插图源自 Le Petit Livre d'Amour志韦
小小谎言 | A Small Lie
2023.11.23-2024.01.28
@Balice Hertling
84 rue de Gravilliers 75003 Paris
在Balice Hertling画廊举办的首次个人展览“小小谎言”（A Small Lie）中，志韦将展出一系列织物绘画和引人入胜的雕塑装置。尽管艺术家倾向于在大尺幅上创作，这些作品却能够唤起脆弱和童真的感受。柔和的色调、绘画中使用的织物以及雕塑中使用的材料，都有意借鉴了玩具和儿童保育中的美学法则。
成长于与纺织业紧密接触的志韦，其作品运用了一系列与绘画相辅相成的布料。每幅画都有大量的织物层，它们或遮蔽人物，或充当背景；如彩色薄纱层在作品的绘画层上叠加出引人注目的视觉幻象。对艺术家来说，具象画面的唤醒力固然重要，但由于织物的遮蔽或包裹，这种视觉唤醒力不断被材料叠加的距离所引申，在某种程度上转化为了一个视觉经验被模糊化的界面。《小小谎言》这件作品如是，它是志韦早期的一件作品另一版本，在这幅作品中，一个“天真无邪”的匹诺曹被装饰上了一个突出且令人遐思的鼻子，但匹诺曹在织物的包裹下难以察觉。但他却萦绕于作品中，呈现在好奇而细心的观众眼前，这个作品标题既反映了这部意大利小说的历史，也表达了对逝去童年的怀念，在童年中，说谎的罪恶感也是伴随着酷儿欲望的耻感之一。
志韦将日常物品置换到我们的感知领域中，为它们提供了一个可以被描述为拟人化的绘画空间，因为艺术家的画作多以两米的高度为创作尺度。此外，Ta还将作品中的形象虚构化了，用志韦自己的话来说便是“为它们提供了一个叙事弧光”，它们在艺术家的画布上突破了主客体关系的限制。展览中可以看到的牙刷和梳子是专为监狱环境设计的，艺术家从网上购得这对组合并创作了动人的画作《大勺子小勺子》(Big Spoon Small Spoon)。这些小巧的橡胶器具被设计成无法伤到使用者的形态，因此导致其几乎无法被正常使用，但它们却在艺术家的作品中被描绘的充满温情，这也与它们最初的设计场景相矛盾：禁止亲密身体接触的监狱。在志韦的作品中，失去功能的物品比比皆是，如同样会被展出的一个水晶串珠盒子，它的本意是用来包裹纸巾盒，赋予了这个用来擦拭人体体液的物品一丝优雅。串珠盒子在艺术家的制作下被放大到了近乎抽象的比例，它将在画廊的下层空间展出——一个巨大而可爱的身影正在反抗自身的无用。
凯瑟琳·邦德·斯托克顿（Kathryn Bond Stockton）在《20世纪的酷儿小孩，或成长中的异类》（The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century）一书中指出，童年本质上是一种酷儿经历，其特点便是是我们在伊始阶段接受异性恋教育的陌生感。志韦的作品、Ta对戏服的兴趣以及对自我的遮蔽/揭示，无不透着一种怀旧的情绪，即我们知道自己处于一种尚无法被命名的差异状态。
For their first solo exhibition at Balice Hertling, entitled A Small Lie, Zhi Wei introduces a series of textile paintings and imposing sculptural installations. Despite the scale on which the artist’s practice often unfolds, their pieces conjure up feelings of vulnerability and childlike innocence. The softness of the chromatic palette, the selection of fabrics to swathe their paintings in and the materials their sculptures are made of all borrow from the aesthetic codes of toys and child-care. Influenced by an upbringing in close contact with the textile industry, Zhi Wei mobilises in their works a range of fabrics that complete and accompany their painting practice. Each painting features numerous layers of fabric that either conceal the characters or act as a background, like the strata of tinted tulle that generate striking distortions within the pictorial surfaces of their pieces. Although sensitive to the evocative power of figuration, the artist constantly puts it at a distance through the playful veiling or wrapping of the paintings, relegating it to a space with fluctuating levels of opacity. This is the case of the painting A Small Lie, a variation of a previous work where an innocent (?) Pinocchio is pictured with a phallic, protruding nose and swaddled to the point of obscuring his entire face. Now barely perceptible, he haunts the composition only to appear to the eye of curious and attentive visitors, referencing with its title both the Italian novel’s storyline and the nostalgia for a bygone childhood where the guilt of lying is also enmeshed in the shame of queer desires. Zhi Wei transports everyday objects within our perspective field while offering them somewhat of an anthropomorphic pictorial framework, since the artist’s paintings are imperatively materialised on a two-meter scale. Furthermore, these items are fictionalised and, in Zhi Wei’s own words, are “offered a narrative arc” as they extend the boundaries of the subject/object relationship on painting. A toothbrush and a comb, both designed for a prison context and acquired on the internet, are paired up to produce the moving Big Spoon Small Spoon painting. These tiny rubber utensils, designed to prevent users from hurting each other and thus rendered practically unusable, are staged in a tender scene that contradicts their original destination: institutions where physical contact and intimacy are forbidden. Objects that become devoid of function populate their work, like that crystal-encrusted cover designed to wrap up a tissue box and infuse it with a dash of elegance – while its task remains to absorb human secretions. Blown up to virtually abstract dimensions, it dwells in the gallery’s lower ground floor, a giant and cute character defying its own obsolescence. In The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century, Kathryn Bond Stockton describes childhood as an essentially queer experience, marked by the strangeness of the heteronormative breeding we all have to comply with. Zhi Wei’s whole practice – their interest in costumes, in the veiling/unveiling of the self – is imbued with a pervasive sense of nostalgia for the awareness of a state of difference one cannot yet name.
志韦（Zhi Wei）1997年生于北京，目前工作生活与上海和巴黎。志韦2019年毕业于牛津大学的罗斯金艺术学院。最近群展：Palai Project (意大利莱切，2023年)、金鹰美术馆（中国南京，2022年）、西海美术馆（中国青岛，2022年）、魔金石画廊（中国北京，2022年）、蜂巢当代艺术中心（中国北京，2021年）和Balice Hertling画廊（法国巴黎，2022年）展出过。
Zhi Wei (b. 1997, Beijing) lives and works in Shanghai. They graduated in 2019 from the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford. Their work has been exhibited recently at the Palai Project (Lecce, Italy, 2023), G Museum (Nanjing, China, 2022), TAG Art Museum (Qingdao, China, 2022), Magician Space (Beijing, China, 2022), the Hive Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, China, 2021), and at Galerie Balice Hertling (Paris, France, 2022).
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