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Information Stacking and the Expanding Magnetic (Noise) Field

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Writen by Lu Mingjun

Translated by Jeff Crosby

When Zheng Wenxin sent me the materials on her recent works, I was hoping she would compile them into pdf format for easy reading, but the email attachment turned out to be two compressed file folders. When I decompressed them, I discovered two sets of images, with numbers for names, arranged in order. This may have made my reading a bit less convenient, but it did get me thinking about whether the use of numbers to title artworks was itself an extension of her painting language.

I have no intention of tracing back the first instances of this artwork titling method. It had already emerged and had become a component of painting language by the time of Abstract Expressionism. Jackson Pollock often used the time of creation in his titles, such as Number 1, 1948, Number 1, 1949, and Number 31, 1950.^{^[1]}The professionalization of art is no doubt one of the key factors behind this. This turned the artwork into a product, and the time of creation, or number, came to serve as the product's production date. Leo Steinberg noted long ago that a major shift in the art world since the mid-20th century, is that, “Avant-garde art, lately Americanized, is for the first time associated with big money... Art is not, after all, what we thought it was; in the broadest sense it is hard cash.”^{^[2]} In this way, art was no longer an identity; it had become a modern profession. It is not so much a form of creation, as it is a form of work, “The active man's formalism—a value independent of content.”^{^[3]}

The titles of Zheng Wenxin’s creations, however, are not the time of creation, but the time and location from which the source images were first shared on Moments, the friends feed for the Chinese social media app WeChat. For instance, 122192017102hs denotes “October 29, 2017, 12:21, Shanghai.” The artist reminds us that the reverse order of the letters and numbers actually encapsulates a logic of viewing: most of the time, we view paintings from the most superficial layer inwards, while creation works from inside out. Of course, Zheng Wenxin is not alone in the use of numbers and letters to name her artworks. It has long been a widespread creation/production method and concept even in China. One thing which is for certain is that Zheng Wenxin is most definitely not a painting fundamentalist. Though she has not discarded the canvas, she prefers to place her practice within the contemporary media ecology. In this sense, her titles are not just indicative signs or experiments in artwork as product or art as profession. As information and capital, the titles are also components of the structure of painting language. Furthermore, numbers, digits, data or so called “digitalism” have come to form the primary methods and logic of the human world, even evolving into a new form of religion.

Since the title of an artwork can directly indicate the motif of the picture, we treat it as an entryway or key to entering the painting, but at that moment we see the array of data after opening up the file folder, it implies the graphic linguistic mechanism of the picture. For the artist, she is doing nothing more than the translation, ordering and rearrangement of the (graphic) information in her social media feed. Zheng Wenxin has persisted in this practice for several years now. By the time of her last solo exhibition, Pieces of Moments (2017, Shanghai), she had already begun to experiment with “Turning myself into a transfer station, collecting the sounds, words, images and information in various mediums sent by my friends on social media, extracting it in a rational and orderly fashion, and transforming it into impressions on the canvas.”^{^[4]}All of the information here comes from mobile screens, but what she extracts is not limited to images. It could be a color field, a line, or a perception rooted in a passage of text, so by the time it finally returns to the picture, it has already been through her individual digestion and fabrication. She often uses screenshots, but is not entirely dependent on or limited to them. After cropping and arrangement, this information is eventually buried beneath the brushstrokes and paints, mediums of painting that still carry essentialist tones. What we see, therefore, tends more toward geometric constructs of color fields, but the stacking of planes is not the focus. Instead, she seems to be releasing more dimensions in space. This touches on such various and complex relationships as combination, pulling, contradiction and clashing, though the boundaries remain clear due to hard edges, pure color fields and varying brush textures.

Though the motivations differ, there are certain confluences with Pablo Picasso's formal explorations. While Picasso was experimenting with a visual disintegration, striving to see more facets and dimensions within the two-dimensional plane, Zheng Wenxin's painting does not take up such a historical mission. Her aim is to transform social media and its information state into an “abstract painting” by way of her own perceptions and aesthetic language. She is concerned not only with magnitudes and dimensions, but could also be said to be engaging in experimentation on the topology of surface and direction. The video and sound installation Virtual Engine (2017) records the turbulent flows of social interaction in virtual space,^{^[5]}making for perhaps the best footnote to this series of paintings. Conversely, we could also treat the painting as a screen of the screen, a transposed screen. Since the pictures tend toward abstraction and uncertainty, they present a barrier and challenge to our recognition and understanding. Thanks to the presence of these footnotes and indicators, we are able to penetrate their inner logic and concepts. In essence, what is “flowing” here is not paint but digits and noise.

Two years later, Zheng Wenxin presents a new exhibition, L'étranger. She did not produce a video installation like Virtual Engine for this exhibition, perhaps because she felt that the pictures themselves were enough to convey her perceptions and concepts, without the need for supplementary direction from such “footnotes.” In fact, through the pictures, we can see that though it is still impossible to establish a direct connection to the original image material, the legibility of the new works has increased. These are no longer pure color field constructs; the picture is now driven by multiple “figurative” images in motion. Yet, as before, they remain negative, non-narrative and anti-flat. In discussing Picasso, Steinberg once wrote, “Though his innovations could be misunderstood and were often mistaken for literal flatness, in Picasso’s own work they served to appropriate for his art what he knew to be solid and real.”^{^[6]}This statement does not seem out of place when applied to Zheng Wenxin. If Picasso was trying to be like Argus, the hundred-eyed giant, and see things from a hundred angles, then Zheng Wenxin is seeking a means of “assembling” the graphic information she finds on her social media feed into a single picture without losing all of the information therein. There was a sequential order to the dissemination of this information, but Zheng Wenxin has forced them into a synchronous structure. In the words of Cubist painter Jean Metzinger, this is a “clever mixing of the successive and the simultaneous.”^{^[7]}

The reason I believe Zheng Wenxin's pictures have not completely lost their sequential and temporal nature is that in her recent works, there often appear stacked images of figures. Before the artist mentioned it, I also had thought of the sequential photography of étienne-Jules Marey, as well as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), which it inspired. As mentioned previously, however, Zheng Wenxin is not engaging in “strict” Cubism. Her pictures do not follow a rational order or absolutely closed structure. The stacking of the images sometimes occurs between one color field and another, sometimes between one line (or outline) and another, or sometimes between a color field and a line (outline). Of course, it more often takes place in the confluence and stacking of parts of multiple color fields and multiple lines, and her stacking is generally expressive, even appearing to possess a bit of “randomness.” Moreover, what she is depicting is not the process of a single person’s movement, or their “traces” in time and space. Instead, they are constructs of different movements by multiple people, so these stacked images are not stacks of a single person's images, but “assemblages” of multiple people forming each other’s shadow. The difficulty here is that she needs to produce a relationship between these various people, but how is such a relationship established? Is this relationship itself dependent on a certain particular image, text or concept?

Zheng Wenxin, 657161117102zh, 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 180x180 cm

Zheng Wenxin, 45651120207102ys, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 100x150 cm

Zheng Wenxin’s tableau is not polyphonic or homogenized. There is always some kind of focal point as the center of weight, an aspect which removes the possibility of outward expansion on all sides. In terms of individual paintings, most of them are isolated, independent, and stable. The faint sense of depth tells us that the picture appears to be built atop a classical structure, and most of the vanishing points are located in the center, as seen in 122192017102hs (2018), 657161117102zh (2018) and 45651120207102ys (2019). This is actually rooted in the compositions of the original images, though the artist certainly has her own considerations in choosing to preserve it. On this foundation, the interventions of the stacked images, dislocation, and various color fields and lines seeming to have no source, appears to be an attempt to break free of this structure. This places the picture in a constant state of tension and contention. For the artist, this awareness of the sense of perspective is perhaps a result of habit, but I wonder if this focus is not referencing the collective online frenzies sparked by certain incidents, or the frequent outbreaks of online violence. This naturally also encompasses the controversy and conflict it may set off. Sometimes it is as a whole, and sometimes just in part, but on social media, everything is broken down to fragments and noise, just as we are unable to piece together a complete image from any of Zheng Wenxin’s pictures. Taking this a step further, this is actually the case with everyone’s image on social media. Byung-Chul Han noted with penetrating insight that as we spend more and more of our time immersed in the virtual world, we are becoming more conflicted, anxious and depressed.^{^[8]}This, however, is not a departure from the truth; in fact it is the truth. The figures in the paintings appear as only a rear view, a silhouette, or a face twisted and distorted like a mask. We cannot identify the sources of these figures, and the artist herself has perhaps forgotten the specific images or people from which they are sourced, maybe intentionally, and the fact is that we are often unable to clearly recognize the self and others in social media.

Information spreads like a virus, and no one can escape. No one can remove themselves from this world of contention where everyone has a differing viewpoint. At this time, we are not just carriers of the virus, we are the virus. It is just like the paintings shrouded in gray. The once clear boundaries have been quite diminished, and she now rarely uses pure colors to weave the painting together. As an extension of social media, her painting practice is like an expansion of a magnetic noise field. Picasso admitted that he was a realist,^{^[9]}and in this sense, Zheng Wenxin certainly has enough reason to call herself a realist as well. And it is along these lines that we can find a deeper understanding of that perspective structure concealed within the picture as the artist’s gaze, which is not so much a record of an outside observer as it is a suspension and “judgment.” Perhaps, deep in the artist’s mind, we would find the same tension and contention. She is far from alone in attempting to flee social media, but there is no real escape. Many have tried to save or repair the disintegrated attention and cohesion, but there is no way to totally resist the powerful temptation around us. This is perhaps the universal psychic condition of everyone today.

As art historian T. J. Clark said, “The way painting continues, it turns out, is by counterfeiting necessity (on the surface) but having one’s metaphors of matter reinstate (on the surface) pure contingency at every point.”^{^[10]} In fact, Zheng Wenxin has never discarded the sense of flatness and perspective. Knives, markers and sponges are all common tools in her repertoire, the markers mainly for laying down outlines, the knives and sponges for flattening the paint and brushstrokes. The chapped scrapes of the sponge in particular reveal the texture of the canvas while also bestowing the painting with transparency. For example, in 326102017102hs (2019), everything from the color fields to the outlines retains a sense of flatness. The stacking and interlocking of the details also retain transparency and clarity, yet this also makes their relationships complex, ambiguous and ambivalent, to the point that we are unable to determine with certainty how many figures are actually in the picture. This is not only rooted in the need for visual richness. They are stacked up layer by layer like slices of people, while the plane and perspective are the essence of the information age and the media world. Sometimes, she will use color to enhance the negative image of the human figures (such as the irregular burnt orange shape between the figure or mask on the upper right and the figure in the foreground), or will place a “sourceless” color field onto the picture (such as the blue color field with a diagonal white bar in the foreground), which is done to balance the overall compositional structure dominated by blue and yellow, and also, in a sense, breaks the picture’s structure of depth. In addition, these actions make the picture more uncertain and dynamic. For another example, the layers and forms of loops, arcs and round planes of differing levels of transparency in 122192017102hs (2018) are allusions to the figure portraits in the picture. The ambiguities and conflicts between them point directly to the instability and uncertainty of the visual structure. This inner contradiction is, of course, the visualization of the conundrum of this era: when highly transparent information is gathered together without any possibility of restraint, transparency becomes an illusion. On the contrary, this stable yet illusory property implies that her painting is at once allegory and reality itself.

Zheng Wenxin, 326102017102hs, 2019, Acrylic on canvas, 200x150 cm

III

Perhaps this is precisely the reason why Zheng Wenxin has not given up on painting. Compared to such other mediums as video and installation, painting certainly feels more everyday and substantive as a practice, action or labor. But she is evidently not satisfied with this. This alone is not enough to convey her thoughts and ideas, and so she tries to bestow the picture with a certain cinematic feel. If the video installation Virtual Engine from her previous exhibition served as an allusion or footnote, then in this current exhibition, L'étranger, she hasn't so much given up on video as she has transferred it into the picture. This is especially apparent in the round painting installation Vernal Equinox—Summer Begins (2019) at the center of the exhibition space.

Zheng Wenxin, Vernal Equinox -Summer Begins (Detail), 2019, Acrylic on linen , 42.7x985 cm

This is a “long scroll” painting stretching ten meters, consisting of roughly twenty different scenes arranged in order. Though they have been organically stitched together in something resembling the flow of information, we can still see that each scene maintains relative independence, and we can still see the center or vanishing point of each scene. Just as alluded by the title “Vernal Equinox—Summer Begins,” life seems to accelerate as the days and years go by, but there is actually no change. Byung-Chul Han says that the so called acceleration is to a great extent just an illusion, one rooted in the trajectory of modernity. The problem today is that this trajectory has disintegrated. We now live in a granular, fragmented, atomized time.^{^[11]}Just like this circular arrangement with no clear beginning or end, we should view it as a film playing in a loop, except that this film is converted and compiled from information and images (or files) from social media. Here, what links these granular points in time or sound together are the lingering echoes. Often, before one event has completely faded, another event has already arrived. In this extended synchronous magnetic field, foreground, middle ground and distance blend together, conflict, undulate and separate. The stacking of forms in particular drives the flows of information like a montage in a rhythmic, harmonious cycle.

Information as digits and bytes can be added together, but they cannot be recounted.^{^[12]}This also demonstrates that Vernal Equinox—Summer Begins does not have a complete narrative, just a noisy confluence and even arrangement of information. For the viewer, the act of viewing is no different from refreshing their WeChat Moments feed. Each compressed scene is like a message from Moments. You can take a glance, or you can click on it for a closer look. It all depends on your curiosity. Though each passage or scene conceals a structure of depth, the artist is not concerned with how to maintain the viewer's gaze or produce the potential for a fixed gaze, only with presenting a reality, the reality that refreshing the feed has taken over too much of the time and space of our everyday lives. In this sense, its function is no different from the video practices of Lin Ke and Miao Ying, as all are trying to form what David Joselit calls “feedback” in the media environment.^{^[13]}The difference is just that unlike the latter, Zheng Wenxin's painting does not invade it as a virus. It would be more apt to say that she uses painting to produce a distancing effect or mirror image.

Zheng Wenxin’s studio, 2019. Image provided by the artist.

Upon closer examination, it is not difficult to discover that Zheng Wenxin's creations are not in sync with the image sources, with the two occurring sometimes as much as two years apart. For instance, according to the title, the new 2019 work 326102017102hs was sourced from a message posted by a friend in Shanghai on October 20, 2017 at 16:23, but the artist did not create the painting until two years later. This has already produced temporal distance, but when she paints information from different points in time together, treating them as a single whole, it forms into a synchronous structure. Thus, like the artworks, the exhibition itself is a stacking of information. Just as implied by this photograph of the studio, all of the works, whether hung on the wall or stacked on the ground, represent different points in time, and differ even in the time of creation, but at this moment, they are like a screen, or like a social media feed at a certain point in time. The studio is a social media feed, and the exhibition space is a social media feed. In fact, the artist has never placed herself outside of the events (Moments), or seen herself as an outsider. From the beginning, she has always been an insider, or, more precisely, an outsider on the inside. And she has always been seeking the right distance between inside and out. This distance is her studio’s center of gravity.

Like most painters, Zheng Wenxin experienced the transition from painting as an interest into painting as her life’s profession or ambition. The difference is that when the flood of social media came to invade or interfere with normal work, she did not grow anxious or averse, but instead pondered how to establish a relationship between the two. She could not, of course, give up painting because of this. Instead, this happened to provide a new field of vision for her painting practice, and even for her recognition of painting itself. Years of practice has demonstrated that she is not drawing from social media in her painting but viewing social media as part of her work and profession. For this reason, social media, like painting, is not just attached to her body or her life, but is an object of analysis and depiction. In that case, the distance between her and her work is the same as the distance between her and social media.

This method is not of Zheng Wenxin's invention. Back in the mid-20th century, the practices of Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Dubuffet “no longer simulate vertical fields, but opaque flatbed horizontals... the flatbed picture plane makes its symbolic allusion to hard surfaces such as tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed impressed—whether coherently or in confusion.” According to Steinberg, it marks a radical shift in artistic themes, the shift from the “natural” paradigm of image as framed landscape to a “cultural” paradigm of image as information network.^{^[14]}Half a century later, we (the artist included) are facing a new change and problem: the sharp opposition between digital information media, and everyday life and work. Zheng Wenxin differs from Rauschenberg in that for Zheng, information media is no longer source material for painting. She is concerned with how to use this practice to reference the media environment, and painting as her work and profession. Capital is the fundamental driving force of social media, and for painting as a sociopolitical force, what matters is not the catalyzation of inspiration or the pleasing of the senses, but how to “boldly set out from the world of art, then return to the world of art,” not to take to the streets in resistance, but how to truly enter into the operational systems and circulatory mechanisms of society. In this sense, Zheng Wenxin’s practice has not only revealed the properties of information and social media on the surface, but through intervention in the latter, it has turned back to reference the capital properties and social function of contemporary painting.

[1]Pollockdid not entirely depend on this naming method. Sometimes he would change a title for different ends and motivations. For instance, the earliest title for Lavender Mistwas Number1, 1950, while Autumn Rhythm: Number 30, 1950 was originally titled Number 30, 1950, and so on. See T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, chapter 6, “The Unhappy Consciousness,”s Xu Jian et. al., trans., Nanjing: Jiangsu Phoenix Fine Arts Publishing, 2019.

[2]Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, Shen Yubing, Liu Fan and Gu Guangshu, trans., Nanjing: Jiangsu Fine Arts Publishing House, 2011, p. 21.

[3]ibid., p. 80.

[4]Zheng Wenxin Solo Exhibition: Pieces of Moments, https://bit.ly/2WhLn00

[5]ibid.

[6]Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, p. 220.

[7]Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, p. 183.

See Bying-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, Guan Yuhong, trans., Beijing: CITIC Press Group, 2019.

[9]Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations withTwentieth-Century Art, p. 183.

[10]T. J. Clark, Farewell to anIdea: Episodes From a History of Modernism, p. 323.

[11]Byung-Chul Han,The Scent of Time, Bao Xiangfei and Xu Jitai, trans., Chongqing: Chongqing University Press, 2018, pp. 56–57.

[12]Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics,p. 80.

[13]David Joselit, Feedback: Television Against Democracy, Guo Juan, trans., Changsha: Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2017, p. 108.

[14]Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, p. 109.

About Lu Mingjun

Lu Mingjun Ph.D. in History, Associate Professor of Art Historyat Arts College, Sichuan University, Curator, Director of Surplus Space. His recentcuratorial projects include: Frontier: Re-assessmentof Post-Globalisational Politics (OCAT Institute, Beijing, 2017-2018),Assembling(chi K11 Art Space, Shenyang, 2018), XU ZHEN?: Alien (ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, 2018), amongmany others. His essays have been published in Literature & Art Studies(Wenyi Yanjiu), Art Research (Meishu Yanjiu), Twenty-First Century(Hong Kong). His book projects are Visual Cognition and Art History: MichelFoucault, Hubert Damisch, Jonathan Crary (2014), LogosandMorale; Conception andSocial Changes in the Painting Theory of Huang Binhong 1907-1954 (2018) and Post-sense Sensibility, Supermarket, Long March Project: Three ContemporaryArt Exhibitions/Projects in 1999 and After (2019). Lu was also the granteeof Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Grant 2015. He receivedthe 2016 Yishu Awards for Writing on Contemporary Chinese Art. In 2017, he was grantedThe Asian Cultural Council Fellowship. In the same year, Lu won the 6th CCAA ChineseContemporary Art Critic Award.

About Artist

Zheng Wenxin graduated from Art college of Xiamen University with a BA in Oil Painting in1997, Kent Institute of Art & Design with a MFA in 2001, participated in Artist Residency Project at Kent Institute of Art & Design in 2001 to 2003. Zheng Wenxin currently lives and works in Hangzhou. Her solo exhibitions include: L’étranger (A⁺Contemporary, Shanghai, 2019) (Upcoming), INTERLACE (Anahita Contemporary, Berlin, 2018), Pieces of Moments (A⁺Contemporary, Shanghai, 2017), Here Sun and Moon Float Day and Night: Zheng Wenxin’s Solo Exhibition (Hunsand Space, Beijing, 2015), Silence: Zheng Wenxin Solo Exhibition (Inna Art Space, Hangzhou, 2013). Her selected group exhibitions include: SoftPower—A Group Exhibition of Four Female Artists (Leo Gallery, Shanghai, 2017), Sow (ShanghART Gallery M50, Shanghai, 2017), Each to His Own: Li Wendong | Wei Xingye Collection Exhibition (OCATXi’an, Xi’an, 2016), Dissensus Agitation-The Painting to Language (TodayArt Museum, Beijing, 2016), I Am Your Labyrinth (1933 Contemporary, 2015), Begin from Chaos (Inna Art Space, Hangzhou, 2014). Her project includes: Creativity Initiated!-Kunting Art Experimental Project (Wu Zuoren International Foundation of Fine Arts, Beijing, 2015).