口目气足口 — 能尖日的可能性世界

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文：付晓东

“一个不愿面对欢乐之过度，缺乏自由，没有血色，不苟言笑的生命微粒应该抵达——极限，这个说法是一个圈套。得到了满足的存在，
要用过度，而不是匮乏，通达极限。”
——乔治巴塔耶《内在体验》
阿米巴虫
古老的阿米巴虫是一种单细胞的原生动物门肉足纲跟足亚纲变形虫，虫体裸露、柔软，可以向各个方向伸出奔放式伪足，内含数个水泡和伸缩泡，是个分裂生殖的透明椭圆体。这种自由生活的变形虫，能够从鼻腔进入生物体内，吞噬脑神经细胞，是研究微生物学最重要的单细胞基因实验观测对象，也是一切奇异变形怪物的起点。史莱姆是电子游戏和奇幻小说里虚构的小烂泥，黏稠物，一种果冻状的半液体，绿色的柔软有弹性，不断的分裂和融合，现实以阿米巴虫为依托，出身则是来自于克苏鲁神话体系，巨大的变形怪物，能将石头之外的所有物质融化进自身体内。

能尖日王国里对软体子民们构想起源于这些单细胞或者多细胞的变形软体生物的传说，它们胡乱的生长着，比较随意，忧郁、松散、弱不禁风。这些绒面拉丝绒毛萌系的子民们，“外貌停留在被逮捕的一瞬间”，“眼神往往是错觉和幻觉”，“暴露了某些自己的过去和未来”。“有一些事物化的事件，凝结了事情的一瞬间，像是一个石化的魔法”。它们是一片蓝天，或者一堆白云，是时空块。它们与人类的存在无限反弹，互相起递归作用，你可以抱着“一个地方”，玩儿“一件事情”，拥有一个“复杂的头脑”，软体子民不仅仅是一些形象，世界上的任何事情，离子，空气，光，都有可能成为以气相聚的软体子民。“世界不仅仅是地球”，能尖日说道。这些可怜萌的子民们被能尖日视为拥有自我意识，能够生存和繁殖的族群。每一个子民就是通往能尖日王国，激活非凡时间的钥匙，在一个可能性世界的物质存在的证据。它们之间互相叠加，组合成“口、目、气、足、口”的身体文字，意指“眼耳鼻舌身”五感四肢，内部空间则用象形和谐音的方法用“肠”，“鹅”的外形拟音“嫦娥”，用“虫”、“蝶”的外形拟音“重叠”，是物体象形、身体象征、语音拟意的叠合重构。它们不单是看的另一种方式，更是“在”的差异形态，回归于更加古老宏大的宇宙机器的机制，将远近亲疏的万事万物以中国宇宙观古老方法中的类比关系的存在巨链紧密的联结在一起。

时间之被

资本主义、工业文明、科学观、进化论之后，所有人都面临着一个问题，古代西方的天主教象征体系崩塌了，东方的儒教伦理和日常宗教体系断裂了，我们该以什么为中心，重新组织文明？

能尖日的可能性王国里，每一个子民，每一个故事，都在试图组建一个属于她自己的时空体系，可以通过展览中的只图片语在脑海里拓扑一个宏大的异样的宇宙世界。能尖日说：“我经常感受到，在一些空间里，到过的与未到过的，一些在意识中的事情碎片，他们处在非线性时间之中，被记忆和失忆重新组合，形成一些形体，在我身后或者身旁。”如同具有超感觉力，她把时间的印象感知固定化，制作了出来，这些偶然的造物形成了毫无秩序的一片混沌的多重时间关系，在分裂的线形时间下展开叙事。在《四维物》中多个子民的形象渐渐的固定化个性化，也日益的人格化，具有充分发展的象征主义观念为基础的思维方式，被定义为时空分岔的当代神话思维。

能尖日试图用她的子民们来安抚和治愈现代人无法弥合的创伤。如果说三里屯“好奇柜”展览里呈现了理性主义、经验主义、精神现象学、新教伦理、符号秩序都无法治愈的文明中心巨大的创伤的话，那么从一战到二战，从民族战争到民主战争，让人疯狂的是一直在寻找让自己满足物质和信仰诉求的人类自己。对物质欲望贪得无厌的索取，和对形而上学世界极限追求的渴望，使人类自身的内部生长出了光怪陆离的怪物。

能尖日要“偷偷的玩”，“做艺术就是从空气中过滤宝石；我在时间的外面向世界里面看，一边走一边捡，透过透明的宝石看，客观世界都在弹珠的折射下换了灵魂，任何一个玩耍的行为都是一个拓扑结构。”将注意力从外在的压迫转换为内在的放松，从歇斯底里的异化转换成晶莹剔透的沉淀和抚慰。我们无法想象一个没有强权的世界，没有资本剥削的世界，我们无法想象一个不吃人的世界，面对如此恐怖残忍又正常运转的世界，为了缓和这种矛盾和焦虑，我们试着停止抱薪救火，苟延残喘在非人的世界里。“当盖上时间的被子，它们才会沉睡，渐渐的显示出清晰的形象。”隔断与现实生活的联系，不是游离于现实之外，恰恰是重返，是与正在坍塌的现实世界的同构，是真实的介入到现实中的另一种途径。在冷漠末世的背景下，有如此浪漫诗意的治疗世界。能尖日的子民们带着某种后人类主义的未知物气质，洋溢着对宇宙物质生命的赞扬之情，歌唱普通日常生活的颂歌，对万物平等给出了具有形象的例证。一种偶然的致乐应运而生，如同享受一片风景时那般，是一种略微平淡的甜蜜和令人愉悦的占有，是一种来自于内在心灵的持久的享受。能尖日说：“画画就是认识世界的方式。非常孤独但很勇敢。”

蒸汽波

能尖日是89 年出生，毕业于央美版画系的研究生。她的弥漫甜蜜的少女系风格来自于对学院系统教育的有意的排斥，和独特个体在艺术世界中自我专断的权力，是一种自愿的、暂时的无遮化的赋形。蒸汽波（Vaporwave）是发源于2010 年，是一种脱胎于赛博朋克的互联网文化和迷幻体验结合在一起的复古电子科技风格。一种将8、90 年代的电子舞曲互相剪辑，切断、扭曲、分层、循环成简单、宁静、阴暗、低沉、致幻的风格，杂糅出一种复古音乐与流行电音的混合乐曲，这种低成本的制作方式让蒸汽波变成了一种全民参与的艺术形式。同样在视觉元素里也是充满了低保真、彩虹渐变色、复古科技的迷幻超现实主义的风格, 在生产、分配和消费中，进行耗费、逾越和祝祭。感性的解放和直觉力的尊崇，从而使旧有的解释学的陈规陋俗得以破解，使当代人存在的知觉决然的呈现。

在B 站上的弹幕群体，以“灵魂画手”来称呼那种传神但技术低拙的画风。在观念绘画之后，“坏”画也成为了反抗已经定型的现代主义语言风格的绘画路径，作为对“好”画的嘲讽，表现为变形扭曲的图像，混搭通俗与流行的风格，配合荒诞不羁的内容。他们的挑战如此的成功，以至于现在显然不是反对派，而是与曾经合法的品味一样，受到了美术馆和收藏家的追捧，甚至登上了主流的位置。以攻击那些自诩为高级正统人士为主要的共同文化目标里，致力于生产反区向的异质化努力，无疑依然蕴藏在中国广大的民间通俗文化之中，亚文化依然是先锋性源源不断的供给资源库。能尖日作品以网络美学的属性，指向卡通、动漫、游戏，以及蒸汽波的美学风格，以新的尺度达到感官比例和平衡。故事以网络超文本（Hypertext）性作为叙事方式，作品作为一个无限开放的链接节点，时间不再是一种消极的容器，是一种不断流动的和现实之间的关系，比如“切故事”和“游戏棋”，如同一个“时空体”囊括了移动的迷宫和各种不同叙事的可能性结果。人在平淡的生活中依然需要加点甜，战胜了自我欲望的魔兽后，飘离出理性之外的奇幻和疯狂依然是人与AI 较量中不可战胜的区别。能尖日的自我的小船已经带着梦、时空和被子飘向了远方，带着她的子民去摸索主体建构的其他的可能性，这种摸索是在自设的游戏规则里面寻找未来，是指向可能性的奇幻世界的一种个人化的出路。

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MOUTH EYE QI FOOT MOUTH---the World of Possibility of Nhozagri

 

Curated by Fu Xiaodong

 

A living particle which is unwilling to face the excess of joy, lacks freedom, without joy, and remains sternest should reach its extreme. This is just a trap. The being that is fulfilled, should apply excessiveness, not deprivation, to reach extremity.

                           ------L'expérience intérieure, Georges Bataille

Amoeba

Ancient amoeba is a single-cell protozoa, belongs to the class of Sarcodina and Rhizopoda. The body of amoeba is bare and soft. It can protrude from all directions its pseudopods and has several blisters and telescopic bubbles. It is a transparent ellipsoid that can produce fission. This free-living amoeba can enter the body of the host from the nasal cavity and engulf the brain nerve cells. Therefore, it is the most important observation object for single-cell genetic experiment, and also the starting point of all the strange deformed monsters. Slime is a kind of fictional little mud who appears in video games and fantasy novels. As a sticky substance and a jelly-like semi-liquid, it is green, soft and elastic, constantly splitting and blending. In reality it is based on amoeba and originates from the Cthulhu mythology system---a huge deformed monster that can melt anything but stones into its body.

 

The conception of Nhozagri Kingdom of its soft-body subjects comes from the legend of these unicellular or multi-cellular deformed mollusk. They grow wildly, in a casual, melancholy, loose, and weak way. For these cute subjects with flock satin and fluffy hairs, "their appearances stay in the moment of captivation", their "eyes are full of illusion and hallucination", therefore "exposing their own past and future." "There are some events of things that condense a moment of things, just like a petrified magic." They are a blue sky, or a bank of white clouds, a block of time and space. They infinitely rebound with human existence, and functions with each other reciprocally and recursively. One can stay in "one place", play "one thing", and have a "complex mind". The soft-body subjects are not just some images, instead, they can be anything in this world--- ions, air, and light can all become soft-body subjects gathered by breathe. "The world is not just about the planet earth," Nhozagri said. These poor yet cute subjects are regarded by Nhozagri as a self-conscious group that can survive and reproduce on their own. Every subject is a key to enter Nhozagri Kingdom as well as to activate unique time. In short, they are the evidences of the material existence in a possible world. They superimpose on each other and form texts of the body like “MOUTH EYE QI FOOT MOUTH, which denotes “eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and body”, namely, the five senses and four limbs. For the internal organs, Nhozagri applies the method of pictogram or homophone: to apply the sound of “肠”（cháng） and “鹅”（é）to imitate the sound of “嫦娥”(cháng-é) (the Goddess in the Moon); to apply the sound of “虫”（chóng） and “蝶”（dié）to imitate the sound of “重叠”（chóng-dié） (overlap). It is a superimposed reconstruction of object pictogram, body symbol and phonetic imitation. They are not merely an alternative way of viewing. but a diversified form of “being”, returning to a more ancient and magnificent mechanism of the machine of the universe, and finally, closely join all the things together, no matter how far they are, through the analogy manifested in the ancient method of Chinese cosmology.

 

The Quilt of Time

After capitalism, industrial civilization, view of science, and Evolution Theory, everyone was facing a challenge---since the ancient symbolic system of Western Catholic collapsed, as well as the Oriental Confucian ethics and daily religious system collapsed, what should we center on to reorganize our civilization?

 

In the Nhozagri’s kingdom of possibility, every subject and every story is trying to form a space-time system of her own, that the audience can imagine in mind a grand and differed universe through the few pictures and words in this exhibition. As Nhozagri puts, "I often feel that in some spaces, whether I have been there or not, exist some fragments of things in consciousness, and they are in a non-linear time, recombined by memory and amnesia, therefore forming some form or shape, just behind me or beside me." As if with super-feeling, she fixed the impression of time and create this impression. These accidental creations formed a chaotic multi-time relationship, expanding narratives in the splitting linear time. In "Four Dimensions", the images of various subjects gradually fixed and individualized, and also increasingly personalized. The thinking mode based on a fully developed symbolism is defined as the contemporary mythological thinking of a forked time and space.

 

Nhozagri tries to appease and heal the unhealed wounds of modern people. If the exhibition “Curious Cabinet” in Sanlitun presents the great trauma in the center of civilization that cannot be healed by rationalism, empiricism, Phenomenology of Spirit, protestant ethics, and s order of symbolism, then we can say that from World War I to World War II, from national wars to democratic wars, it is human themselves who is always in the pursuit of material and spiritual satisfaction that drives people crazy. The insatiable demands for materials and the desire for the ultimate pursuit of metaphysical world that have led to the development of strange monsters within human beings.

 

Nhozagri wants to "play secretly". "Art creation is to filter gems from the air; I look into the inside world while standing outside of time, walking and picking; looking through transparent gems, the objective world have changed its soul through the refraction of marbles. Any act of play is a topological structure.” We have to turn our attention from external oppression to inner relaxation, from hysterical alienation to crystal sedimentation and soothing. We can't imagine a world without power, without capitalism exploitation. We can't imagine a world that doesn't eat people. Facing such a terrible yet normal world, we try to stop doing counterproductive things while just lingering in the world of inhumanity, so as to alleviate this contradiction and anxiety. "Until the quilt of time is covered, they will fall asleep and gradually show clear images." To cut the connection with real life is not drift outside the reality, but return to it. It is a simul-construction with the collapsing world, an alternative way to truly intervene the reality. Therefore, against the background of the indifferent doomsday, we can have such a romantic and poetic world of healing. With a temperament of post-humanistic unknown things, Nhozagri’s subjects are full of the praise for material lives in the universe and for the ordinary daily life, giving a vivid example of “all things are equal”. It is an accidental ecstasy, as if enjoying a beautiful view, a slightly mild sweet and pleasant possession, and a lasting enjoyment from the inner mind. An accidental joy comes into being, as if enjoying a landscape, it is a slightly dull sweet and pleasant possession, a lasting enjoyment from the inner mind. Nhozagri said: “Painting is a method to know the world. Lonely but brave.”

 

Vaporwave

Nhozagri was born in 1989 and graduated from Printmaking Deptment, Central Academy of Fine Arts. The sweet girl style impregnated in her works comes from the intentional rejection to college system education, and from The arbitrary power of a unique individual in the art world, which can be regarded as a voluntary, temporary and unobstructed form-giving. Vaporwave is a microgenre of retro electronic style that combines the internet meme with huge amount of cyberpunk tropes and psychedelic experience emerged in 2010.  The style is defined by its appropriations of 1980s and 1990s mood music styles; through clipping cutting, twisting, layering, and circulating, a simple, quiet, dark, low, and illusory style appears. It tends to be characterized by a nostalgic engagement mixed with a popular entertainment. The low-cost production method of Vaporwave makes it an art form that everyone has access to be involved. Also in its visual, there is the psychedelic surrealist style filled with low fidelity, rainbow gradient colors and the retro technology, consuming, exceeding and sacrificing in the production, distribution and consumption. Its perceptual liberation and intuitional respect allow the previous hermeneutics to be cracked, decisively foregrounding the perception of contemporary existence.

 

The cyber citizens on the Bilibili named the expressive but low-tech paintings as the works of “soul painters”. After the conceptual painting, the "bad" painting has become a painting path against the stereotyped modernist language style, as a mockery of "good" paintings, which is represented by distorted images, mixed with popular styles, and absurd content. Their challenge was so successful that it is now clearly not an “opposition”, but more likely a once legitimate taste, having been sought after by art galleries and collectors, and even becoming the mainstream. Subcultures, usually share a common goal—to attack those self-proclaimed “high-ranking”professionals, and devote to producing heterogeneity in the opposite direction. Subculture is still providing continuous supply of resources to the avant-garde, as it is undoubtedly hidden in the vast Chinese folk cultures. The works of Nhozagri, with the attributes of cyber aesthetics, point to the hybrid styles of cartoons, animations, games and vaporwave, reaching the sensual proportion balance with a new scale. The story uses the hypertext as a narrative method. When her works are taken as an infinitely open chain node, time is no longer a passive container; instead, it becomes a continuous relationship with the reality, such as her works “cutting stories” and “chess game", like a "space-time body" encompassing the moving maze and various possibilities of different narratives.

 

People still need to add some sweetness in their plain life. After defeating the monster of self-desire, the fantasy and madness that drift away from rationality is still the invincible difference between human beings and AI. Nhozagri’s boat of the self-speaking has drifted off into the distance with dreams, time and space and quilts, and with her people to explore other possibilities of the construction of the subject. This kind of exploration is to find the future in the rules of the game set by herself, which is a personal way out of the fantasy world of possibilities.