Critical Reflection
In this unit, my work concentrates on using oil painting to express myself. I have explored the elements of religion and sexuality further. This is closely linked to my family background. I grew up being influenced by two different cultural contexts, including biblical references and taboos represented by Christianity, as well as Chinese folklore and mythology. While following the Christian faith, I am constantly questioning my identity and looking at it from both Eastern and Western perspectives. My interest in religious painting has led me to focus a part of my painting research on the early Renaissance artists, such as Masaccio and Francesca, because I really like the depiction of biblical references by these old masters. In Piero Francesca's work The Baptism of Christ (image1), what struck me most was the man in the background preparing for his baptism: the blouse he is taking off, which just happens to cover his face. I couldn't help but thinking about the emotions of the baptismal figure in the painting: was he excited, moved, or perturbed? This scene reminded me of my experience of baptism as a young boy, as I used this work as a medium (image2) to represent how I felt when I attended the ceremony.
After that my approach changed, on the one hand through documentation, family photos and information gathering, and for the first unit of work I mainly used some documentary photos taken in Chinese rural churches around 2000, which included choirs, stage photos of holy plays and daily scenes in the church. But after practising a few pieces, I started to think about the resources available to me: the amount of personal material was actually very limited and I didn't want to be constrained by my limited image corpus, so I looked at some photographic works, documentary pictures and also screenshots of films, such as The martyrs in Tarkovsky's ‘Nostalgia’, or Carl de keyzer's vision of Christianity. On the other hand, I work with key words or sayings that come from my family, the Holy Bible, or literatures, such as salvation, burning with brimstone, or body without organs. Although there are a lot of subjective pieces in my work, I hope that my work to jump outside of my personal narrative in the future, allowing the audience to form their own senses.
image 1
image 1
image 2, oil on canvas, 160x200cm
image 2, oil on canvas, 160x200cm
One of the points that came out of the discussion of Richter's and Catherine Anyango Grünewald's works in the reading group struck me. Both artists also painted secondary documentary photographs, but depicting the political contents at different times and places would produce different interpretations. This led me to consider what my purposes were in using these secondary sources, and what messages did I convey to the audience through the secondary portrayal formed by these materials? In the tutorial with Yeon Woo, she also discussed with me what I wanted to deliver through religion and sex. Are my works simply being expressions of my own emotions? Combining these two questions, my idea is to create hybrid images by mixing my own subjective feelings and objective records. This hybridization may have an accidental effect, which slowly dissolves my individuality. I want to place these images in juxtaposition so that the viewers can actively form their own imaginations (image 3).
image 3
image 3
I think Gerard Garouste (image 4) has influenced me a lot in terms of his way of painting. Firstly the erotic, eerie quality of his pictures, which is always accompanied by a classical and religious quality, where the vulgar contents of the pictures are mixed with the sublime, creating a great tension. Secondly, even though Garouste's pictures are intertwined with a mass of his private experiences and personal history, I can experience the work exactly how I intuitionally feel when viewing it, as I always ignore all the background information. Meanwhile, his way of painting is very direct, his brushworks are often bold and obvious. Just like Alex Katz (image 5), he can finish his work rapidly. The reason for my involvement with sexuality is related to my own experience of being obsessed with the topic, but also being fostered in a conservative family environment, as well as my inner turmoil about the religious taboos. Another of my inspiration was Georges Bataille, who impressed me with his detailed descriptions of sex in his book of ‘the story of eye’, as he wrote, 'At any rate, the soft area of the cunt (nothing is more like it than a day of floods or storms, or even the suffocating gas eruptions of a volcano, which is normally deadly dull, but when there is a storm or a volcano-like catastrophe, it becomes unusually excited, this heady field)'. There are similarities between Bataille's depiction of erotic scenes and Garouste's works: ignoring the moral ethics of their contents, their narratives are intensely entertaining and strongly imaginative, or containing morbid beauties. The contrasts between the vulgar and the sublime, the radical and the conservative, are essential to me, and push me to take a step further emancipating my body and my mind.
image 4
image 4
image 5
image 5
Besides, the appropriation of historical images has also been my common method. The advantage of appropriation is that it can quickly transcribe information, but the disadvantage is that if you are not careful, your own information can be overwhelmed by the original work, making the picture thin and uninteresting as a whole. I expect myself to take the immediate reality as a starting point, to use the classic elements from the images and the power of history to generate new works in an intriguing and contemporary way, thus differentiating from the original.
painted by Masaccio
painted by Masaccio
Reference:
Robertson, J and McDaniel, C, n.d.^Themes of contemporary art. p.18.
Robertson, J and McDaniel, C, n.d.^Themes of contemporary art. pp119-123.
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. and Massumi, B. (2019) in A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 326–330.
Bataille, G. et al. (1982) in Story of the eye by lord Auch. London: Penguin, pp. 37–40.
Pal, A. (2023) Marlene Dumas: Metal magazine, English. Metal Magazine. Available at: https://metalmagazine.eu/en/post/interview/marlene-dumas-the-image-as-burden-amrita-pal#:~:text=Drawing%20inspiration%20from%20still%20images%2C%20she%20recreates%20them,the%20Tate%2C%20“second-hand%20images%20can%20generate%20first-hand%20emotions”. (Accessed: January 23, 2023).