站台中国20周年｜线上展览回顾：2019

Gong regarded the countryside as a place to test and criticize the changes and essence of secular life. Thanks to the conversion into dialectical unity of solemnness and desire, elegance and gaudiness from specific life that can be felt and seen, we can sense which direction an artist is marching toward in his pursuit of serious art: seeking a balance between general thinking and concrete forms. At that point, as expressed in his works, amid anticipation for simple beauty, which was mixed with holiness and desire, there seemed to have been a farewell to the once indescribable gaps and irreproducible feelings, a restriction resulting from the morality and dignity required under a realistic approach.

Recent years also saw the debut of other works like Yuange, Zijuan, Xiaoyang and Qiulai (Arrival of Autumn), where characters are observed from multiple facets, such as emotion, state, mind and the circumstances they are situated. Step by step, Gong crystallized the image of his drawing objects and focused on persons. However, instead of unclassifiable individuals possessing absolute personalities, persons in his paintings are dynamic images that are defined by a certain relationship and can be shaped and interpreted by viewers. Following the shift from countryside to context-free unknowns, Gong abandoned the pattern carrying cultural symbolism and turned to more distinctive practices. Wang Xingwei, who learned from and established a close relationship with Gong, once pointed out this kind of shift by saying “From city to countryside, from contemporary era to no era”. Liu Xiaochun stressed the “very solemn humor and very serious absurdity” manifested in his works, in a recognition that Long showed the dramatic reality and the dramaticism of realties.

The exhibition To Youth is not trying to play nostalgia up, but about the recognition and expression of the authentic life. In the era of data rationality, while utilitarianism and consumerism are prevailing, romantic feelings and will have been ignored bit by bit. At this point, reviewing the meaning of the innocence and ideal, to respond what is youth, what does youth mean, everyone will give different answers. It can be romance, passion, detachment, and mystery. However it also easily falls into decadence, insipidity, dejection, and mediocrity. Discussing the influence of the diversity and complexity of youth experience on the work of artists involves the investigation of thematic content, formal language, psychological implication, and some other dimensions. The works of 33 artists will be presented in the exhibition, with individualized expressions and rhetoric, revealing their views on youth.

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The above words come from Ma's self-statement, resulting from his affection for over four decades 'art experience. These words perfectly embody the artist's feelings and understanding for art, worth savoring over and over again, during which his pride and resolution reveal themselves between lines. The attraction of painting described by Ma is from the biunique correlation between artists and their arts.In the correlation, the art features a kind of absolute self-sufficiency with the mystery of agnosticism. Far beyond secularized cultural perception and missions, this kind of correlation described here represents the covert relevance between individuals and sacredness. Indeed, in this artist's view, the assemblage of these attractions gives art a kind of “transcendency”. The transcendency was such that the artist decided tore-enliven himself and take up a brand-new adventure. In the second half of his self-statement, this artist expresses his strong affection with a type of bolder rhetoric of antiphrasis, which makes the confession of his failure in realism more like a declaration of another kind of victory. Therefore, one could realize what he pursues devoutly is the opposite of realism and an end to his past experience.

袁运生，寞，油蜡、色彩、 蛋、墨、麻纸，240x240cm，1996 

Yuan Yunsheng, Lonely, Oil wax, gouache, egg, tempera and ink on hemp