展览现场 & 对谈 | 王川:黄金岛——王川的绘画

Silent drama in the sea of the unconscious

Xu Sheng

When humanity looks back, in some distant future, upon the year 2026 and the years immediately preceding it, they will scarcely appear as a particularly radiant period. The prophecy articulated by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation has, in many respects, been realised, though in a form even more absurd than he imagined, and curiously lacking in the dramatic intensity he anticipated. Capitalism is no longer even the destroyer of civilization, for destruction at least requires motive. What contemporary capitalism produces instead is a dull stagnation. It scarcely deserves to be called an “ism” at all. Within such a condition, art as a whole has become little more than an accessory to this bloated and inert illusion.

Against such a backdrop, we must at least cultivate a certain habit: if a story must be told, let it be a longer one, which does not attempt to seize attention within five seconds, fifteen seconds, thirty seconds, or even five minutes. What we require is the capacity to speak in one’s own voice, even if that voice seems to address no audience at all. Artists generally possess such a capacity. It is simply that many have chosen to relinquish it. Among those who have not, Wang Chuan belongs to the slower and more hesitant kind. He may well be attempting to learn how to tell a story suited to the rhythms of the networked age, only to abandon the effort out of impatience. Or perhaps he has already tried and failed. In contemporary society, “refusing to follow the crowd” has long since become a cheap gesture. And “wishing to follow the crowd, yet never quite managing to learn how” may instead be the truest evidence that the soul remains alive.

Wang Chuan’s artistic path begins with Farewell, Little Road, a work rendered in a realist idiom, yet curiously detached from reality itself. The figure in the painting stands before a path like the guide of some ancient myth; or perhaps the figure resembles inspiration itself, a mysterious summons without a clear source. In this sense, the seeds of the artist’s later abstract explorations were already planted there.

From 1985 onwards, Wang Chuan began his investigations into abstraction through a series of ink works on paper bearing numerical titles. At the time, such numbering was itself an aesthetic sign closely associated with abstract painting. His early work was most strongly influenced by Cy Twombly. Twombly’s cryptic orchestration of line and his sense of volumetric brushwork inspired Wang Chuan’s own exploration of layered ink. By 1992, works such as No.5–1992 and No.6–1992 already revealed his engagement with oil painting. Heavy masses replaced lines, forming two pyramid-like structures locked within an interior space, what might equally be described as inner temples, or totems.

One might, of course, speak of the influence of Cubism. Yet the cunning of Cubism lies precisely in the fact that its definition, continually revised by theorists eager to celebrate Pablo Picasso, has gradually expanded until it appears to stand as the source of all abstract painting. In reality, Cubism was little more than a natural extension of Futurism. Its true innovators included figures such as Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger, and Albert Gleizes. Regardless of their subjects, their paintings became manifestations of an inner rhythm. This lineage may be traced even further back to Hilma af Klint. Such rhythms emerged from the development of psychology during that era. They were attempts by artists to render the interior life of the mind.

Wang Chuan’s totems, however, possess no such rhythm. They are motionless. Composed of straight lines and blocks of colour, they seem suspended in a state of silence, monumental forms confined within the rectangle of the canvas. The mottled textures and muted tones of domestically produced pigments at the time lent these works a distinctive patina, as though dust from the real world had settled upon them. Such textures appeared widely in paintings of the period, yet in Wang Chuan’s works they are not concealed but accentuated, becoming a depiction of the relationship between the self and reality. Only Chinese artists can truly understand this stillness. It is the particular temperament of an era.

Wang Chuan’s long struggle with illness is already known to those familiar with his life. He survived, in a sense. Whenever he attempts to recount that experience or the insights it brought him, he discovers that he is not a natural storyteller. He once wrote a semi-autobiographical book titled The Oyster’s Illness Produces a Pearl（蚌病成珠）. Even today, if someone raises the subject, he prefers simply to send them the document and fall silent. His paintings, too, require reading, not a symbolic decoding, but a patient attention to their details.

Water runs through Wang Chuan’s name, and his life has long been intertwined with it. In the late summer of 2003, while working in a small fishing village on Nan’ao Island, he encountered Typhoon Dujuan. At the time he habitually painted with sheets of paper spread upon the ground, leaving completed works there as well. More than two hundred ink paintings were flooded and destroyed. He later remarked that the act of making them mattered more than their survival, because “to live wholeheartedly is itself a gift of talent,” and the loss of the works was simply “one texture of life.” Those paintings became new totems, imprisoned in memory, transformed into something that transcends the works themselves.

This event offers a key to understanding the three large mixed-media works he produced in the latter half of 2003. Still bearing numerical titles, they combine ink with mineral pigments. Straight lines, boundaries, and colour blocks disappear, as if dissolved by seawater. Fragments of writing emerge as conversations the artist conducts with himself. From that moment onward, his practice broke free from the strictures of form, and the barrier between himself and reality gradually dissolved. He no longer confined himself within a rectangle but unfolded outward. This does not mean that he became more extroverted; rather, he discovered a way of embracing the world while remaining largely unseen by it.

Between 2005 and 2015 he produced works in a variety of forms, never settling into a single recognisable schema. More concrete titles began to appear, Himalaya, Landscape, Jungle, City, or Autumn. Each work stands independently, a manifestation of the texture of life. Every artist possesses a creative trajectory; in contemporary society such trajectories are easily converted into brands, their genuine spiritual substance reduced to recognisable trademarks. Yet Wang Chuan’s trajectory contains a resistance to this narrative of marketisation. Perhaps this resistance is not even deliberate. He has simply persisted in becoming himself, wholeheartedly.

Abundance cannot yield to barrenness. Abundance may be overlooked, yet it sustains itself. As Walt Whitman writes: “The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves.” And thus Wang Chuan arrives at his own island in sea of unconscious.

Since 2015, colour in Wang Chuan’s paintings has grown increasingly vivid, while his brushwork has become looser and more relaxed. One work titled Portrait of the King of Shu recalls, at first glance, the graffiti-like language of Jean-Michel Basquiat, yet each stroke within it stands with greater independence. This provides a new thread through which to reconsider the artist’s work of the past decade. Many of these works can scarcely be called “abstract painting” in the conventional sense. They contain numerous figurative elements; even when only lines appear, those lines are “specific”. They are particular lines, irreducible to a general form. The boundary between abstraction and figuration has always been indistinct, and Wang Chuan does not seek to define it. All paintings arise from the most basic materials. Pigment and ink are not flat substances but tangible presences. They do not construct images so much as traces. They possess their own life and intention, wandering across the canvas and sketching, as a silent drama that is forever unfolding.

展览现场

Exhibition View