新氧艺O2art | 黄一山个展「TOY STORY」策展文章及展览现场

“TOY-STORY”展览现场

黄一山：Toy Story

文 / 陈立

黄一山的最新个展“Toy Story”是极具趣味性的。这一系列作品都以玩具、玩偶化的形象为载体，将耳熟能详的童话、寓言，以及艺术家虚构的或荒诞或典型的生活场景作为题材。同时，明艳、光亮的色泽，画面中浮雕式凸起的人物形象和现成材料，使得画面令人异常愉悦，也通俗地近乎甜腻。这种在题材和视觉上的趣味性，是黄一山在近年所开启和着重的工作方向。但趣味何以入画，且不流俗于取悦？这是黄一山在观念、叙事和绘画语言之间所进行的持续探索：他将约定俗成的趣味前置，通过在绘画的空间和物质性上的推进，重构了一个在美丽表象下令人惊诧的黑色现实。

在黄一山的长期绘画实践中，画面大多以社会性的场景为题材。他之前的作品也多是在现实主义批评的基础上去重新构建出荒诞的叙事结构。以玩偶和童趣作为画面主体和视觉表征，仅较少地出现在Mini Q系列中。在此次的“Toy Story”展览中，我们可以更为集中地发现艺术家基于这一特定框架在绘画叙事和空间层面的推进。黄一山选择了将现实批判意义隐藏在玩偶的趣味和视觉的享乐下：羊脱下了狼皮，但在羊皮之下是人的伪装；白雪公主为后母端上水果，而后母也因为踩到香蕉皮而摔倒；屋顶上出现了两个圣诞老人，一个红色、一个绿色，在谎言被揭穿之前他们就已经尴尬地相遇；两位报幕员正在晚会的红色幕布前报幕，而背后已有人伸出双手准备拉开幕布；美容室里做护理的虚假姐妹；一群成功人士在酒会上举着比头还要大的酒杯；园丁将欧式花园的草丛修剪成了许多个同样的熊仔形象，你不能确定他是正在得意还是在惶恐……黄一山以通俗和愉悦为表象来作为画面的基础，相较于他之前的创作，这在叙事层面无疑是更近一步地挑战。它依赖的不再是具体、特定的对于现实性意义的再现，而是诉诸于一种普遍的共识和视觉经验。画面中同时包含了多重叙事，这些玩偶的主体和情节除了在世俗社会具有既定的所指之外，美好、黑暗、虚构和现实被共同编制在一个多层级、彼此关联又冲突的叙事结构中。更重要的是，他首先就挪用了通俗和大众视觉经验，将之作为通道，其目的是去挑战观者的认知和经验，以建立在现实与超现实、虚构与再现之间的感知张力。

黄一山明确地在这一系列绘画的叙事中去凸显普世性。他以通俗、趣味和日常来去对抗精英主义式的社会批判，试图去将他一直所关注的现实主义转化在更为朴素的世俗生活中。他依然坚持以具体的形象去传递抽象的感受，同时通过绘画物质性来去处理现实与想象之间的关系。自2007年以来，黄一山以类似于浮雕和漆画的方法，通过材料的层层堆叠、磨平将画面中的人物、物件、空间呈现出不同程度的立体感。在他的绘画中，立体与平面之间的差异回应的是关于绘画物质性与平面性的议题，他的绘画创作关注的是现实与抽象、物理空间和心理空间之间的界限。相较于黄一山的过往作品，“Toy Story”的系列作品其局部的浮雕和立体程度更为明显，同时他在画面中也更为直接地使用了现有材料：《受惊吓的人》（2023）中突起冲向前方的“眼球”就是可转动的部件；人的头部以圆形的球体被镶嵌在画面里（《画圆》，2023；《成就》，2023；《抱抱抱》，2023）；镜面被直接地安置在画面的镜面意象中（《Mirror》，2023；《白雪公主-2》，2023；）；以及，《Sleep》（2023）全部使用了木材来呈现老夫妻在房间睡觉的画面，以此回应传统的木制玩具和岁月痕迹。物理空间在画面中不仅是线条、边界和构图，还有那些看似平面的色块，因叠加、磨平和厚度不同所产生的空间透视差异。与此同时，画面中的物质性和空间关系所服务的依然是叙事，它调动着观者的感知和心理空间。

在展览“Toy Story”中，黄一山以玩具的外壳、消费主义的视觉取向去构建多重叙事，抑或是在绘画物质性和空间性的持续探索，实质上它们依然包裹着一个现实主义的内核。黄一山以更为日常和普世的方式来呈现一种视觉经验在生产和消费之间的吊诡。就像迪士尼乐园是一个理想奇境，真善美的核心价值总能够轻易地触及每一个人，但总有离开乐园回到现实世界的时刻。这就像展览中的两幅作品，残酷地将这层美丽外壳剥下：《成就》里画家面对着画布/镜子画着自画像，他的形象在镜中层层显影、重叠。这是艺术家对于自我身份和创作欲望的竭力追问；还有那面位于《Mirror》中间的镜子，更是直接地照向了看向它的每一位观众。

“晚上好”作品展览现场

“晚上好”作品局部

Huang Yishan: Toy Story

By Leo Li Chen

Huang Yishan's latest solo exhibition, "Toy Story," is quite tasteful. Using iconic toys and dolls as carriers, this series of works revolves around the subject matter of familiar fairy tales, fables, and fictionalized scenes of absurd or typical life by the artist. At the same time, the bright, glossy colors, the relief-like raised figures, and the readily available materials in the images make them exceptionally pleasurable and colloquiallyunctuous. Such subject matter and vision are what Huang Yishan set to focus on in recent years. How would one integrate taste into a painted image without falling into the trap of sheer visual pleasure? This quest drives Huang Yishan to continue exploring concepts, narrative, and the language of painting. He fronts a conventional taste, and by advancing in the space and materiality of his paintings, he reconstructs a surprising and macabre reality beneath the works’ beautiful appearance.

The subject matter in Huang Yishan’s ongoing painting practice has mainly revolved around social scenes. His previous works reconstructed absurd narrative structures based on critiquing realism and using dolls and child-like playfulness as the main subject, and visual representation of his paintings only appeared incidentally in works such as theMini Q series. In this "Toy Story" exhibition, we discover the artist's further explorations in the narrative and spatial aspects of painting with this specific framework. Huang Yishan chooses to conceal the critical significance of reality under the tasteful and visual pleasure of dolls; in other words, although the sheep takes off the wolf's skin, it’s a man in disguise. Snow White serves fruits to her evil stepmother, who then trips on a banana peel and falls; two Santas appear on the rooftop, one in red and the other in green, whose awkward encounter preceded their lies exposed. Two announcers are still speaking in front of the red curtain at an evening party while the curtain behind them is drawn; frenemies are getting treatments done in a beauty parlor; a group of successful people at a cocktail party holding up glasses bigger than their heads; a gardener trimming the bushes of a European-style garden into the same teddy bear shape, which is hard to tell of being complacent or terrified, etc. Huang Yishan set the colloquial and pleasurable as the basis of his images, which is undoubtedly a challenge to generate narrative compared to his previous works. His works no longer rely on a specific, concrete representation of reality but appeal to a universal consensus and visual experience. His pictures contain multiple narratives simultaneously: the subjects, in this case, the dolls, and the plots about them. Other than their established references in a conventional social context, their aesthetics, dark, fictional, and real implications are meshed together in a multi-layered, interrelated, and conflicting narrative structure. More importantly, the artist first adopts the popular and general visual experience to challenge the viewer's knowledge and experience to establish a perceptual tension between the real and the surreal, the fictional and the representational.

Huang Yishan explicitly emphasizes universality in the narrative of this painting series. He confronts elitist social criticism with the commonplace, the fun, and the everyday and tries to translate the realism he has always been concerned with into humble and secular life. He insists on using concrete images to convey abstract feelings while dealing with the relationship between reality and imagination through the materiality of his medium. Since 2007, Huang Yishan has been applying similar techniques for relief sculpture and lacquer painting to his work, in which the figures, objects, and spaces are rendered three-dimensional in varying degrees through stacking and smoothing. In his tableaus, the difference between three-dimensionality and flatness responds to the lasting issue of surface in painting, and his artworks are concerned with the boundaries between reality and abstraction, physical space, and psychological space. Compared to Huang Yishan's previous works, theToy Story series delivers a more pronounced detailed and relief dimensionality, while he also uses existing materials more directly in the images; for example, the bulging "eyeballs" in Frightened Man (2023) are rotatable parts; the man’s head is set in the picture from part of a sphere (Drawing Roundness, 2023; Accomplishment, 2023; Hugging, 2023); mirrors are placed where it appears in the image (Mirror, 2023; Snow White-2, 2023;); and, in Sleep ( 2023) uses wooden pieces to render an old couple sleeping in their room, resonating with traditional wooden toys and traces of time. Physical space in these pictures is embodied in the lines, boundaries, and composition and the differences in spatial perspective produced by the superimposition, smoothing, and varying thicknesses of the seemingly flat color blocks. At the same time, the materiality and spatial relationship in the pictures still serve the narrative, stimulating the viewer's perception and psychology.

In "Toy Story," Huang Yishan constructs multiple narratives with the shell of toys and the visual inclinations of consumerism, who continues to explore the materiality and spatiality of the paintings, which are still wrapped in a kernel of realism. Huang Yishan adopts an everyday and universal approach to present abizarre visual experience from production and consumption. Just as Disneyland is an idyllic wonderland, everyone would sympathize with its core values of truth, kindness, and beauty, yet there is always a moment when one has to leave the park and return to the real world. Like the two works in the exhibition, with their beautiful shells peeled off, in Accomplishment, the artist faces the canvas/mirror and paints a self-portrait, with his image appearing and overlapping in the mirror. This picture visualizes the artist's desperate quest to discover the self and desire to create and the reflexive surface at the center of the Mirror, which shines directly at every viewer who looks into it.

展览现场 Exhibition Site

成就

板上综合材料，油彩

60x53cm

园丁

板上综合材料，油彩

200x170cm

TOY-抱抱抱

板上综合材料

50x40cm

Victory

板上综合材料

110x90cm

屋顶

板上综合材料

140x120cm

白雪公主-1

板上综合材料,油彩

90x72cm

白雪公主-2

板上综合材料,镜子，木材

90x72cm

Mini-双黄

板上综合材料

35x29cm

“TOY-STORY”展览现场

开幕现场 Opening Site

“TOY-STORY”开幕现场

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正 在 展 出

群展「持灯的使者」

2023.10.14-2023.11.11

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新氧艺O2art艺术空间成立于2011年，长期经营与代理中生代当代职业艺术家，多次推出过独立策划的群展以及艺术家个展，涉及的艺术媒介包括绘画、雕塑、装置、摄影等。目前新氧艺O2art拥有位于北京朝阳798艺术区和顺义中央别墅区OOPS的双空间。新氧艺O2art会不断跟进当代艺术家的创作与事业发展，成为构建中国当代艺术生态中不可或缺的成员。

O2art was founded in 2011. It's an organisation that focuses on promoting and managingcontemporary professional artists. It has independently curated many group exhibitions aswell as solo exhibitions, with artworks in various media including paintings, sculptures, installations, photography and so on. Now O2art has two spaces located in 798 Art Zone and O2art Online Project Studio in Shunyi central villa area. O2art will continue to follow up artists' career and creation development, and become a strong part of China's contemporary art community.

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