PREFACE
Today,The Sky is Cloudless
Article: Wang Jiang
For a long time in the history of art, painters explored the principles of visual imaging, used lenses to observe details, and used the camera obscura to accurately reproduce the appearance ofobjects. Until the birth of photography, photos fulfilled people's desire to record and preserve objective images, and constituted a threat to traditional realistic painting. As a result, modern art turned to the exploration of forms of Art, and was obsessed with art for art's sake. At the same time, it also exposed its drawbacks of being gradually divorced from reality and real life. Painting moved toward extremely personal abstraction, toward simplification and repetition. It is precisely because of this, some painters insist on focusing on specific daily objects, depicting all aspects of real life, and photography has become the basis for their experiments. Ye Qing is exploring this practical path of contemporary painting. He imitates the ‘snapshot’ visual effect created by the lens to show a neutral and objective attitude. This approach distances itself from traditional realism that embodies the humanistic spirit, and from modernism, which emphasizes the form-will.
From classical to modern times, painting is a creative action carried out by painters based on a certain understanding of‘truth’. When discussing paintings that imitate the real world, we cannot avoid thinking about their authenticity. The affirmation or denial of this can be found in two different positions in classical philosophy. Plato put forward the ‘theory of rationale’ in <The Republic>, arguing that there is an essence prior to and higher than the real world, which denies the authenticity of the real world, thus denying the authenticity of realistic art. In his view, if art imitates the ever-changing world of experience, it cannot reach the world of ideas and obtain reality. Aristotle believed in <Poetics> that ‘the first entity’ only belonged to concretely existing things, affirmed the authenticity of the real world, and then affirmed the authenticity of realistic art. Ye Qing's paintings involve the above two attitudes towards the real world. His pictures vividly reproduce the details of things, and occasionally show flaws on purpose. For example, two identical pine trees appear at the same time, and the picture has the effect of copying digital graphics, which undoubtedly reminds the audience that the scene reproduced may have a certain degree of fiction.
In recent years, ‘city’ is the subject that Ye Qing continuously to paint. It is not difficult for us to recognize his artistic concept from the images he chooses. In his creation, the city is no longer a geographic location with clear boundaries and a specific culture, but an endless, continuous, and vague space. In urban spaces, people cannot tell what is real and what is fiction. It is a production machine of signs and symbols, creating not only the conditions of material life but also the life of signs and symbols. Monuments, hotels, factories, hospitals, toll stations, zoos, mountains, rivers, lakes and seas in cities are all carriers of signs and symbols. The city is not only the presentation of the material world, but also the presentation of the symbolic and symbolic world. It is a commercial heartland that exists for consumption and exchange. All kinds of material and non-material elements in the city exist to satisfy people's desires and needs. The city itself is also a commodity, and it creates its own value through various elements such as brand, image, culture and history. Ye Qing's seemingly neutral images actually allude to the full occupation of real life by consumerism.
The works in the exhibition present a variety of cultural and natural landscapes. These snapshot-style images will inevitably bring a certain ‘sense of wandering’ to the audience, responding to people's daily needs for travel. As Baudelaire said: ‘I feel that I often feel better in other places. Traveling is one of the issues that I constantly discuss with my soul.’ Why do people travel, and what can they gain from it? Perhaps, ‘TODAY,THE SKY IS CLOUDLESS’ can inspire us to go out of the door immediately and find our own answers in it.