评论 | 对无形的诠释：沈忱的近作

文字：罗伯特 C. 摩根 

中文翻译：张弛

在我和中国画家们打了数年交道之后，最终发现沈忱的作品是一件自然不过的事情。沈忱在纽约已经居住了二十多年。我们刚刚认识的时候，他正在为一个由八位中国画家的作品组成的巡回群展做准备。展览的名字叫“气韵”， 策展人是批评家和学者黄专。沈忱的作画方式既系统又直观。他通过一系列均匀间隔的笔触，横向排列于画布的方式来控制颜料的使用。他在绘画的过程中保持站立，画布平铺于地面上，以冥想状态中保持有节奏的呼吸。他使用画笔的频率持续稳定，一次次通过注意力高度集中而放松的重复用笔来创作。作品《无题-作品10277-0912》展现出的便是这种笔触重叠结果的绝佳例子，其画面基于沈忱不断重复最大限度的用笔产生出恰到好处的韵律。在这幅画里，笔触之间的关系比大多数前几年完成的作品更清晰可见，特别是黑色颜料下笔之处历历可见，却仍然能与白色的背景融为一体。

无题-作品10277-0912, 布面丙烯, 172.5 × 122 cm, 2009

Untitled No.10277-0912, Acrylic on  Canvas, 48 × 68 in, 2009

这类绘画的“形而上”特征有一种传统的孔学上的渊源。在中国绘画里，它指的是无常或 “抽象的”空间 － 无形无像之所在。由于在中国语汇里没有与西方观念中的视觉抽象这个概念直接的对应词，“气韵”便常常被译做一种具有形而上意义的自由而和谐的能量。这又是源于公元六世纪，也就是六朝时期的一种绘画理论。沈忱的近作采用的手法是用宽大的画笔以单向的长笔触，不断重复地把颜料层层铺叠，渐渐的与其对应色相的颜料组合衍生。沈忱的主观意图是赋予画面一种透光感，以至于进一步的回溯到重要的道教观念即黑暗和光明的非二元性。拿另一件作品《无题-作品12333-11》来做对比则更有意思，渐变的灰色调由暗灰到深灰，而相比以前的画作中呈现出来的不加遮掩的对立笔触，在《无题-作品12333-11》中，笔触的痕迹几乎完全消失，以此来创造一种整体上的黑白效果。于此一年之后完成的作品《无题-作品92122-12》，也是同样，黑蓝的色调渐渐演变成一种更具暖意的灰色，再一次的遮盖了画面任何犹存的笔触的痕迹。

无题-作品12333-11, 布面丙烯, 91.44 × 76.2 cm, 2011

Untitled No.12333-11, Acrylic on  Canvas, 36 × 30 in, 2011

无题-作品92122-12, 布面丙烯, 162.5 × 112 cm, 2012

Untitled No.92122-12, Acrylic on  Canvas, 64 × 44 in, 2012

沈忱非常敏锐的观注到北宋山水画家们，从视觉效果的角度选择了相近的色彩，即在作品中使用精湛的水墨色泽。虽然丙烯在画布上可能难以生产出同等的视觉效果，沈忱仍极力以他独自的方法营造某种色彩错觉，使得不期而至的色彩顺理成章的相互融合。对于沈忱来说，所有的颜色源自于也终归于黑与白。通过营造色彩对比－而不是对立－观看者凝视的目光被吸引进去，把物质性的存在转变成空洞，即形而上维度中的虚无（sunyata）。虽然这是一个东方佛教的概念，在许多方面与康定斯基赞赏的感观体验，以至于观者能感触到的“艺术之精神性”有着异曲同工之处。

无题-作品12447-12, 布面丙烯, 162.5 × 112 cm × 3, 2012

Untitled No.12447-12, Acrylic on  Canvas, 64×44 in×3,  2012

有一个例子是沈忱的三联画，《无题-作品12447-12》。其中黑紫罗兰的复杂的色彩组合，由画布顶端边缘正下方启始向下，在三联中的每一篇幅中都渐变成明亮的橙色。我们无法断定沈忱作品中的形而上维度和美学维度之强弱高低，也许前者容纳在后者之中，也许反之。从西方人的角度，这听起来好像有点玄乎，如果不是荒谬的话；但从传统中国人的视角看来，当感受没有被知识分隔之时 － 当然在鉴赏学的层面上 － 这样的认识显得更加易于被人理解。在唐朝（公元618到906年），文人们会花费几个小时的时间舞笔弄墨，直至找到从内在自然散发出的“气韵”。 如果“气韵”被感悟到了，文人们才会在画上盖印定稿。这时正式标志着作品已经达到了形而上维度的高度。形而上属于精神领域，也就是一半在日常物质世界之内一半在其之外。对于唐朝的身为朝臣的文人们和最后跟随北宋和元朝被流放的文人遗老们来说，绘画的形而上方面既是不可见的又是“概念性的” 。它与物质并不对立，但却能够通过绘画的物质存在而被感知。有可能这就是沈忱试图找到的：去重新发现，并以一个在西半球创作的中国画家的身份来传播这种理念？难道色彩不过是他以这些画作为工具提供诠释的手段？这显示出与五十年前纽约色域理论家们的命题完全不同的意图和期望。

无题-作品92292-12, 布面丙烯, 142.24 × 121.92 cm, 2012

Untitled No.92292-12, Acrylic on  Canvas, 56 × 48 in, 2012

沈忱热情洋溢的这类三联画的笔触留下的效果并没有被隐去而是被明白的显示出来，并使得整个画面发出搏动的光茫。这里值得指出的是，相不联体的三幀篇幅，恰是同一件作品的整体画面。事实上，“三联画”这个词来自西方文艺复兴时期的祭坛绘画，在三联画中的每一篇幅里都有一个代表不同的神或圣的形象，它们之间通常相互有联系。不过，把先前的有透视的人体转换到抽象或是东方形而上的题材也许产生了一个语义上的问题。

宗教符号已经不存在了，所以“三联画” 这个术语必须进行语意的重新调整和阐释。在沈忱的作品里，三联画的每一篇幅没有不同的主题，而是完全相同，形成一个统一的整体。在《无题-作品12447-12》中，每一单幅画的功能都是整体的一部分，并对应其它篇幅提出同样存在的物质和形而上层面的要求。这么看来，在东方形而上上下文的框架之下，对该画更准确的称法可以是“一幅三篇幅的画作”。

以上的分析不是我期望对沈忱意义深远的画作所做的结论，它仅仅向我们展示了他的创作的复杂程度。沈忱的作品既不是极简主义的也不是单色的。它们超出了我们在西方发明的现代主义理论的分类之外。也就是说他的作品要求我们对有形的和无形的作品同样重视。观赏这些画作，在它们身上花上一定的时间后，我们会意识到，仅靠我们完全通过凝视，仍然无法领会其全部的深邃的意义 (作者写于2013年)。

罗伯特 C. 摩根是国际领先的当代艺术批评家，画家和演讲者。他的书和文章被翻译成19种文字。他是欧洲文理学院的成员也是罗切斯特技术学院艺术史的退休教授。他现在居住在纽约市。他在纽约视觉艺术学院任教。最近他的文集被译成了中文和现代波斯文。

美国著名艺术评论家Robert C. Moegan 访问沈忱工作室, 2013年纽约

Illuminating the Invisible: Shen Chen’s Recent Paintings

Robert C. Morgan 2013

Having been involved with Chinese brush painters for several years, it was only natural I would eventually come to discover the paintings of Shen Chen. Originally from Shanghai, Chen has been a resident of New York for more than a decade. At the time we met, he was preparing work for a traveling exhibition that included eight Chinese painters, titled Qi Yun, curated by the criticand scholar Huang Zhuan. Chen’s manner of painting is both systemic and intuitive. He controls the application of paint through a series of evenly spaced strokes of pigment that he pulls across the canvas. His process of painting, done laterally on the floor of his studio, might be compared to the kind of rhythmic breathing used in meditation as the steady motion of the brush occurs and recurs through a highly concentrated, yet relaxed effort. The final result shown in Untitled No. 10277 – 0912, for example, is a composition based on measured cadences derived from the repetition of Chen’s maximal brush. In this particular painting the strokes are more visible in their relationship to one another than in most other paintings completed over the past few years, especially in the way the strokes of black pigment appear visible, yet integrated into the white background.

The term “metaphysical” in relation to this type of painting has a traditional Confucian reference. In Chinese painting, it is used as a way to indicate absence or “abstract” space – that which is not entirely visible. While there is no direct correlation to the Western idea of visual abstraction in Chinese ideograms, the term qi yun is often translated as meaning a free and harmonious movement of energy, which carries a metaphysical connotation. This, in turn, is based on a theory of painting that goes back to the 6th century (the period of the Six Dynasties). The recent paintings of Shen Chen employ the use of broad brushes by which layers of pigment are repeated in single long strokes,gradually mixing with layers of contrasting pigments painted beneath. Chen’s conscious intention is to give a feeling of luminosity to the surface, further referencing the important Daoist notion of non-duality between darkness and light. It is interesting to compare Untitled No. 12333-11, painted in modulated gray tones moving from dark to darker, with earlier paintings where contrasting brushstrokes are left visible. In Untitled No. 12334 -11, the evidence of the brushwork is nearly obliterated in order to produce an all-over monochrome effect. Much the same could be said of Untitled No. 92122 – 12, painted the following year, where the blue-black hue modulates into a warmer gray and again overshadows any clear evidence of the sustaining brushwork underneath.

Chen is acutely aware of the subtle tonalities of ink used by the landscape painters in the northern Song Dynasty (10th Century) who optically implied a semblance of color. While acrylic pigments on canvas may carry limitations in producing this kind of retinal function, Chen proceeds to advance a notion of color illusion according to his own method, which allows for unexpected mixtures of color to occur without coercion. For Chen, all color begins and ends with black and white. In working with color contrasts – not opposites – the viewer’s gaze is pulled inward, thus transforming physical presence into absence, the void (sunyata) in which a metaphysical dimension may be felt. Although an Eastern Buddhist concept, this, in some ways, may parallel, if not complement Kandinsky’s elevated sensory cognition in which the viewer encounters “the spiritual in art.”

An example would be Chen’s triptych, Untitled No. 12447 – 12, in which a complex aggregation in dark violet, beginning slightly below the upper edge, modulates downward into a bright orange in each of the three panels. While there is no guarantee that one will sense a metaphysical dimension in Chen’s work any more than will sense an aesthetic one. Perhaps, the former is contained within the latter, or vice versa. From a Western perspective, this may sound pretentious, if not preposterous; but from a traditional Chinese point of view, where sensibility is not divided from intellect – certainly on the level of connoisseurship – such realizations appear more within reach. During the Tang Dynasty (618 – 906 A.D.) scholars would study paintings for hours seeking to acknowledge the qi yun emanating from within the painting. If the qi yun were felt, the seal or chop of the scholar would then be applied to the painting. This was the official indication that the metaphysical dimension of the work had transmitted.

Metaphysics exists within the realm of the spirit, which is might be found half within and half outside the everyday material world. For the Tang scholars, who were courtiers, and the exiled literati that eventually followed in the northern Song and Yuan Dynasties, the metaphysical aspect of the paintings in these periods was both invisible and “conceptual.” It was not in opposition to material, but was understood through the painting’s material presence. Is it possible that this is what Shen Chen is attempting to find, to rediscover, and to transmit as a Chinese painter working within the Western hemisphere? Is the color his vehicle toward illumination inthese paintings? This suggests a very different aspiration from the propositional aspect of painting posited by color field theorists in New York five decades earlier.

The residual effects of the brush markson Chen’s ebullient triptych are not concealed but visibly present and optically pulsating throughout the surface. In this case, there are three surfaces within a single surface, which is something worth mentioning. In fact, the term “triptych” derives from the Western Renaissance concept of altar painting in which each of the three panels represented a different saint or deity that related directly to one another. However, the translation from perspectival figuration to abstract or Eastern metaphysical subject matter is problematic. The iconography is no longer present and therefore the term needs readjustment or clarification. Rather than each panel having a different subject, the three panels in Chen’s painting are identical and thus work as a single unit. In Untitled No.12447 – 12, each panel functions as one in the same painting, which requires its neighboring panels to exist on both a material and metaphysical level. Therefore, within an Eastern metaphysical context, the more accurate denotation might be “a three-paneled painting.”

While the foregoing analysis is not the point on which I had hoped to conclude my remarks on the enduring paintings of Shen Chen, it is merely a way of suggesting some of the complexities that pertain to what he has done. Chen’s paintings are neither minimal nor monochrome. They are something other than the categories we have invented to deal with Modernism in the West. This is to suggest that his work requires as much attention to the invisible as to thevisible. By seeing these paintings, and by giving them our time, we may sense the limitations of meaning that we derive solely through our dependence on the gaze.

Robert C. Morgan is a leading international critic, a painter, and a frequent lecturer on contemporary art. His books and essays have been translated into 19 languages. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He currently lives in New York City where he teaches at the School of Visual Arts, and has recently had collections of his essays translated into Mandarin and Farsi.

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.

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