评论 | 沈忱：超越抽象

文字：理查德•怀恩

中文翻译：张弛

Untitled No.11711-15 Acrylic on  Canvas 64 × 46in, 2015

无题-作品11711-15, 布面丙烯, 162.5 × 116.8cm, 2015

沈忱的艺术有三个卓尔不群的特征。首先，他的绘画是纯抽象的，与他同代的中国出生的画家很少做这样的选择。第二，他的作品表面看上去是西方的外像却内涵着东方的灵魂，可以说是把富于延展性的色域绘画美学和永恒的精神性的主题联系起来。最后，他的画作兼具精湛的技巧和微妙的情感 － 这是两个在当今的艺术发展中常常被忽略的元素。

但是，这些画作是否只是完全自发的美学载体，优美而仅仅指涉自身？抑或它们有自身以外情境的另论，表面看似退避，却旨在对纷纭的现实作出反思？

数千年来，中国绘画在本质上基本源于意象。花鸟，远山，树木，动物，河流，人物， 从简陋的茅舍到堂皇的宫殿 － 都是中国绘画想象中的既定的词汇，通过标准化的表现手法代代相传，其主旨在于意胜于形。到了二十世纪初，西方的诸多表现理念比如重视透视，使用人体模特，关注感知深度和个人心理等等声势浩大地来到了中国。同时，在海外求学的中国画家们倾向于就读最声名卓著的西方艺术学院，而在那里讲求逼真的现实主义仍然占据着绝对的主导地位。最终，在中华人民共和国于1949年成立之后，苏俄式的社会主义现实主义成了艺术创作中的政治主旋律。

无题-作品42778-15, 布面丙烯, 162.5 × 112cm × 3, 2015

Untitled No.42778-15 Acrylic on Canvas 64 ×132in ×3, 2015

即使在七十年代和八十年代的改革开放之后，抽象主义仍然被中国官方以怀疑和排斥的态度对待，主要因为作品中包含的不易被解读的“信息”，被视为有潜在的颠覆性。所以，在沈忱还在上海戏剧学院的时候，一个北京博物馆里展出外国非具象绘画的展览竟成为了一个标志性事件，学生们要通过罢课来赢得时间和许可去参观。即使到了后来，他所参与的 包含抽象作品的展览仍然不时的被预防性的关闭。直到最近这些年，在九十年代的中国前卫艺术圈里出现了诸多令人震惊的喧嚣激烈的图像之后，抽象画才被中国的官方文化体制逐渐容忍 - 甚至欢迎－因为它被视作一种既足够“现代”又可以安全规避露骨的社会政治批判的艺术形式。

于是，对于从1988年就移居美国的沈忱而言，现在又面临着如何使他的抽象作品能在自己的出生地受到真正意义上的接受和欣赏的再次努力。他必须清晰的把自己的作品和当今中国公共空间中时常能见到的全然装饰性的和抄袭现成风格的抽象画分离开来，后者在富于批判性的艺术家和观察家群体中是毫无可信度的。无容置疑的是沈忱已经成功的完成了这一分界，但是要理解他是如何成功做到这一点的则要求我们认真地审视并且静心思考这些庄严而且熠熠生辉的绘画作品产生的过程。

无题-作品21339-1415, 布面丙烯, 122 × 172.5cm, 2014

Untitled No.21339-1415 Acrylic on Canvas 48 × 68in, 2014

沈忱没有选择最短的捷径来达到他的目的，即通过表达他现今的境况和文化传承实现个人化的简单的愿景。在美国居住的二十多年间，他本可以轻易的追随西方抽象传统中的动态派。（他早年的一些水墨画，展现解构了的中国书法，颇有此意 ）回应诸多西方美术前辈的先声－霍夫曼，波洛克，史蒂尔，托比，德•库宁 － 他也可以选择象征agon，也就是终极的张力，相互抵抗的造型和手势化挥舞的笔触。那一类艺术视自然为各种冲突中的巨大力量的熔炉，视社会为不同相互抵触的自我利益的多元混合物，视自我为恐惧，本能，需求和欲望集合于内心的疆场予以呈现。

沈忱反其道而行之，选择了一个更安详，更富于精神性的抽像形式。在西方，这种形式来源于特纳，莫奈，魏斯勒，再经过马列维奇，纽曼，罗斯科，和战后的色域画家们，然后到阿格尼斯•马丁和罗伯特•莱曼这一脉的传承。当他的色调于画布中自上而下微妙的进行转换之际，沈忱的画作－ 由多层颜料与媒材创造而成 － 令人感受到哈德森河画派 “透光派”绘画的气息，暗示自然将在神圣光线（意为知识和爱）中最终消融 － 该理念可回溯至但丁，十一世纪的教会父老派，摩尼教，圣经，直至最早的太阳崇拜，将我们内心对孕育生命之光的最原初，欢乐的生化反应，赋予神圣化。

当然，沈忱是在当今这个世俗得多的时代创作。在这个时代里，宗教上的争议（在美国和欧洲，在非洲和中东尚未如此）基本上已被一种微弱的，泛化了的“精神主义”所取代，沈忱是在（美国）东岸用丙烯在画布上创作，从一定意义上来说，他是二十世纪六十到七十年代光与空间运动特立独行的继承者。但仅仅将他视为一个西方极简主义艺术家是短视的，忽略了他另一半的文化传统和艺术创见。

除了明显的笔触痕迹特征之外，沈忱的绘画强调的是传统中国水墨画中使用不同灰色色调之间的互动关系，由它们之间的参差变换产生无穷的颜色感  — 就像是传统中国绘画一样。我们不难发现这与派特•史黛尔的滴水式构图的瀑布效果及中国古代的山水画之隐约关联。在沈忱的画面中，常常会有一道水平方向的较深色带，暗示向着地平线的退隐 －纵深空间。画面似乎幻化为一幅风格化了的图象。

无题-作品10109-16, 布面丙烯, 122 × 172.5cm, 2016

Untitled No.10109-16 Acrylic on Canvas 48 × 68 in, 2016

众所周知，现代韩国艺术家已经将中国山水画诠释为抽象意念，其形式几乎与西方动态主义在各个方面完全对立。东方的全景画 － 包括若隐若现的远山，舒缓的云雾，曲折的河流，零落的住宅和星星点点的人影融入广阔的地貌之中 － 展示着和谐与安宁：自然是永恒的和重复的， 社会是一个遵循孔教的父系社会的代代相传，个人被整合于这广大的秩序之间，时间本身也是循环的，缓慢的，无所不包的。自从沈忱在1982年抛弃了具象表现的手法，这些元素就一直含蓄的存在于他并不那么虚无的画面的混沌之中。

无题-作品69000-16, 布面丙烯, 122 × 137cm, 2016

Untitled No.69000-16 Acrylic on  Canvas 48 × 54in, 2016

这样看来，艺术家近作中鲜明着色的，定义形状边缘的出现在暗示一个主题的变奏。这些新的形式的出现 － 柔和的边界，延展的痕隙，潜在可能的冲突性 － 在沈忱原本和谐的画面上说明了什么？它们是在为某种即将到来的激进的风格上的改变做铺陈？抑或是在预示一种新创意的合成？考虑到作品的展览地要在上海，这个最为多元化，变革最激烈的中国二十一世纪的都市， 我们提出这些问题就是要认识沈忱的抽像作品的本质，和它们一贯以来的一样，其意义已远远超出了抽象本身。

无题-作品12936-12, 布面丙烯, 162.5 × 112cm, 2012

Untitled No.12936-12 Acrylic on Canvas 64 × 44in, 2012

理查德•怀恩

理查德•怀恩是《美国艺术》杂志的高级编辑，他经常撰写关于亚洲及其他地区当代艺术状况的评论文章。他在芝加哥大学获得文学博士的学位，并担任过《芝加哥评论》和《对话：艺术专业杂志》的主编。他曾在芝加哥艺术学院，美国音乐学院，沙特阿拉伯的Riyadh大学，纽约社会研究新学院，和纽约大学任教。他的文章曾在不同专业杂志刊登，包括《Salmagundi》，《乔治亚评论》，《Tema Celeste》，《现代诗歌研究》，和《新标准》杂志，也在众多艺术图录和评论集中出现。他已经成书的研究成果《Odd Nerdrum：油画，草稿和绘图》于2001年被Gyldendal/D.A.P.出版。《新中国，新艺术》一书是他写的关于中国艺术从1976年到现今的总体回顾性著作，由Prestel出版社2008年秋季出版。2011年秋，该书在被更新和扩充内容后再版发行。

Shen Chen：Beyond Abstraction

Richard Vine 

Three aspects of the art of Shen Chen (b. 1955, Shanghai) immediately stand out. First is the fact that he does purely abstract painting, a relative rare choice for Chinese-born artists of his generation. Second, the work has a Western appearance but an Eastern soul, so to speak, combining expansive Color Field esthetics with timeless spiritual themes. Finally, the paintings manifest both refined facture and emotional subtlety—two concerns frequently neglected in progressive art today.

But are these works simply autonomous aesthetic objects, beautiful and entire unto themselves? Or are they emblems of circumstances beyond themselves, reflecting complexities of life from which they are only seemingly withdrawn?

For millennia, painting in China was almost exclusively imagistic in nature. Flowers, birds, distant mountains, trees, animals, rivers, human figures, dwellings that range from modest huts to gorgeous palaces—these were the staples of the Chinese pictorial imagination, conveyed from generation to generation through standardized modes of rendering, with an emphasis on essence over appearance. Then, at the turn of the 20^thcentury, Western styles of representation—with a greater attention to perspective, modeling, perceived depth, and individual psychological—arrived forcefully in China. Chinese painters who went abroad to study, meanwhile, gravitated to the most famous Western academies, where verisimilitude still reigned supreme. Eventually, once the People’s Republic was founded in 1949, Soviet-type Socialist Realism became politically de rigueur.

Even with the great Reopening of the late 1970s and ’80s, abstraction continued to be viewed askance by Chinese officials, largely because its indecipherable “messages” were thought to be potentially disruptive. Thus in Shen’s days at the Shanghai Theater Academy, a Beijing museum show presenting foreign examples of nonrepresentational painting was a signal event, and students nearly had to declare a strike to win time and permission to attend. Even afterward, university exhibitions involving abstraction remained subject to preemptive closure. Only in very recent years, following the emergence of alarmingly rambunctious imagery in China’s avant-garde circles during the 1990s, has abstraction been increasingly tolerated—even warmly embraced—by China’s cultural ministries as an art form at once certifiably “modern” yet safely devoid of explicit sociopolitical critique.

Thus Shen, who has lived and worked in the United States since 1988, now faces a second struggle to gain true appreciation for his abstract work in his native land. He must clearly differentiate it from the merely decorative and often highly derivative type of abstraction that turns up in many public spaces in China today, a style that has no credibility among critically astute artists and observers. That Shen has succeeded in making this crucial distinction is beyond question, but to understand how he has done so requires close looking and a willingness to think through the process that has led to these stately, luminous pictures.

Shen has not chosen the easiest route to his goal, the realization of a personal vision that expresses both his current circumstances and his cultural lineage. Residing for 25 years in the U.S., he could simply have slipped into the dynamic mode of Western abstraction. (Some of his early ink works, featuring deconstructed calligraphy, approach this manner.) Echoing any number of precursors—Hofmann, Pollock, Still, Tobey, de Kooning—he might have opted for the contending shapes and gestural slashes that signify agon, or fundamental struggle. Such art portrays nature as a cauldron of titanic forces, society as a pluralistic mix of contending self-interests, and the self as an internal battleground of fears, drives, needs, and desires.

Instead, Shen has chosen a calmer, moodier form of abstraction that derives, in the West, from the atmospheric experiments of Turner, Monet, and Whistler, passes through Malevich, Newman, Rothko, and the postwar Color Field painters to Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman. As his hues modulate subtly from top to bottom, Shen’s paintings—created with multiple layers of pigment and medium—evoke the Luminism of the Hudson River School, suggesting the ultimate dissolution of nature in divine light (synonymous with knowledge and love)—a notion that goes back to Dante, the Church Fathers, Manichaeism, the Bible, and ultimately to sun-worship, sanctifying our most innate, joyful biochemical response to life-giving light.

Obviously, Shen works in much more secular era, one in which religious contention has been largely displaced (in the U.S. and Europe, though not in Africa or the Middle East) by a vague, generalized “spirituality,” inducing a mild frisson at the thought of the infinite but eschewing any passionate warfare between virtue and sin. Shen is, in a sense, a maverick heir of the late 1960s-’70s Light and Space movement, working on the East Coast with acrylic on canvas. But to see him solely as a Western Minimalist is myopic, eliding half his cultural heritage and half his artistic intent.

Despite their higher chromatic register, Shen’s tonalities recall the gray-scale interplay—its variations evoking color—in traditional Chinese ink painting. It is not hard to see an affinity with the waterfall effect of Pat Steir’s drip compositions and hence with ancient shan shui (mountain water) painting. Often, too, in Shen’s work, there is a horizontal band of greater darkness near the center of the canvas, suggesting a recession into space—a horizon, and thus a stylized landscape.

Chinese landscape painting, which modern Korean artists have notably translated into abstraction, is contrary in nearly every way to Western vitalism. Eastern panoramas—with their looming mountains, slow mists, winding rivers, scattered habitations and small human figures integrated into vast terrain—bespeak harmony and calm: nature as constant and repetitive, society as a stable Confucian patriarchy preserved from era to era, the individual as an integral component of the overall order, and time itself as cyclical, slow, and all-encompassing. Ever since Shen abandoned representation in 1982, these elements have been implicit in the not-so-empty blur of his paintings.

Thus the advent of distinctly colored, shape-defining edges in the artist’s recent work suggests a thematic departure. What are these emergent forms—softly bordered, growing separate, and potentially competitive—doing in Shen’s otherwise harmonious work? Do they foreshadow a radical change or a new synthesis? To ask such questions about artwork in an exhibition in Shanghai, arguably the most diverse, most changeable city in 21^st–century China, is to acknowledge that Shen’s abstract paintings are, as they have always been, about much more than themselves.

Richard Vine

a senior editor at <Art in America>, where he writes frequently on contemporary art in Asia and elsewhere, the author of the book <New China, New Art>. He holds a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Chicago and has served as editor-in-chief of the Chicago Review and of Dialogue: An Art Journal. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the American Conservatory of Music, the University of Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, the New School for Social Research, and New York University. 

GINKGO SPACE成立于2014年。通过展览、出版、驻留等多种方式，建立具有广泛影响力的开放平台，GINKGO SPACE积极参与国际当代艺术的发展进程，探索亚洲当代艺术的独特美学价值和文化身份，持续关注中国艺术家的多元创作。

GINKGO SPACE was founded in 2014. Through a range of methods, including exhibitions, publication, sartists’ residencies, collectors salons and non-profit projects, 

Ginkgo space aims to participate in the developmental progress of international contemporary art, to examine the Asia artists’ diverse creativities in depth, actively explore the unique aesthetic values and cultural identity in contemporary Chinese art.

GINKGO SPACE

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开放时间  10:30-17:30 周二至周六（Tue-Sat）

北京市朝阳区酒仙桥路4号院 798艺术区65幢

Address  ＃65, 798 Art District, No.4 Jiuxianqiao Rd., Chaoyang Dst., 100015, Beijing, China