Zhang Yunyao: Palace of Extasy

Nowadays, painting has become interlinked with a sense of “self.” Relative to more non-traditional and “unitary” mediums, painting, on the one hand, has constructed a self-contained narrative by virtue of its relationship with history. While on the other hand, it must continually refresh its “legitimacy” under waves and waves of “new” aesthetics, which threaten to subsume. The resulting situation is that a work must accept challenges of form and aesthetic, while simultaneously reflecting the artist’s ego.Although such reflection is often hidden, or totally unbeknownst to the artist, painting is indeed more concerned with the problem of self-return in the contemporary era than it has ever been, while also being concerned with the ontological problems brought on by the transformation of the poetic into the philosophical. In other words, the “exported” image is in itself questionable from any aesthetic standpoint. The artist always begins at the image itself -- line, brushwork, color, and even the angle of the hand in relation to the canvas -- all of these concepts and positions are internalized in the final work. Yet these internalized relationships do not guarantee the "faithfulness" of the image to the concepts behind it. On the contrary, it is often in this dislocated space between “Painting” with a capital “P” and the specific image that the layering and mystery of the creation are revealed.

Over the last two years, Zhang Yunyao has been developing a clearer and clearer awareness of the interval that his work inhabits -- between concept and image. On the one hand, this awareness is an outgrowth of a more relevant motif -- one involving the study and repeated description of the human form and its imagery. On the other hand, the artist has become a maestro of the medium of felt, which has been a mainstay of his long-term practice -- an understanding that transcends technique, and includes a methodological and conceptual instinct borne of practice. The decision to work with felt as a canvas is in a sense underpinning the structural significance of his work. Here, Zhang’s technicality is also a conceptuality. For most artists who paint in oil or propylene, it is not a given that a conceptual premise will arise at the material, or rather, the concept is self-evident. Whereas Zhang, by choosing felt and graphite as his media, underlines a type of legitimacy which extends from concept to image in the decision itself, in addition to mandating a set of technical issues which must be addressed in his work.

By choosing to work with felt, Zhang is “voluntarily forced” into an irreversible method of painting, which demands absolute precision in execution which leaves no room for respite or error. The decision to paint with highly permeable graphite demands more rigor of the process. Zhang says he chooses to work with graphite on felt because these materials remove virtually all room for spontaneity and chance while painting. In other words, Zhang places his trust in the stability and control of “process,” rather than improvisation and lyricism.Before working on the massive blank space of the felt canvas, Zhang always creates intricate drafts, sketching out every detail of the composition by projecting the image onto canvas -- the final image, including not just the outline, but also the shadows, gradations, and manifold gray areas are all delineated. As a result, the canvas is prepped for the oncoming "process," which will adhere strictly according to "the plan." At no point during the process does the artist allow for laxity or improvisation, and he does not stop until blank spaces are "filled in." Within this process, which Zhang has coined “anti-painting,” execution outweighs “lyricism.” The artist does not “express” form via line and brushstroke, rather, he “maps out” the image by tracing and filing it in.

As a result of this demanding technique, the entire process is protracted and drawn out. The artist moves steadily across the canvas, from zone to zone, at a measured and gradual pace which contradicts our commonly held notion of painting as a dynamic and mutable release of energy. The artist says he "needs" to go through this process to complete a satisfactory “painting.” On the one hand, he knows the laboriousness of the process will gradually erode any initial infatuation inherent to creating images of the human form. While such infatuation may have spurred the initial desire to paint, it is also this very infatuation which obstructs the transformation of the subject into an internalized structure -- which is what the artist truly wishes to realize through his work. On a deeper level, Zhang seeks to dispel the functional and physical effect that the “nature” of painting has on him through this “procedural” approach, which is the true intention of “anti-painting.”Here, we can borrow Bergson’s “Élan vital” in describing how painting in this most primitive and basic sense refers to function of energy and the nature of life itself. To extend the metaphor further, if painting is a process of energy and expression, and each stroke of the brush is a metaphor for passion and pain, then Zhang Yunyao’s “painting” is a calm and “painless” pursuit. It is as if the direct stimulation of the body’s faculties has been inhibited, lulling the sensory metaphor of painting into a state of dormancy.Here, painting is disembodied and becomes a substitute for ideas and a self-silencing device. Interestingly, this is the artist’s position of “anti-painting.” There is a sense of absurdity inherent in this negation of self, which is not unreasonable, as it more or less provides a glimpse into the kind of universal reflexive consciousness present in contemporary painting. As Zhang says, “I’m trying to create paintings that seem, in part, buried in the grave, and, in part, brand new.”

Whereas this ambition to achieve “anti-painting,” results in works that depart from or even contradict their conceptual underpinnings. With such dislocation, Zhang’s work follows its own set of rules constituting a subtle area of intrigue. Standing in front of Zhang’s work, the viewer’s perception will contradict the sense of “apathie” and “sense of loss” underlying their conceptual mechanism. On the contrary, the paintings are abnormally functional.Not only because Zhang’s work depicts images of the body in detail -- including the volume of the muscles, and the shapes wrought by intense movement, and even the marks and bruises from whipping and beating -- more importantly, the felt used in the painting is indispensable to the effect of the whole. Clearly, the distinctive textures of graphite on felt infuse the images with a layer of unique lustre. Up close, the gloss presents as full, rich granules of pigment, evoking a strong tactile experience. While on the whole, it speaks a textural language of lustre, skin, and flesh. As a painter, Zhang is hypersensitive to the subtle variations of gloss and the psychological effect of such variations. In a sense, he has adopted an extreme approach to the penetrative relationship between graphite and felt, as well as the effect of the luster which builds on several levels as a result of this relationship.As a result, the pieces are often silver-toned, shining through the black, which imbues the surface of bronze figures with a layer of high photosensitivity and the sense of dramatic movement that contributes to the lushly staged atmosphere of his compositions. All of this invests a vitality in his works, contrary to the “insensate” technique of choice the artist uses while painting, the resultant images have been created for the explicit purpose of teasing out a specific sensation and experience with their lustrous siren song of sensation -- a tremor which erupts under the skin, only at close proximity to the flesh.

On this level, it can be said that Zhang’s work is not “anti-painting” at all -- in that they are not antithetical to the emotion of painting. In an instant of reversal, the negation of concept and behavior finds a hierarchy within the work itself, which allows the sensory experience to be maneuvered around and re-released.Which is why, rather than conceptualizing “anti-painting” as an act of elimination or resistance, it in fact is a proof of concept -- one wherein the painting undergoes a désœuvrement (tr: idleness) which is reflexive to its ontological meaning.To Zhang, this process of “painting” and “anti-painting” is critical; in a fundamental sense, it should be seen as the core that drives his creative process. Though seemingly paradoxical, the artist understands -- more clearly than the audience -- the implicit logic of this relationship, however subconscious his understanding may be. The functional experience and the depth of pleasure he seeks in his work cannot be attained except on the level of désœuvrement. He must delay and restrain experience while painting in order to elevate the experience to another echelon of intensity. This zone of suspension and re-entry approaches the “absence of feeling” that Bataille emphasizes in his textual analyses of de Sade. Bataille writes, “Sade demands ruthlessness. In order to transform passion into energy, he must suppress passion so that it may pass through an instant where sensation is absent, into completion. This is how passion may rise to an unparalleled height.”[1]Here, Bataille analyzes the work of the famous functionalist -- Marquis de Sade -- through the lens of a negative metaphysics. In proving the existence of the individual by delineating the negative space of “emotionlessness” and “absence of feeling,” he achieves more than a transformation of nothing into something, it is moreover an “elevation,” because to Sade, “passionlessness is pleasure a thousand times holier than pleasure derived from weakness.”[2]This moment approaches the religious experience, marking a supreme experience of the faculties, so intense, that it can only be attained through “disengagement” or “extasy” of the ego. It represents a higher plane of experience for the body and its faculties, a heterogeneous temporality which is ekked out. If it is said that Zhang’s paintings take a detour, suspending the sensory metaphor of painting by seeking out a metaphysical experience in the ontological sense, then this act of creation is itself a moment of “extasy” -- one which possesses a reflective structure and takes a roundabout path. Therefore, Zhang’s so-called “anti-painting” represents paradoxically, a departure from and return to painting.

 Overall, this process is one of violence. The act of placing painting in a position where it “cannot,” where it is functionally the désœuvrer, is in itself an act of violence. Whereas the functional release, or rather “extasy,” undoubtedly overrides such dominance, involving the creator himself into another type of violence. Regardless of whether the artist is conscious of such violence, if the image can truly “attain such heights of experience,” it then represents the violence of the painting on the body of the painter.It is as Jean-Luc Nancy writes when describing the “pleasure” of drawing, “the subject is overwhelmed within pleasure, because pleasure is not a standard “satisfaction” to be sought out, considered, or accepted. It is more accurate to say that it overwhelms itself, or rather, it is the overflowing self of the ‘subject.’”[3]Zhang continues to seek out this experience of overflowing and overwhelming in his work -- a reflexive and violent act of pleasure which resonates from the painting to himself. Only, he goes about it in an obscure and unobtrusive manner. For example, his tireless depiction of luster is in itself an appropriate response to the image as a psychological representation of “overflow.” Or one might point to the way he uses delicate lines in his images to “press down” on the brute vitality of bodies, as if violence would launch a resistance against beauty and fragility.Viewed again under this lens, the artist’s selection of classical statues as his creative motif transcends content, because it also bears psychological and aesthetic significance. In all that we see, Zhang’s works are not dealing with problems of image, but rather, problems of painting itself -- He perceives “the body” and interprets “the body" on the level of function rather than image. One might then conjecture that the reason contemporary painting has not been exhausted in the general problem of the image is because the problem of “Painting” with a capital “P” does not exist. Every artist is dealing with their own concerns within the bounds of their own paintings.