科纳艺术中心（KCCA）｜「纯化艺术语言研究展」展览预告

纯化艺术语言研究展

Purification-Artistic Language Research Exhibition

关于艺术家

About the Artist

孟禄丁｜Meng Luding

孟禄丁是中国当代绘画语言转型过程中具有标志性意义的艺术家之一，其创作路径自20世纪80年代中期“85新潮”语境中确立，并持续贯穿具象、表现性绘画向抽象语言系统的转化过程。在这一长期演进中，他始终围绕一个核心问题展开：绘画语言如何从对外部世界的再现逻辑中抽离，并逐步形成具有自足结构与内在秩序的视觉系统。

早在1988年前后，孟禄丁即提出“纯化语言”概念，该概念的提出并非意在建立一种封闭的形式体系，而是在特定历史语境中，对艺术过度承担社会与思想表达功能的一种回应：当艺术被赋予过重的外在使命时，其自身的感知结构与表达机制反而趋于失效。

这一意义上，“纯化”并不意味着去除意义，而是试图重新界定意义生成的路径——即将绘画从外部叙事驱动中抽离，使其回归到形态结构、材料逻辑、节奏关系与观看经验共同构成的艺术内部本体机制之中。

朱砂，石青，雄黄，2021

 Cinnabar, Azurite, Realgar, 2021

布面矿物质颜色

Mineral color on canvas

100 x 100cm

这一线索在其长期创作中呈现出清晰的演进轨迹：从《红墙》《足球》等早期具有强烈的个人生命体验的作品，到“元态”系列中对抽象语言的确立和综合材料的实验，再到“元速”中对机械控制与主体性的辩证探索，以及近年来“朱砂”系列中对材料、空间与仪式性结构的整合，孟禄丁的创作逐步从图像再现转向对视觉秩序本身、过程性结构的建构，逐渐演化为关于绘画自主性的长期实验。

因此，在本次展览的语境中，孟禄丁的实践并不被视为单一风格的延续，而是一场对语言研究的持续探讨：它既指向艺术内部结构的不断精炼、重新分配与校对，也指向个体经验如何在形式中获得可感知的存在。正是在这一不断推进的过程中，艺术语言不再只是表达的工具，而成为艺术得以成立的条件本身。

Meng Luding

朱砂，2023 

Cinnabar, 2023

布面矿物质颜色

Mineral color on canvas

80 x 120cm

Meng Luding is widely regarded as a pivotal figure in the transformation of artistic language in contemporary Chinese painting. His artistic trajectory was shaped in the context of the mid-1980s '85 New Wave movement and has since traced a sustained shift from figurative and expression modes toward the construction of an abstract, idea-driven artistic system. Throughout this long-term evolution, his practice has consistently revolved around a key question: how can painting detach itself from the logic of representing the external world and instead develop a self-sufficient visual system with its own internal structure and order?

As early as around 1988, Meng proposed the concept of the "purification of artistic language". This notion was not intended to establish a closed formal system; rather, it emerged as a response to a specific historical condition in which art was increasingly burdened with social and ideological functions. When art is overdetermined by external missions, its own perceptual structures and expressive mechanisms risk becoming compromised. In this sense, "purification" does not imply the elimination of meaning, but a redefinition of how meaning is generated—by desengaging painting from externally driven narratives and re-centring it on its internal mechanisms, constituted by formal structures, material logic, rhythmic relations, and the conditions of perception.

This line of inquiry unfolds clearly across Meng's oeuvre: from early works such as Red Wall and Football, which are deeply embedded in historical context; to the Yuan Tai series, where his abstract artistic language begins to take shape; to the Yuan Rate series, which explores the dialectic between mechanical control and subjectivity; and more recently, to the Cinnabar series, where materiality, spatial construction, and a quasiritualistic structure are brought into synthesis. Across these phases, Meng's practice gradually moves away from image-based representation toward the construction of visual order and processual structures, evolving into a sustained investigation into the autonomy of painting.

Within the context of this exhibition, Meng Luding's practice is therefore not understood as the continuation of a singular style, but as an ongoing inquiry into the nature of artistic language. It points both to the continual refinement, redistribution, and recalibration of painting's internal structures, and to the ways in which individual experience may attain perceptible form through formal articulation. It is precisely through this ongoing process that artistic language ceases to function merely as a vehicle of expression, and instead becomes the very condition through which art comes into being.

Xu He

马布拉松的困惑，2023

Malaason's confusion, 2023

布面丙烯

Acrylic on canvas

89 x 75cm

Xu He's painterly practice unfolds through an ongoing interrogation of the very conditions under which painting comes into being. This inquiry does not aim at the negation or dismantling of the image; rather, by continuously destabilising narrative coherence, he redirects painting toward its primary generative mechanisms—the subtle interplay between layers of colour, tactility, temporality, and perception. From his early academic training in oil painting at Minzu University to his later transnational experience in Germany, Xu gradually disengaged painting from questions of style, turning instead toward an immanent exploration of artistic language—one that neither relies on representational meaning nor serves as a vehicle for cultural signification.

This trajectory has become increasingly pronounced in his recent work. Xu situates individual experience within a pictorial field subject to constant internal deconstruction: forms hover between legibility and dissolution, meaning is deferred, and viewing no longer culminates in comprehension but approaches a state of perceptual hesitation and resonance. Crucially, Xu does not pursue "purification" through reduction. Pather, through decentralised, multilayered, and structurally complex compositions, he allows the image to loosen from within—narrative does not disappear but is transformed into an unstable, continuously unfolding visual energy.

Such an approach to the "purification" of artistic language departs significantly from the modernist project of rationalising medium specificity. Xu's artistic language retains a persistent tension between sensuous immediacy and contingency: thin washes and fluid chromatic strata generate an almost corporeal tactility on the canvas, as if the image were engaged in an ongoing process of self-adjustment, simultaneously revealing and withholding itself. In this sense, "purification" becomes less an act of elimination than a process of pushing artistic language toward a critical threshold, where form no longer functions as a vehicle of expression but emerges as experience itself.

Yan Bo

无题2022-05，2022

Untitled 2022-05，2022

木板上混合媒介

Mixed media on wood

115 x 91 x 14cm

Yan Bo's artistic trajectory does not unfold as a linear evolution within the medium of painting; rather, it develops through a continual "departure from the given premises of painting", gradually approaching a more fundamental question of artistic language: what remains of painting once it is no longer anchored to the conventions of the frame, image, and representational logic. Beginning in the 1990s with expressive figurative and lyrical imagery, Yan underwent several phases of self-revision, ultimately relinquishing an already mature visual vocabulary in favour of a more indeterminate mode of structural generation—an ongoing experiment in the dissipation and reconstitution of artistic language.

In recent years, Yan Bo has reconfigured the boundary between "painting and object", progressively disengaging his practice from the normative framework of easel painting. By incorporating mineral-based materials and labour-intensive processes of layering, accumulation, and abrasion, the pictorial surface is no longer confined to a visual plane but becomes a materially sedimented structure of time. Irregular edges and spatialized constructions further destabilise the conventional integrity of the pictorial field. Within this process, the image is deliberately pushed toward a non-referential condition: form emerges through the interplay of material, structure, and space, producing a kind of "defamiliarised logic" that occupies an open field between the self-referential system of abstraction and the objecthood of sculptural presence.

From the perspective of the "purification of artistic language", Yan Bo's approach is distinctly counterintuitive. Rather than reducing or isolating essential elements, he achieves a form of "purification" by intensifying material complexity and introducing a durational dimension into the process of making. The repeated acts of covering and abrasion are at once material operations and mechanisms for deferring visual resolution. His works often originate from indeterminate forms, gradually emerging through cycles of revision and displacement; yet this emergence remains inherently unstable, as meaning resists fixation and only surfaces momentarily in the process of becoming.

Yan Bo's practice can thus be understood as a sustained interrogation of the autonomy of artistic language. As form, material, and space are driven into a state of mutual constraint, painting ceases to function as a vehicle for images and instead operates as an experiential apparatus imbued with weight, temporality, and tactility. In this sense, the "purification of artistic language" is detached from a modernist discourse of medium specificity and rearticulated as an ongoing, generative process—one that preserves an irreducible tension at its core.

KennaXu画廊（深圳南山）

KennaXu Gallery (Nanshan District，Shenzhen)

KennaXu画廊（深圳福田）外观

KennaXu Gallery (Futian District，Shenzhen）

科纳艺术中心（龙岗）

关于KennaXu画廊 /About KennaXu Gallery

KennaXu画廊成立于2018年，立足于深圳粤港澳大湾区，在深圳福田区、南山区、龙岗海大科技园设立三个画廊空间，展览空间总面积1800多平米，定位为“国际视野、个案研究、实验未来”，学术性、实验性的艺术机构。致力于为艺术家、收藏家、艺术爱好者服务的国际性艺术交流平台。

KennaXu Gallery was established in 2018, based in Shenzhen Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao Bay Area. Three gallery spaces located in Futian District , Nanshan District and Longgang District (HAIDA Science Park) in Shenzhen, with a total exhibition space of more than1800 square meters, positioning itself as an academic and experimental art institution with "international vision, case study and experimental future". It is committed to serving artists, collectors and art lovers as an international art exchange platform.