Songs from A Room-汪莺莺个展

​文：付晓东

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空间站将于2014年12月14日至2015年1月11日为你带来 “Songs from A Room”—— 汪莺莺首次个人作品展。作为南京艺术学院油画专业的青年教师，可以从汪莺莺身上看到印象主义以后的平面绘画风格与现代流行文化的融合，这种融合几乎不带矛盾和冲突，反而显示出一种简洁、单纯、轻松的气质。她喜欢格列柯、弗洛伊德，也会喜欢莫兰迪、亚历克斯·卡茨，这些富于表现力和个人色彩的艺术家，促使她更迫切地想要构建属于自己的绘画语言。汪莺莺说她有些惧怕文学性的描述，因为那种方式很容易被文字代替，因此，她不介意作品的题材来自流行文化中的图片，也不更多的纠结于构图（《肖像》系列，2013-2014年），不一定非要画一个对象的正面肖像（《背》系列，2013-2014年）,甚至，对于她熟悉的朋友也制造出一点“陌生化”的距离感（《在南京》系列，2011-2014年），她说这样由画者本人可操控的空间往往更大。

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 “陌生化”作为一种创作手法（Verfremdungs Effekt）由德国的戏剧家诗人布莱希特提出，亦被译成间离效果。俄国形式主义的代表人物什克洛夫斯基“务求新奇”（Ostranenie）的概念也与此一脉相承。“陌生化”后来成为俄国形式主义理论的核心概念之一，它指出文艺的美感特征首先是惊奇陌生的新鲜感。什克洛夫斯基在《作为手法的艺术》等文章中认为，艺术的目的是要人感觉到事物，而不是仅仅是知道事物。艺术的技巧就是使对象变得陌生，使形式变得困难，增加感觉的难度和时间长度，因为感觉过程本身就是审美目的，必须设法延长。“陌生化”并不只是为了新奇，而是通过新奇使人从对生活的漠然或麻木状态中惊醒过来。

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“Songs from A Room”是莱昂纳德?科恩（Leonard Cohen）1969年的民谣唱片名，此次展览借用这一名称是想描述一种对熟悉事物保持一定距离的观看方式，“陌生化”的绘画语言如同一个房子中传来的歌声，既熟悉又带有某种介质转译后的疏离感，是一种感官的再认识，再感知，企图开启一种新的审美方式。一直以来，汪莺莺将自己限制在一个二维平面狭小而单纯的形式中，这似乎已经成为她创作的某种信条。她喜欢给画外留有更多的空间，作品是对各种引申意义的邀请，对新鲜感知力的召唤。

此次展览主要展出的是她2013年至2014年的创作。《背》和更早一些的系列，画的是她身边的朋友，司空见惯的生活瞬间和周边环境，她粗略的，有些模糊不清与灰白状态的绘画，有时我们甚至可以看到她流动的笔触在画布湿润时反复涂抹的痕迹。她将对象放置于一定的安全距离，轻松中携带着某种情感，但是我们又能感受到她对于情感表达那种节制而审慎的态度。在绘画语言上追求不断简化提炼，从而达到纯粹统一的效果。她从不在意艺术家与画中人物应有的关系和距离，然而，她笔下的所有人物几乎都表现出与她有着某种关系。《肖像》系列中，那些名人在她面前似乎毫不掩饰内心的世界，这让我们感受到他们在镁光灯背后更加私密的个人世界。她的肖像以人物名作为作品标题，更加强调了作品的私密性。透明油彩的使用，不仅彰显了笔触的力量，也强化了人物的内心世界，营造出敏感迷离的氛围，这种简单直接的距离感正是汪莺莺作品的魅力所在。

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Space Station is going to present you with Wang Yingying’s first solo exhibition “Songs from a Room” from Dec. 14th to Jan. 11st, 2014. Wang is a young teacher of oil painting faculty in Nanjing Art Academy, and we can clearly see the integration of classical portrait style and modern popular culture in her, an integration with no paradox or conflict, but with a succinct, pure and relaxed temperament. Wang says she is afraid of literary description, which is easily replaced by words. She is more interested in constructing her own painting language, for it offers bigger space for the painter himself or herself to control. Therefore, she does not mind using pictures from pop culture as materials and does not dwell too much on the careful composition of picture (The Portrait series, 2013-2014), does not have to be a front (The Back series, 2013-2014), and even for her familiar friends, she would create some distance by using defamiliarization(The In Nanjing series, 2011-2014).

“Defamiliarization” or “Alienation effect” (Verfremdungs Effekt) is put forward by the German playwright Bertolt Brecht. The concept can be traced to the same origin with the “ostranenie” put forward by Viktor Shklovsky of the Russian formalism. Verfremdung in Deutsch is a very expressive word, which includes multi-layered meanings like alienating, distancing, defamiliarizing, and dissimilating. “Defamiliarization” later becomes one of the key concepts of Russian formalism theory, which considers that the aesthetic of art lies in the freshness brought by amazing and unfamiliar things. Shklovsky in his Art as Technique says, the purpose of art is to make people feel the things, not just simple know the things. The technique of art is to defamilarize the object, making the form difficult by increasing the difficulty of feeling and the length of time, because the feeling process itself is the purpose of aesthetics, and the artist should try to expand it. “Defamiliarization” is not only for the sake of novelty, but arousing and exciting people from their apathy and numbness towards life.

“Songs from a Room” comes from the name of Leonard Cohen’s 1969 LP, for the exhibition attempts to use the name to describe a way of inspecting from a distance the things we are familiar with. Defamiliarized painting language resembles the sound of a song that comes from a room, both familiar but distanced because of the retranslation through certain medium. This is a kind of re-understanding of the sense organ, a kind of re-perceiving, trying to create a new aesthetics of re-understanding and re-perceiving. Wang has been limiting herself within a pure, narrow, and two-dimensional form, which seems to have become her doctrine on creation. She likes to leave more space outside the painting, viewing the work as an invitation to various kinds of extended meanings, and as a summoning of fresh perception, illustrating that an indirectly open painting can bring more possibilities of multi-perspective interpretations.

This exhibition mainly consists of her works from 2013 to 2014. It has the Back and several other earlier series, which are about the friends around her, pieces of common life, familiar corners, her rough, ambiguous, and ash gray paintings. Sometimes we can even see the repetitive daubing trace her flowing brush strokes have left on the canvas when it is still wet. She places the object within a safe and communicative distance, with some emotions in relax, yet we can also feel her restrained and prudent attitude towards the expression of emotions. She constantly simplifies and refines the painting language in order to make the painting pure and unified. She never cares the supposed relation and distance between the artist and the figure portrayed in the painting, yet almost all the figures she draws have shown some intimate relationship with her. In The Portrait series, those celebrities do not conceal their inner loneliness and melancholy in front of her, enabling us to learn the more private inner world and some peculiar, paranoid behaviors behind the limelight. The titles of her works are named after the names of the figures portrayed, increasing the privacy of the works. The application of transparent paints not only shows the power of the brush stroke, but also strengthens the character’s inner world, building up a sensitive and ambiguous atmosphere. This simple and direct sense of distance is exactly the charm of Wang’s works.