Roger M. Buergel《刘毅：弥散层》｜香格纳西岸中环

刘毅的作品绝不会停留在僵化的定格，而是灵动地再现一些场景——时而可见乡间，赶驴人挥舞着鞭子，渐行渐远；时而远处高山巍峨，旅人们沿河而走，悠然穿梭。有时，是一位僧人踏上通往寺庙的蜿蜒小径；有时，则是一场分别——男子与随从渐渐走远，女子倚在门边目送他们离去。

你可以尽情的徜徉在水墨之间，感受这些由中国馈赠给世界的珍贵画作——笔锋流畅，墨色淋漓，氤氲出梦幻般的氛围。这些作品笔触精准，细腻传神，一笔一画都源自艺术家对现实的观察，仿佛梦境的一切跃然纸上。目光随着画中事物游移，思绪也被悄然拨动。画中的世界有无尽的景象可以探索，而这一幕幕场景，也映照着观者的内心世界。

→ Slide for English version

It was to be expected that the pictures would one day start to move. They were never intended to be rigid representations. Sometimes a donkey driver could be seen in the foreground, swinging his stick. Or a group of travellers moving through the picture, along the river, high mountains behind them. There was the monk on the winding path leading up to the temple or farewell scenes such as the one with the man walking away with his servant while the woman still leans against the door of the house and looks after him.

You could lose yourself in all these landscapes that China bequeathed to the world, painted with a fluid brush and ink. The atmosphere invited you to dream, the cloudiness of the ink, while the stroke, which owed itself to the most precise observation, presented the dreams as realities. And so the eye wandered; the play of thoughts was set in motion. There was much to discover in the painted world, which was also an inner world.

在这些山水景象中，我遇见了刘毅。她的作品承载了一千年、甚至一千五百年的历史。即便她生于当代，而她作为艺术家——从笔触的挥洒、墨水的流动、在观察与记忆中，以中国绘画的传统技法，诞生并发展出她独特的艺术语言。

这种独特的艺术语言通俗概括来说是动画（animation），和其他任何语言一样，它拥有众多表现形式，最早可以追溯到19世纪初的费纳奇镜（phenakistiscope）。关于动画的漫长历史，我们暂且不谈，但要注意的是，这个术语本身是有些误导性的——它暗示着图像在静止状态时是“没有生命力的”、“没有灵魂的”。然而，古代中国绘画告诉我们，事物从来都不是静止的——一种当下已然少有人使用的观赏画作的方式被嵌入其中。

→ Slide for English version

I discover Liu Yi in this painted landscape. Liu Yi is very old; she is 1000, perhaps even 1500 years old. But we are not talking about the person here, that much should be clear, but about the artist, who develops her language from the sweep of the brush and the flow of the ink, from observation and memory and from the repertoire of Chinese painting. 

The common term for this language is "animation", and like any language, it has a multitude of idioms, starting with phenakistiscope at the beginning of the 19th century. We'd better leave the long history of animation out of the equation, but note that the term is at the very least misleading. After all, it suggests that things were lifeless, even soulless, before they were animated. But as ancient Chinese painting teaches us, things were never lifeless. They were embedded in a practice of viewing images that is no longer (or only in rare moments) ours. 

刘毅的创作植根于当下，作品的主题源自现实。然而，我们不应该被表象所迷惑：当下的许多议题——比如难以调和的个人情感和欲望与来自周遭世界的寻求平衡的困境——并非新鲜事。即便如此，当代世界也有其独特之处。首先，当下并非是单一的时间维度——《无需经营的清晨与黄昏》（Morning and Dusk, and No More）捕捉了塞浦路斯的时间，截然不同的是《初次见面》（Nice to Meet You）所描述的一位中国厨师在日本工作经历中，混杂着另一维度的“梦境时间”；而在《天演论》（Origin of Species）中，时间又成为一个永远处于过渡状态、没有固定形态的时空。

→ Slide for English version

Liu Yi creates in the present. The artist's subjects originate from the present. But here, too, many of today's things - such as feelings of longing or the difficulty of harmonising one's own desires with societal demands - can be very old. However, the global present also has its own special features. First and foremost, the present is not a single time. The time that "Morning and Dusk, and No More" captures in Cyprus is different from the time that a Chinese chef spends in Japan ("Nice to Meet You"), or the dreamtime - the time that consists only of transitions, in which nothing is fixed, as in "Origins of Species". 

当代世界是一个由不可调和的对立面交织而成的碎片化时空，犹如一团烈焰，正如《火》（Burning）所展现的那样——在那里，人类的形态，乃至自我的存在，似乎随时可能熔化。然而，“熔化”并不一定意味着终结。每一次新生、每一次重塑，都预示着一次涅槃重生。这正是刘毅以动画作为媒介的关键：将看似无法调和的元素动态地结合为一体。

→ Slide for English version

The present is a scattering of often irreconcilable opposites, a sea of flickering flames, as "Burning" shows, in which the human form - the form of the self - threatens to dissolve. Whereby "dissolution" does not necessarily mean an end, as every new beginning, every rebirth presupposes a "death by flame". And this seems to me to be the key to Liu Yi's use of animation as an artistic medium: the dynamic combination of the seemingly incompatible. 

“看似无法调和”的特质也体现在刘毅其它创作中——她在艺术创作中寻求与人工智能的交流，更确切地说，是与人工智能绘画的互动。这种交互既被推崇，又存在隐患。我们可以预想到在这片迷雾中潜伏着怎样的挑战和机会，以及这片灰色地带对于未来的人类而言有多么重要。

在这片迷雾之中，艺术家游走于算法与人类智慧之间，徘徊在担忧与惊喜之间。具体地，刘毅向人工智能输入草图与场景，引导并训练算法，使其在一定程度上自主地创造动画视觉世界。在这个过程中，AI绘画难免会出现“故障”或“错误”——它无法识别（解码）某些现实信息。然而AI并不会因此停止运转，反而在“故障”之中生成了一种“诗意的产物”——一种超越意义本身的自发性信息。刘毅称这些意外的创造为“数字幽灵”（digital ghosts）。

同时，这些“数字幽灵”也成为艺术家创作新图像的起点素材——她将人工智能的“感知”融入中国画的媒介，融入笔墨、色彩与笔触的语言之中。《精心创作的未知错误》（Unknown Mistakes of Elaborate Creations）便再现了这一开放性的创作过程。在这组作品里，绘画、代码与剧本草图共同构建了新的整体。

→ Slide for English version

Part of the theme of the "seemingly incompatible" is that Liu Yi seeks artistic contact with the machine, or more precisely with computer technology and machine intelligence. This interface is a grey area that is both hyped and feared. We can guess what monsters or possibilities are hidden in this cloud of fog and also how crucial this grey area is for future humanity.

The artist moves between algorithm and human ingenuity, between fear and euphoria, in this cloud of fog. Specifically, Liu Yi feeds the intelligent machine with sketches and sceneries; she teaches or trains the algorithm to create the animated visual worlds in relative autonomy. During this process, "glitches" or errors occur in the machine, which does not recognise this or that reality, i.e. does not know how to decode it. Instead of falling silent, however, the machine creates a "poetic production" in place of its ignorance: a piece of spontaneous information that is beyond any meaning. The artist refers to these creations as "digital ghosts". 

The "digital ghosts" in turn serve Liu Yi as fodder for her own artistic process, which integrates the "perceptions" of the machine into the medium of Chinese painting, into the language of ink, pigments and brushstrokes. This open process is documented in "Unknown Mistakes of Elaborate Creations" - idiosyncratic pictorial forms that combine painting, code and film script sketches.

在某些方面，这种创作方法由来已久。艺术家一直尝试将材料本身自发的生命力——其天然的不可控性，融入创作过程。色彩会流动，某些变化只能被部分掌控。然而，正是这种相对失控的瞬间，给予了艺术家创作自由，它打开了一扇通往更具联想性的世界的大门，去到一个不受既定意义束缚的世界。

因此，我们可以说，这片灰色地带一直存在于人类文化之中，而人类的创造力也总是在混沌之中被激发。然而，真正新的部分是人类与人工智能之间的交界处，这是一种比现代性更有力量的存在。这类机器不仅仅是工具，它是一个社会行为体，它在学习，或者被训练去塑造社会。毫无疑问，这令人感到恐惧。而明智的选择只有加以利用，让它服务于人类。

或者说，我们的任务是将“代码的真实性”与“代码的美学”相协调。至少，刘毅正在尝试这一探索，《火》（Burning）便展现了这一点：那团闪烁的火焰，既是由人工智能生成的画面，也是刘毅绘画的作品——在其中，人的形态或消散，或重现。

→ Slide for English version

In some respects, such a method has a long tradition. Artists have always tried to integrate the spontaneous life of the material, i.e. its natural resistance, into their working process. Colour flows, and the processes can only be controlled to a limited extent. However, such moments of relative loss of control give the artist freedom. They pave the way to a world that is more associative in nature, as it does not recognise any established meanings. 

Let us therefore note that the grey area is an anthropological constant and that human creativity has always fished in the murky waters. What is new, however, is the interface between man and intelligent machine, which is an incomparably more powerful entity than anything that came before modernity. Because this machine is a social actor; it learns or is trained to shape society. Is that frightening? Undoubtedly. Nevertheless, there is no sensible alternative to putting machine intelligence at the service of humanity. 

In other words, we are faced with the task of harmonising the truth of the code with the beauty of the code. At least Liu Yi is undertaking this task, and "Burning" shows it: the flickering flames in which the human form is lost or found are painted as well as AIgenerated.

如果只是简单地认为人工智能是冰冷的，未免过于片面。《无需经营的清晨与黄昏》（Morning and Dusk, and No More）就提供了另一种视角。

刘毅曾作为驻地艺术家来到塞浦路斯的一个偏远小村庄——萨拉米乌（Salamiou）。村庄的代表弗里奥尼斯（Vrionis）负责接待她，并带她游览乡村风貌：村庄的生活、起伏的丘陵、田野、牲畜……这些探访也促成了许多交流，比如与一位牧羊人的交谈。而当时正在拍摄这些场景的刘毅并不能理解他们的语言，直到她回到杭州的工作室，将这些对话翻译出来后她才明白早先村民们交谈的内容。

如同许多乡村地区一样，萨拉米乌（Salamiou）周边的年轻一代几乎都搬去了城市，村民大多是老年人，也因此这里的生活节奏缓慢而祥和。刘毅的拍摄，某种程度上是一种田园生活的记录，尽管它发生在当代，但本质上与我之前提到的古代中国山水画并无二致。《无需经营的清晨与黄昏》（Morning and Dusk, and No More）的命名本身也颇具意味，其中的“No More”既可以理解为“一切已然消逝”，也可以解读为“再无其他，也无须再有”。

→ Slide for English version

It would be wrong to simply assume that machine intelligence is cold and inhuman. "Morning and Dusk, and No More" gives us another idea. Liu Yi was a guest artist in Salamiou, a small, remote village in Cyprus. Vrionis, the village secretary, was responsible for the residency. He took on the task of showing Liu Yi the surroundings: the world of the village, the hilly landscape with its fields and animals. These explorations led to conversations, such as with a shepherd, which the artist, who was filming all this, was unable to follow. The meaning of the words only became clear to her later in the studio in Hangzhou, when the conversations were translated.

As in many rural regions, the younger generation around Salamiou had more or less fled and moved to the city. Old people dominated the scene and set the leisurely pace. It was a kind of documentation of pastoral life that Liu Yi was engaged in, contemporary to be sure, but essentially not much different from the ancient Chinese landscapes I mentioned at the beginning. "Morning and Dusk, and No More", as the title says, where "No More" can mean both that there was nothing more or that no more was needed.

这片塞浦路斯的风景既陌生又熟悉，它让刘毅透过镜头对当代中国进行了反思——自给自足的乡村生活与高度现代化社会的复杂福祉之间的对比。伴随着这样的思考，刘毅来到Vrionis家中。在那里，她遇见了Vrionis的母亲，和他有心智障碍的姐姐。

屋内的场景同屋外一样，围绕着简单的日常琐事展开：切面包、喂姐姐吃饭——她的行为和动作都受困于疾病，但她是这个家庭不可或缺的一部分。

然而，萨拉米乌恬淡的生活景象，只有在刘毅完成后期、并经过动画的滤镜处理后，才能够真正向观者展露。现实的影像在这一过程中被转化为一种独特的“符号语言”。

→ Slide for English version

The unfamiliar yet familiar landscape of Cyprus invited the artist with her film camera to reflect on contemporary China, on the contrast between a rural, almost needless way of life and the ambivalent blessings of hypermodern civilisation. And then Liu Yi crossed a threshold. She met Vrionis' family, his mother and sister with Down's syndrome.

The scenes in the house, like the pictures outside, revolve around simple, everyday things: cutting bread, feeding the sister, whose behaviour or movements are determined by Down's syndrome, but who is an integral part of the whole. 

However, the spectacle of life in Salamoiu is only revealed to the viewer after Liu Yi has edited her footage and passed it through the filter of animation. This turns the filmed reality into a sign language.

动画处理的过程中究竟发生了什么？这无法用语言完整描述。这种转变极其微妙，某些画面轮廓变得更加清晰，某些形态则愈渐模糊。AI绘画对现实的感知与捕捉，无论是运动、人、物，还是风景，都与单纯的艺术主体不同。

画家的手试图捕捉事物的“本质”（比如疾驰的骏马或摇曳的竹林），然而复刻“本质”本身就是一种诠释，刘毅的作品亦是如此。而人工智能，对事物的“本质”有着不同的理解——如果我们可以称其为“理解”的话。

正如前面所说，算法所描绘或“赋予”动画的世界，并非一个刻板、机械的世界。一方面，它对于人类的视觉习惯而言非常陌生，另一方面，它也同样具有启发性。人工智能在感知方面设置了不同的、陌生的特征，于人类而言，这些特征能够增强现实感。

在刘毅的作品中，尽管人工智能以不同的方式诠释世界，而绘画的笔触——作为人类视觉、灵魂，以及艺术智性的象征——成为了既非人类亦非人工智能的第三种元素。

仿佛艺术是一条通向未来的轨迹。

→ Slide for English version

What exactly happens during the animation process is somewhat beyond description. The transformation is extremely subtle. Some graphic contours become sharper; forms run out. The intelligent machine registers the real - movements, people, things, landscape - differently than mere artistic subjectivity can. It is true that the painter's hand aims at the essence of things (be it a galloping horse or a bamboo grove). But this "essence" remains a question of interpretation, and this also applies to Liu Yi. In any case, the machine, or more precisely AI, has a different idea of the essential, if one can speak of an "idea" at all.

The world as painted or "animated" by the algorithm is, as already indicated, not a dull, mechanical world. It may be alien to the human eye in some respects but is equally enlightening. The AI sets different, unfamiliar accents in perception, but for us humans, these can enhance the impression of reality. 

While the machine thus interprets the world differently, the graphic stroke, which we associate with the eye, soul and artistic intelligence, becomes a third element that is neither human nor machine. 

As if art were the trail of something future.

上下滑动查看更多