| A Slanting Smile |
| Tang Yao |
Henk Visch was born in 1950 in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. He is six years older than Sui Jianguo. Henk Visch's art is based on association that runs through all the senses; it is in principle a form of translation that creates a living area between sameness and difference. It is a horizontal way of thinking. It results in a free, thoughtful and surprising look at the world. It has no trace of China-style adversarialism, frame of reference or pressure; no comparing of East and West, no conflict between historical and original creativity. His freedom is rich, his art completely open to the world. But it is not always easy to be free. Freedom to this extent, especially to this unharnassed man, implies alienation and anguish, loneliness, isolation and doubt; a good way of overcoming hesitation is to make the world a poem, like the Jewish father did in the film Life is Beautiful. Henk Visch’s world is a poem, whatever he sees when he pokes his head inquisitively out of his room is art。 Although considered as a whole Henk Visch’s creative work is of no specific style it moves, like a snail’s horns, in two directions; one stretches out to the material world, and the fight with gravity, the other to the virtual world of images and sensations. The emphasis of Henk Visch’s early works (in the 1980s), comparatively speaking, was on the former. His works of clear-cut, distinct material on a relatively large scale took characteristically abstract, extremely convincing forms, which he often named Untitled. When Henk Visch was invited to represent the Netherlands at the 1988 Venice Biennale, his works gradually took the latter, more cultural direction. Encasing in cloth is one of Henk Visch’s favourite modes; it may have something to do with the cold winters, as well as Calvinistic conservatism, of Northern Europe. At times it brings to mind Beuys' carpet. From Henk Visch's point of view, they are states of mind, like warm streams in deep oceans. Figures continued as a subject matter after the mid-1990s; they were, to be more precise, person-shaped organisms, now large, now small, now tall, now short. Henk Visch’s figures say hello from across the Pacific Ocean; their wish is to glide unobtrusively beneath the sun through the coastal skies, over city roofs and streets now and again to public places to say hello to everyone: eager to be recognized. They sometimes spring up, like mushrooms, at a famous European museum, before an everyday doorway or on a common pathway. No-one discerns their existence or quest. A slender, gangling shaped mould that mingles witch-like stealth and purity of spirit with a believer's asceticism, a little frigid, a little solitary, is what constitutes Henk Visch's extraordinarily moving contemporary north European poetry. Whether standard or imposing, all are bereft of invasiveness, euphoric fighting spirit, belief in victory, courage and strength. Works on display at this exhibition, consisting in eight pieces composed of nine figures, constitute The man who saved his own life, now among Henk Visch's few “epic” works. On the one hand, they are merely imbued with poetically spiritual confusion and doubt, yet their form, structure, posture, attitude and subject are imbued with the level of extreme self-indulgence that constitutes ungainly yet penetrating “expression”; this is genuine, innate artistic talent. Henk Visch's works seem to have a magic charm that banishes barriers. They usher directly into our souls the author's most intimate sorrows and perplexity, awakening the age-old complexes in our collective unconscious. That primal memory of childhood that fades with age and Shangri-La hence generates the impulse to converse with him, not in a commentary on an academic seminar workshop, but confidentially, in whispers, beneath a starlit sky. Another main characteristic of Henk Visch's works are their extraordinarily poetic titles, for example, Out of the depths into the light; also Do you want to know the whole story? and Within silence is a more profound silence. Henk Visch's sculpture and installations apart, he is also an accomplished drawer and poet/writer. Read at my level of English, his writing is Gothic, disturbing, ambiguous, surreptitious and extremely metaphorical, perhaps approaching the manner of Chinese author Sun Ganlu. Below is a passage from selected extracts of his essay written in 2007 Everything is preceded by something that deludes me. |
| I was alone in the city, thinking of someone who was also alone in the city. A strange index finger played with my left outer ear. I thought of the first thing I saw this morning when, after three nightmares and two breakfasts, I broke a shoe lace and fell over backwards on the wooden floor of the home-built hut where the sound of silent people moving around without being seen could constantly be heard. The unexpected has everything to be perfect and in this case it was a young woman washing her black hair in the Schelde colouring it in dark shades, whose navel I recently got to know and she was now looking at me bewildered and angry. I fled, ran away, but didn't get anywhere. She put a knife in my heart. I died in her arms and everyone was humming softly as red blood dripped on the floor. When a river jumps over a mountain, the fish will sing. When sorrow leads to melancholy, there will be 3 more years of war and the children will silently wash their hands in mud. When at sunset the city skyline seems like a ruin with a horse head and the towers with their dimly lit windows are swaying from left to right, that is the time to stand still and refrain from laughing, because when an aeroplane crashes, everything will be over. Everyone knows an old woman doesn't have long to live. |
Henk Visch is an ordinary artist. He dresses in a simple, unassuming style. He enjoys interchange and is eager to formulate his thoughts as images. He is the archetypal late contemporary artist aligned with democracy and the public domain. Henk Visch's theories of art are neither too lofty to grasp nor too deep to fathom. They are not arduously original paths trodden by geniuses and heroes, instead his starting point is the creation of images that evoke other images or words or sensations. His work is per se deductive, connecting ad infinitum what can be connected. He doesn’t advocate representing any ism or school, he is just working his way through. Perhaps it is this non-symbolism that has actually made him a main representative of contemporary Dutch art within the late contemporary language structure. Henk Visch and his friend Richard Deacon organized the celebrated Between the two of us joint exhibition, and simultaneously published a recorded dialogue. Henk Visch tells Richard Deacon: I can see two polar bears swimming, white fur moving elegantly through the water. I am really surprised, because fish have no fur; I have never liked white furred animals in water. Henk Visch work is a continuing dialogue, and the dialogue distance between him and Chinese artist Sui Jianguo is possibly greater, more intriguing, and offers greater food for thought. Both are leading exponents of first grade sculpture and contemporary art in their own countries; both to a certain degree continue and maintain the realist tradition of clay sculpture, painting and writing. They at the same time comprehensively conduct and practice creative material work. The difference between them, however, is essential; Henk Visch's art is deductive, synesthetical, associative, temperamental, emotional, innocent, gentle, friendly, confidential, intuitive, curious, unsophisticated, diffident and responsive. Sui Jianguo's art is cerebral, rational, precise, critical, analytical, conceptual, methodical, philosophical, cool and acutely cutting edge. It needs to be placed within a large coordinated system against a vast state historical and international backdrop. Sui Jianguo's art is insightfully wise. Henk Visch's art is imaginative thinking Wisdom is a mixture of temperament and wit. It embodies the strength of rationality and knowledge, which comprises scepticism, analysis, reasoning, criticism. In Sui Jianguo's own words, encounter Buddha, kill Buddha; run into ancestors, kill ancestors. This constant sequence of introspective, self- questioning negativity is what Adorno called the negative dialectic. I sometimes think that a negative dialectic actually does constitute the fundamental structural strength of Sui Jianguo's wisdom and that it is at the foundation of his art. Sui Jianguo's creation in the 1990s of Earthly Force, Memory Space and others represent profound achievements in Chinese modern sculpture. The Five Person Sculpture Exhibition 1994 which he planned and participated in was one of the most significant exhibitions of greatest academic value in the history of Chinese modern sculpture. During this period his negative strength was directed against the predominantly Franco/Russian teaching system of sculpture in academies of fine art. But by the mid-1990s his change of creative direction: Mao Suit and Clothes Vein Study series sought, against the contemporary conceptual background, to update, rebuild and realize a sculpture value system. This is instance of self negation moreover makes him a bright, clear symbol of the transition in Chinese contemporary sculpture from the modern to late modern period. In recent years he created the space video installation Speeding Up, the public art project Pujiang New Town17.5 Diversion, the life-long performance The Shape of Time and other works that have pushed him farther towards creativity and awareness of life's time and space, experience and expression. Sui Jianguo held his new Revealing Traces exhibition in May this year at Joyart gallery in Beijing’s 798 art district. In this exhibition he made his clay moulding performance the object of observation, making use of the enlarged sequentialization process of sculpting clay into clay sculpture, combining the gallery space as a yardstick through which to achieve an enlargement of clay moulding performance itself. During this process, traces of individual performance are treated as objects or source materials of art and literature, which are transformed while being sequentialized into dual prominent symbols of the life of seclusion of the individual artist himself. The Moon River Art Museum's inaugural exhibition presented his most recent work The Chord: seven metal sticks actually the same length that in the visual sense present the appearance of being of various lengths, because inverted mirror images of the corresponding ends are buried in earth. This metaphor enlarges our understanding that the entire scope of phenomena, humankind, life, the material universe and that of a microscopic grain are actually the same, and that the only difference is their concealment in a different sequence of historical structure. This is Sui Jianguo's The Equality of Things. In summary of the above description, Sui Jianguo's creativity began at the beginning of the1990s, and he is today still at the forefront of the most outstanding exponents of the study of Chinese contemporary sculpture. Much fundamental background contemplation is needed to understand Sui Jianguo's works: the history of nation states, social political history, the history of international art along with the diffusing memory of the individual artist's historically interwoven life. His primary way forward is to search out a possible methodology with which to deal with the relationship between East and West, contemporaneity and tradition, form and concept, individuality and communality, negativity and constructiveness, through a series of dialogues. What we perceive out of all this is a man's mature, grave wisdom. Sui Jianguo took up Henk Visch's invitation before this exhibition to visit his workshop in the Netherlands, a vivid, colourful country. Regardless of whether sea roving, colonizing, growing tulips or playing soccer, everything is done with a kind of wholesomeness; the style of government and defence is purely that of a soccer match: no ruler without an opposition. Cruijff is the prince of soccer; his strategies to win the game are known by parliamentarians. That the orange soccer team by no means lacks genius may be deduced from astoundingly romantic and sorrowful legends of previous world cup and European cup matches. But Sui Jianguo has another channel of interpretation. Henk Visch presented Sui Jianguo in autumn 2007 on an earlier visit to his Beijing workshop a hand-painted Dutch dish. It is a commonplace souvenir handicraft whose depiction of Netherlands scenery no-one would give a second glance, yet it was this mundane item of which Henk Visch made a gift: the dish shows the plightful social foundation of Dutch society. At the same time it was given to memorize their first meeting at the seashore of Belgium, where they were both strangers and where life is stopped by the dynamics of the ocean. That sparked intimation in Sui Jianguo's keen vision of his enormous amplitude of spirit. Sui Jianguo has been to several European countries, but had never set foot on Dutch soil when he first knew Henk Visch and received from him this small hand-painted dish. His impression of Henk Visch and his works along with Henk Visch's description of his own life merged in Sui Jianguo's vision with this small depiction of Netherlands scenery. At around the same time, friends sent him a DVD of the hugely successful American series Prison Break. In one episode, while the prisoner portrayed as being mentally challenged is on the run after making his escape, he finds a Dutch painting of Netherlands scenery. The place depicted in the painting is to him the most beautiful on earth; a Shangri-La where there is no crime, no prison. From that time onwards the escape of the Van Gogh-like convict becomes a desperately haphazard quest to find the Netherlands. Eventually, during a police pursuit and capture, he jumps to his death from the top of a water tower, clutching his hidden picture of this mythical haven of peace and happiness. The sight of this small Dutch dish consequently set Sui Jianguo off on a spiritual quest similar to that of the escaped prisoner. He chose to make clay sculptures of 10 objects from the scenery decorating the dish, including figures, animals, houses and ships, in the traditional classical method, incorporating glistening sand and colour applications that made the work approach to the greatest possible extent the image on the dish. Art, along with the clay sculpting process, achieves entry into his image of “Dutch Shangri-La”, simultaneously making the exhibition a vehicle through which respectfully to present Shangri-La to the people. The works on exhibit here have achieved cultural sociological expression. Henk Visch has now delivered a new target; a Dutch plate hand-painted with Netherlands scenery. It is, however, sufficient. Following this lead, Sui Jianguo takes us to the vast “Netherlands to Beijing” concept of space. His method is to suspend 10 figures at the same slanting angle – the angle (that is to say, the inclusive angle between the central line of gravity and the perpendicular and the normal space behind the slanted hanging figures) coordinating the earth core's 0 degrees with the extreme coordinate around the same included angle as that of the Netherlands and Beijing. Presented in another way: that is to say, in this way these 10 figures in the Netherlands are seen, in a perpendicular state, as transposed to Beijing. The landscape suspended in mid-air strengthens the impression of a shift, thus revealing and expressing space that is beyond the everyday consciousness. Through this space activation, the work becomes an abnormally vast and magnanimous impression of metaphorically rich cultural vision and imagery. Yet the author maintains a half secluded state; his method of transmitting his space consciousness being merely to borrow a transpositional or mirror image. Hence emerged a very dramatic prelude: the souvenir dish is not only an introductory gift that consolidated their meeting at the seashore, but even so it corresponds with the disc in the hand of the so well known ‘Greek discus thrower’ before it is thrown into space. This chain of generating events is continued in Sui Jianguo's mirroring of the sculpture that in the end becomes a Dutch Shangri-La, capturing his slanted smile at the space consciousness of his fellow dialogist on the other side. |