Zi Lin
Go West / Oil on canvas 120x120cm / 2020
Artist George Chang and his work Go West (2020) featured a distinguished gesture with the rest of works in the exhibition. At an 80 x 80 canvas, this work is significantly smaller than the other two pieces mentioned above, but in this small painting space, one can find a gesture of painting that runs opposite to almost works in this exhibition - a gesture that is opposed to image rhetoric. In George Chang’s works, there is no clear figure, nor his discussion about extensive reference beyond the painting itself by establishing symbolic figures. This strategy, if it can be called a strategy, is very different from that of Wu Chen, Qiu Ruixiang, and other artists. In the other direction, Go West (2020) is no conventional type of abstract painting, for the viewer can still vaguely distinguish the cultural scenes it refers to and the figures that appear in them - though these figures are hardly interesting nor visually appealing - they are the nearby waste dumps or the distant factories and chimneys. The artist here seems to have no interest in subject matter, figures, ambience, nor pigment texture. At the same time, it does not mean that this is a work from the direction of rational knowledge, because there is nothing that can be perceived as knowledge nor theorized. The viewer’s attempts to understand the work from these angles are doomed to be futile, while the sense of oppression caused by the black coloring filling the painting during observation may cause mild discomfort.
Detail
What a mind-boggling riddle! According to the artist, he was fascinated by the impression of villages and towns passing by in the window of the train during the night rides when he took night trains several times through the years. Only one or two strong light sources illuminate a part of a building or street in the endless darkness - this creates a temporary theatricality and dramaticality, and the scene only exists for about three seconds before disappearing in the darkness again and it would have never been seen again. The artist said that the original intention of this series of work was to recreate and pieces together the mental image from these brief fragmented impressions. Studied in Chicago and New York for eight years, the artist’s academic background is the American abstract expressionism, but this is also a style that the artists tries to avoid. In the painting, the extensive references to the illusion of space brought by the local figures is reduced as much as possible with the artist’s efforts of inserting blurring objects. For example, in the lower part of the picture, the neat geometric part created by scraping pigments is isolated in the lower part of the picture by a black “waste pile” figure surrounding it. The spatial relationship between this “waste pile” and the bright factory building at the top of the picture falls into a vague state.
Detail
On the right side of the relatively clear image of the distant factory building, a brown space with unidentified meaning appears excessively huge, breaking the spatial logic brough by the factory building. The visual system constructed by George Chang in Go West (2020) is a real deconstruction system. It seems that any definite figure and spatial relationship implies some kind of danger in the artist’s mind, while the artist keeps walking on the edge of this danger. I personally very much approve of George Chang’s work and his creative stance, and I think it is a really experimental gesture. Although George Chang’s works are not suitable for collection as interior decoration from the point of view of commodities, I think his works are very good pieces of art. Its discussion happened in the existentialist level, outside of the image rhetoric. His works are opposed to the decorative and is incompatible with the artificial romance that floods the world of painting today - behind all these particularities, we can see the artist’s meticulous thinking and poignant grasp of these issues.