Frieze's Review 艺评 | GENG YINI 耿旖旎 @chi K11美术馆

（Scroll down for the English version)

迎面而来一只以戏谑狂傲的方式伸出的舌头，开启了耿旖旎在K11的个展“挂塔&完美鸭潭”：在“脏柜”（2013）中，一只带有粗糙纹理的巨型舌头从一张脏暗的床头柜凹穴里延伸出来。虽然不同于那些在这场精心策划、纷繁绘述的蒙太奇中担当主角的形象（例如鸭子、香蕉和健身明星)，这第一眼就让人觉得滑稽而毛糙的舌头，恰到好处地将观众带进了耿旖旎的世界。展览中许多件作品上点缀有精练的语词片段或传统中国俗语，使得作品的意义愈为复杂；整体呈现变得有趣多样、诱人好奇的同时，还带有一种能够混淆视听的能力。

Amazing Duck Deep Pond 惊奇鸭潭，2017

Oil on canvas 布面油画

200x320cm

大幅双联画作“惊奇鸭潭”（2017）淋漓尽致地体现了耿旖旎那种将平凡事物变得不同寻常的魔力。画作里有只庞大的鸭子，在宁静的山峦与日落中，安逸地漂浮于一隅水塘之上。艺术家将背景中的景观镜像化处理了（伴以细微的差别），因此鸭子两侧出现了双瀑布，画作前景的右方则飘荡着“惊奇”二字。超现实的物体、罗夏墨迹（Rorschach）实验般的排布、咒语般的夸张文字，耿旖旎似乎想用她的作品催眠观众，且并没有完全失败。

Life Winners 人生赢家，2017

Oil on canvas 布面油画

200x150cm

 “人生赢家”（2017）有着同样奇异的画面：有三个人在和一个蛋形脑袋的人打牌，在那个人后方脑壳上印刻着彰显其老板身份的英文（“boss”）。玩家的表情多样，有放松的亦有狡诈的；写于画面上方的传统俗语“生死有命，富贵在天”则奠定了作品呈现的基调。由民间俗语传达出来的既定结果已然让牌场上的任何技术布局都失去了意义。我们不知道那个老板在这个局里是命运的仲裁者还是施惠者，但令人惊讶的是，看似如此轻松愉悦的场景却让人不禁思考有关命运与自由意志相对立的沉重问题。

耿旖旎的作品大多带有一种蠢笨和敏感的气质，但有时却会有一道可怖的气息突然切入。在“断层”（2012）中，艺术家以温暖舒心的色调描绘了一方华丽的室内空间。而在那个室内的墙上则挂着一张装帧好的画作，画面中有一张戴有面具的脸。这样一幅与周遭环境格格不入的肖像，加上艺术家在作品上用英文涂写的“Fault（错误）”，让整幅作品萦绕着一丝恐怖的气息。在另外一件作品“黑洞 I”（2017）中，艺术家甚至将水果变得怪诞而诡异。两孔错视的黑洞闯入了由亮黄色香蕉占据的画面，而那两个黑色的烂熟部分看起来似乎即将就要威胁到现实中画作的陈列支撑。作品旁边的墙壁上还出现了两个实际的孔洞，似乎画作中的深洞已经强大到有足够的能力来影响真实世界了，艺术家以此成功营造了一种令人惶恐不安的气氛。

Installation view of Deep Pond Perfect Duck

“挂塔 & 完美鸭潭”展览现场图

从视觉上来说，艺术家的创作所采取的策略远不及新颖：蒙太奇的形式、玩味着虚幻与现实的技法、以及让被压抑遗忘的日常以匪夷所思的姿态重新浮现这些方式，都是惯常的超现实表现套路。然而，耿旖旎本人的怪趣诡诞以及其作品中对艺术家周遭环境的隐射，使得这些套路变得不那么寻常。社会现实主义的一些惯例表现手法——标志性的人物、纹理质感的画面、伴有强烈色彩的泥黄色调——众多元素交织于画布上，增强了作品的通俗感。除此之外，在文字对画面的重塑力量下，这些作品不仅让人联想到传统中国绘画中以诗词点缀画面的方式，亦让人不禁想起政府资助制作的宣传横幅（时至今日仍渗透于中国人的日常生活之中）。正是耿旖旎这种制造异乎寻常却又恰如其分的联想的创作能力——超越了使人眼花缭乱的视觉狂欢——使得“挂塔 & 完美鸭潭”这场展览中的作品呈现得如此生动迷人。

(English)

Geng Yini opens her solo exhibition at K11, Perfect Duck Deep Pond, with a playfully defiant gesture: a stuck out tongue. In Dirty Cabinet (2013) an oversized, textured rendering of this muscle protrudes from the cavity of a dingy bedside table. At once funny and gross, it is an apt welcome to Geng’s world, where unlikely protagonists such as ducks, bananas and bodybuilders star in perplexing painted montages and shrewdly constructed assemblages. Many pieces are embellished with pithy text fragments or Chinese folk sayings, which complicates their interpretation; the result is a body of work that alternately amuses, intrigues and disturbs.

Installation view of Deep Pond Perfect Duck

“挂塔 & 完美鸭潭”展览现场图

The large-scale diptych Amazing Duck Deep Pond (2017) exemplifies Geng’s talent for turning negligible subjects into noteworthy ones. Here a gargantuan duck floats peacefully on a tiny pond amid bucolic surroundings complete with mountains and a sunset. With subtle differences in detail, the background landscape is mirrored, resulting in twin waterfalls that flank the fowl, while two painted characters – 惊奇 (amazing) – hover in the foreground on the right side. With its surreal subject, Rorschach-like setting and hyperbolic, incantatory text, the work seems to be attempting, not entirely unsuccessfully, to hypnotize its viewer.

In an equally bizarre tableau, Life Winners (2017), three characters play cards with an egg-headed figure whose boss status is literally inscribed on the back of his balding cranium. The players’ expressions range from relaxed to devious and a classic Chinese proverb translating as ‘life and death are determined by fate; rank and riches are decreed by heaven’ is inscribed within, setting the tone for the picture. The folk-wisdom pronouncement of preordination trumps any scheming taking place in the game. It is unclear whether the boss is the arbiter or benefactor of fate here, but it is surprising that such an ostensibly lighthearted scene broaches the weighty question of fate versus free will.

Installation view of Deep Pond Perfect Duck

“挂塔 & 完美鸭潭”展览现场图

Geng’s works are generally goofy, sentimental or a mix of both but, at times, this is cut through by a more macabre sensibility. In Fault (2012) an opulent interior is rendered in an inviting, warm palette. A framed picture hanging on the wall features a masked face. The incongruous portrait, along with the addition of the word ‘fault’ scrawled in English across the painted surface, imbue the work with a menacing air. In another work, Black Hole I (2017), the artist manages to morph even fruit into something weirdly haunted. Two trompe-l’?il holes interrupt a canvas otherwise occupied entirely by blazing yellow bananas. It seems the dark ripening spots of the fruit have started to threaten the physical support of the picture. Two actual holes have also appeared in the wall that abuts the piece, creating the unnerving impression that the voids possess agency to impact the real.

Visually, the strategies in these paintings are far from novel: the montage format, the play between the illusory and the physical, and the repressed mundane that resurfaces as uncanny are all tropes familiar from surrealism and beyond. Yet, Geng’s eccentricities and the inclusion of cues particular to her environment bring these methodologies into less familiar territory. Certain conventions of social realism – with its schematically modelled figures, textured surfaces and earthy tones punctuated with more strident hues – reverberate in these canvases and enhance their folksy character. In addition, the way the texts recast these pictures brings to mind not only the Chinese tradition of embellishing paintings with poetic inscriptions but also the government-sponsored banners that, still today, punctuate everyday life in China. It is Geng’s ability to conjure such anomalous yet apropos associations that – beyond the dizzying visual fray – makes the works in ‘Perfect Duck Deep Pond’ so engaging.

“挂塔 & 完美鸭潭” DEEP POND PERFECT DUCK @chi K11美术馆 chi K11 Art Museum, 2017.09.16 - 10.15

翻译/刘洁旖