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text by Kuo Sin-Sin
This is the characterization of colors and symbols by Wu Tung-Lung, an artist that is really hard to understand. If abstract is a style that is hard to describe with words, why don’t we just put aside the habit of searching for a meaning and just stand in front of the paintings, simply leaving the world of expressional boundaries behind and letting our imagination help us see the colors and structures? Don’t you think? They are so poetic… just like water birds spreading their wings. Just like butterflies or fireflies; just like whatever you see in them.
I want to go to the outskirts of Taipei, the desire to delve into my thoughts and the thirst for silent has taken a grip of me. In the mountains close to the southern valley of Xindian City, there is a small community called Quchi, which is also the place where painter Wu Tung-Lung has created a large amount of artworks in the five years he has been living here. It has already been three years since his last solo exhibition; he explains that, “If the creativity of a painter can be constant and calm, there is no need for me to burn myself up in the flash of a moment.” He possesses the wisdom calm people have and has obviously freed himself from the pressures of time; he seems to live just like the Flaneur described by the French poet Baudelaire. On the winding country road that leads into Quchi while passing trees, open spaces and simple neighborhoods, he notices every detail of his surrounding, just as if they would talk to him. It seems like things and creatures around him come alive just because of his attention, just as if they suddenly had a purpose other than mere existence.
The pure symbolism and colors in Tung-Lung’s paintings create a highly recognizable individual style. In spending his days, he has embraced all possible techniques to make time go by even slower. From sunny skies to cloudy weather, from foggy skies to the reemergence of the sun; all weather changes pass by the top of his head. He can look at dawn and its bright colors, there are the changes in the sun’s position over the time of one day, and there is the sunset and deep, dark night. Even at night, the sky would never stop moving, there are always different shapes to discover. But Quchi is most beautiful when it rains, because the fog and mist will never join in with the other colors, it will billow back and forth. Maybe the different types of scenery and weather are transformed into abstract layers and emotions in Tung-Lung’s paintings, maybe he even leaves the sceneries behind completely while painting, entering an unnamed emotional state. But in all his paintings there is a sense of his own individual aesthetics, a beautiful elegance that is his and his alone.
In his works the French novelist turned all people and things into symbols. Those symbols were in a sense revealing and unrevealing at the same time, by explaining and cracking up the details of memories they gave his work a sense of cohesion. As Wu Tung-Lung explains, those symbols have no place in his paintings: “There is no narrative in my paintings, there isn’t even a story.” This kind of fragmentism defeats all curiosity, but at the same time invites imagination. Wu, who has received a traditional education in the fine arts, creates artworks that are hard to grasp by the onlookers, but follows the process of traditional oil painting, creating works that have a classic feeling to them by respecting the natural texture of the canvas. The creative work on the canvas is a mix of rational considerations and experimenting; he uses tape to cover parts of the canvas and rip them off after he finishes painting. This “unforeseeable” method turns into a “calculable” process because of the experience he gathered over time. And, different to other artists who finish their paintings in one go, he takes his time to clean up his table after the completion of each step, using the time he creates a type of “intervention”, to be able to gather his thoughts and slow down the process of forgetting. After one painting is finished, he would keep it hanging on the wall of his studio for a while; this period is when there are moments of honesty between the artwork and the artist. During the many “emotional encounters” between the two, both the work and the artist are already not the same anymore as they too go through changes while time goes by. Regarding the mystery of Wu Tung-Long’s use of colors and symbols, we can use one of Proust’s quotations: “Style to a writer is just like colors to a painter; it is not a question of skill, but a question of vision. Vision is a kind of appearance. It is a unique, individual way of perceiving what is in front of your eyes. If there were no artists, this vision would for ever be the secret of the individual.”
“Maybe one day mankind will be able to exchange emotions only by the power of thought, if that should be the case we could very well just spare the effort creating art,” is Wu Tung-Lung’s conclusive statement. But can this really be what he wants? For now that the future is yet to present itself, he doesn’t seem to be concerned with the small misunderstandings of life, because he knows that every individual is searching for different things and their thoughts can not all be the same. Sometimes they just make him aware of aspects he has not yet considered before. Why don’t we just stay silent and let our imagination bloom in perfect slowness…
Cacao Vol.4, 2011.09 |
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