姚嘉善 評 张怡 / BANK ARCHIVES

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浅谈张怡艺术作品中的“曲折蜿蜒”

姚嘉善

当代艺术所面对的抽象与未知已是普遍认同的陈腔滥调。模糊、不定、挑衅、质疑已成为现今的主调，似乎作品越随性、越具开放性，就越能被当代艺术世界所接纳。这种趋势并不意味着作品内涵的消失，而是有意地将作品的意义掩盖或蓄留，藉作品未呈现的内容来认识作品。当代艺术的转变可能源于全球化演变的暗流，即那些渗透在我们日常生活中的不确定、不安、意外与可能性影响了艺术的创作和实践；亦或源于试图以含蓄隽永的方式去表达那些难以言喻，无法言说的内容。我们比以往任何时候都更能体会到自己的日常生活被分裂、脱节、错位的片段所重构，正如艺术作品呈现给我们的现实与虚构、真实与假设的细微界限。

张怡

香格里拉

单频录像、装置，40 分钟，2005

阐明张怡的艺术，就像正面剖析一个模糊界限，身份、性别、情感与历史语言倾向的过程，有时像是在未知水域里的潜水，尽管手里可能有一份地图但路途仍旧非常迂回，沿路不时遭遇窘境、诱惑与歧途。无论是测试自己身体的极限，或以大胆表演来测试观众的极限，还是关于神话创造、身份构建、缔造虚实文化臆想的影像，张怡的作品都有含义隐晦的设定，却又看似偶然。如她2005年的影像《香格里拉》，是艺术家对香格里拉的实地考察之旅（中国云南中甸县），这个城市因英国小说家詹姆斯·希尔顿（James Hilton）的长篇小说《消失的地平线》而闻名。影像毫不费力地在现实与虚构间穿梭，将戏剧的场景与纪录片的内容混合剪辑，描绘了艺术家真实且具有象征意义的游历以及当地市民重新建造一座在当地具有象征性的雪花山模型的过程。

张怡

哈密瓜

SD 录像，4 分钟，1998

如果张怡对意义的追求往往是在于对复杂内心的揭露，那其话语和阐述的机制正是对此的重要体现——艺术家对文化特性和个人历史的表达总是有所抑制或转移。在她早期的行为艺术作品《密友》（Alter Ergo，1997）中，张怡无声地一动不动站了几个小时，她嘴里塞满了糖果，口水留下来滴到定制衬衫上；在《哈蜜瓜》（Melons [at a loss) )中，她身穿放有哈密瓜的胸罩，用勺子剜开其中一个，挖出果肉的同时茫然地诉说一个她童年的故事。这个作品将一个表面无意义的破坏性行为与另一个对语言更为不合时宜的运用做了荒诞结合。或以《剃毛》（ take Shaved [at a loss]，1998), 《喷泉》（Fountain，1999）, 《鳗鱼》（Eels，2001）, 《在爱里》（In Love，2001），甚至“扭体”系列作品（Contortion，2000-2002）为例——所有的表演都是无语的，艺术家的身体代替语言成为表达的媒介。在她最近的影像中，张怡不再把自己做为主体，而是对语言问题充满兴趣。

张怡

鳗鱼

SD 录像，17 分钟，2001

在《西部概念里呈现的中国风味》（Chinoiserie Out of The Old West，2006）中，张怡通过一系列短片反映再现了翻译，误译和跨文化中传译的演变。而在最近的短片作品《未成年》（Minor，2010）中，除了无法言说，艺术家也揭示了可能存在无法被听到的语言境况。

张怡

未成年

单频录像，30 分钟，2010

2009年在中国最西部新疆地区拍摄的《未成年》是张怡第四次在中国拍摄的影像作品。影片将不同场景编织在一起——著名的塔里木盆底，在沙漠的风中轻舞的降落伞弦，与一个年轻维吾尔族姑娘的低声对话，和在有着古老语种的空旷街道中开过的机动车，《未成年》是对领土和复杂文化的冥想，中心和外围，公开的暴力和暗藏的逝去，空虚和具象。这是奇异的、未曾记录下的足迹。影片最后留给观众的是萦绕在心头无言的痛，当艺术家无声地在飞机玻璃窗上拓写：“动荡”、“屠杀”和“创伤”，飞机尖啸着翱翔过无垠的沙漠边界，开往未知的地平线。

实习生曹晓珏对本文翻译亦有贡献

Meandering Meaning in the Art of Patty Chang

Pauline Yao

That contemporary art often deals in matters of abstraction and unknowability has become a common, if predictable platitude. Ambiguity, indeterminacy, provocation, questioning and doubt-filled gestures have become the order of the day, and it would seem that more makeshift and open-ended work of art tends to be, the warmer the embrace by the contemporary art world. This is not to say that meaning is absent, rather it is increasingly obscured or politely deferred, to the point where a given work is marked not by what it says but by what it doesn't say. This shift in contemporary art making might be attributed to undercurrents in our globalizing world, namely the growing uncertainties, insecurities and contingencies that penetrate our daily lives and as a result, infect artistic and creative practices; or to the implicit and perpetual attempt to express that which is inexpressible. More than ever before, we find our lives oddly united by profound experiences of dissociation, disruption or disjuncture, just as we are simultaneously reminded through art of the tenuous borders that lie between truth and fiction, veracity and invention.

Patty Chang

Shangri-La

single channel video installation, 40 minutes, 2005

Unraveling the art of Patty Chang is to dive head-on into an unfolding process that skirts these nebulous boundaries and veers towards identity, gender, emotion, history and language. At times it is like taking journey into uncharted waters: a map may exist but it is highly circuitous, and encounters along the way are at times off-putting, alluring or downright misleading. Be it daring performances that test her own physical limits or the limits of the audience; or short film/video works that center upon processes of mythmaking, constructed identities and the production of real and fictive cultural imaginaries, Chang’s work is designed to register meaning obliquely, and it might seem, accidentally. An example of the latter would be her 2005 film Shangri-La, an intuitive exploration of a real city (Zhongdian in China’s Yunnan Province) that named itself after the imaginary locale Shangri-La, made famous by British writer James Hilton’s 1933 book Lost Horizon. The film moves effortlessly between fact and fiction, mixing staged scenes with documentary footage as it reflexively depicts the real and symbolic peregrinations of Chang herself alongside the townspeople’s own repeated construction and reconstruction of their emblematic icon Snow Mountain. 

Patty Chang

Shangri-La

single channel video installation, 40 minutes, 2005

With the conflicting trajectories of pain, absence and loss. Provocative and visually arresting, In Love more than hints at the unspoken, unconditional yet often bitter love that exists between parent and child, while making use of slight video trickery to further manipulate and redirect clear meaning. Depicting the artist in two separate shots with each of her parents, the dual-screen video In Love simultaneously shows Chang face to face with her mother and, in the adjacent frame, face to face with her father. Slowly, on both screens at the same time, the artist presses her face against each of her parents as if engaging in a full mouth kiss. The audience soon learns (the video runs in reverse time) that the act performed is not a kiss but something just as disturbingly intimate—biting and passing a raw onion back and forth between their mouths. Their chewing is slow and methodical, and parent and child share entranced gazes, yet at the same time each fights back tears from the onion’s pungent taste. Love, desire, pain and grief mix in this moving work, which in its reversal suggests qualities of redemption.  

Patty Chang

Minor

single channel video installation, 30 minutes, 2010

Shot in 2009 in China’s westernmost region of Xinjiang, Minor marks Chang’s fourth time filming ad working in China. Weaving together disparate scenes—covertly filmed footage of a famed Tarim mummy, parachute strings dancing in the desert wind, whispered dialogue with a young Uighur girl, and motorized vehicles puttering along an empty road trailing ancestral linguistic markers—Minor is a meditation on the troubled relationships between territory and culture, center and periphery, open violence and hidden loss, emptiness and concreteness. Viewers are left, in the film’s final sequence, with haunting references to unspoken pain as the artist literally and silently inscribes the words “turbulence”, “slaughter” and “trauma” on the glass surface of an airplane window as it soars above the boundless desert landscape, journeying towards an unknown horizon. 

即将 UPCOMING 

张怡：再架构

PATTY CHANG  Re-configurations

开幕酒会 OPENING：2016.5.13, 5-7PM

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