Design Department at Shanghai Theatre Academy and stayed to teach around the end of 1980s. As a backbone force in cultivating the presence of abstract painting in Shanghai, he gained a lot of knowledge in art history, especially for post-war Asian art which is not oriented by Eurocentrism, from the formal training, and began to paint abstraction in the early 1990s. QU Fengguo’s practice in abstraction stems from the conflictual and ambiguous cultural field in Shanghai and develops with the complicated entanglement of different visual powers. However, it does not seek to perform the city as a collective cultural identity. The decline of humanism, the transformation and breakage from cosmopolitanism to global conceptualism, as well as the narrative enclosure of Shanghai together result in a kind of transitional yet penetrating expression by QU, beyond the canonical form of flatness and the historical divides in abstract painting.
“Hand Writing” and “Untitled” Series are among QU’s early attempts in abandoning brushstrokes but adopting text planning of abstraction. “Hand Writing” was initiated in mid-1990s, while “Untitled” featured the transitional period when the artist gradually shifted from “Hand Writing” to “Four Seasons.” Compared with “Four Seasons,” these two series are more expressionistic in terms of calligraphic traditions in the Orient and the relevant uncontrolled scale. QU’s conception about abstraction is to separate abstract forms and abstract languages, which contributes to the complement of the sample discourse of “rationalism” or even contest against it. He hopes to establish another sort of non-linear narrative which lies outside the historical inference of Chinese contemporary art and includes detailed geographical situations and the will of an epoch. “Four Seasons” could be dated back to 2005, focusing on the institution and condensation of the idea of time. The series interposes itself in the fleeting moments of the nature being naturalized. QU utilizes the quality of opposition and reflection concealed in painting to establish the assembly of the field of lines.
In “Four Seasons,” QU relies on alternative facilitating agencies built up by himself. Abstraction is practiced as a habitus but not a scenario-based transcription in his composition. The paint is squeezed out of the tube and left on the canvas by lines and then shaved off by a ruler. To repeat such an act finally conforms to the fulfillment of the entire canvas in horizontal stripes. Different colors of paint get to blend with one another. Though in recent practice of this series, the superposition of division and the division of superposition functions as a structural element occupying the very center of the image. A number of geometric motifs emerge, but the core of QU’s creative language is the disappearance of space and spatiality. He read a lot about “Gutai,” the avant-garde artistic group that was founded in the Kansai region in Japan and had been active between the mid-1950s to early 1970s, “Mono-ha,” the Tokyo-based art movement that emerged in the late 1960s to 1970s, and “Dansaekhwa,” the trend in Korean painting that came to surface in Seoul in the mid-1970s. All the involved artists inspire QU about subverting and transcending the institutionalized conception of space. Lee Ufan, whose practice runs through Japan and South Korea, once noticed that the repetition of the same action resembles a training or self-discipline where the notion of passivity is extremely crucial. QU is deeply moved by such a creative theory. The continuous accumulation of various minutes by chance finally condense itself into the immediate existence of “Four Seasons.”
Even so, QU hasn’t fallen into the trap of pan-arianism. As cultural in-betweeness sneaking out, he depends on the dynamic multi-perspective rooted in Shanghai and distinguishes different patterns of manifestation in abstraction, which make him acquire the truly universal visual language beyond standard “gaze.” What truly moves visual and aesthetic experience is the intuition of being. It does not come from any geopolitical or social conflicts and limiting identifications. In “Four Seasons” by QU, the idea of time cannot be interpreted as a homogenic mathematic concept. It rather speaks to the notion of durèe by Henri Bergson. It is an entity that cannot be identified by any term. Only by empathetic perception can it be really motivated. The changing past and the fine-new here-and-now expands into each other till the ultimate, while being pulled back to consciousness by intuition in time. Such a process of tensioning again and again gets solidified into a state of being in QU’s practice. One’s personal history is being kept in this way so that it will not appear as ever known; however the same kind of situation will never appear again so that it will circulate by a fresh instance. The life of being sustains itself in this way, yet disappearing as always.
