Double Denial

by Pi Li
September 2006

I have known Zhong Shan for years. All these years, Zhong Shan has been living quietly in a corner of the city, painting. He seems to be struggling to keep his life and work pure against the noise and fury around, in an age when maintaining purity is more challenging than creating turmoil. Likewise, compared to the present more forward Chinese contemporary arts, Zhong Shan's works appears simple. In his number series, Zhong, in a state of Zen Buddist performing Zazen, writes numbers repeatedly on a long fabric, reconstructing reality using the basic graphic unites. This might be easily done with a computer, a printer and a simple computer program; however, the artist took a remarkably long time and a large amount of energy to complete it, a key component of the work.

The artist started out exploring numbers thoughtlessly and it quickly became a tate of creative action. Zhong Shan says, "Number is a form. It goes from easy to complicated; it begins, ends and begins again. It's just like what Buddhist Canon describes as eternal return. You go to where you come from; it ends where it begins. Everything is developing in a certain direction and trend, which is unpredictable, changeable and repetitious. It is just this unpredictability, changeability and repetitiousness that lead our thoughts beyond the painting and make space for imagination."

Maybe for the artist, writing down these numbers is a process of illumination, not a religious one, a Hermeneutic apocalypse. The number series for Zhong Shan is pure process art. It is the action and experience to achieve the illumination instead of didactic imagery. That's why we cannot see much independent existence of pictures, if any, it is a mere outline, a "maintaining" of painting action. If we say that the world is a broken place, then what the artists was trying to do is "sew" it up with these numbers. In doing so, he made an attempt to understand the character of the present life: in a digitalized world, what are the identities of life, individual identity and the uncertainty of the answer are the greatest enlightenment of the work. The action of resultless inquiry itself is a source of inspiration.

The honesty to the work might be considered a lack of concern for representationalism which is now popular in contemporary Chinese art. The artist's commitment to process is uncompromising. We can't help ask if reality justifies our daily watch or is our so-called art and ideas, to some extent, complicating it. In today's China, what Chinese people feel most intensely is not the ostensible reality, but the conflicts among all kinds of values and ancient traditions. The scariest part is that these conflicts are disguised in a cold face of prosperity and noise, unnoticeable to us. Said in the self-description the artist made, "Looking with sensibility at these orderly arranged numbers, you can perceive the coldness of post-industrial era. Every urban dweller is like a numerical trace, a passionate coordinator while a lonely being. A person is just a number in the city; so is a city on the earth; the earth in the universe and the universe in something else…" If we see Zhong Shan in the light of his age, style and artistic expression, we will find him an artist who devotes himself wholly to breaking the superficial reality with style and revealing the spiritual truth of this era of say, returning the truth.

As a painter born after the 70s, Zhong Shan has a unique way of processing knowledge and thinking. The older generation painters are living in a world of words as the media from, while the so-called post-80s generation grew up in the graphic media. Zhong Shan lives between words and images, having qualities of both generations.

We can see very clearly the duality in Zhong Shan's works, which sterns from his age and personality. On one hand, he abandons the idea of creating an image to form an idea; on the other hand, he removes the core speech idea claims in a piece of work. He clears out ideas as well as images and exhausts the work of the essentials with the painting process. He is determined to use "nothing" to represent "something", individual behaviors too social values. His duality comes down to his denial of both images and ideas. Even if he is in the spot of exhibition, he focuses more on atmosphere and performance than the exhibit itself. This duality is a summary of the characteristic of his generation: a refusal of articulating an idea as well as accepting others' interpretation; minimization of the interrelationship between works and audience. Hence, when we are presented with his works, it's like going into an endless action and space where the linear time is replaced with eternal return. Tie becomes pure; one only hears the faint sound of the nib scratching the paper.

Returning to his work, we can understand the message he conveys is beyond symbols and logic. It stands against the disorderliness of ideas, attitudes, values and knowledge of reality. Zhong Shan has no intention to provide a religious interpretation; instead, he lets us participate in his search for a personal solution. Zhong's peaceful work against a complicated backdrop turns art into an action that only matters to the individual in this time of turmoil. For Chinese art, it is a process of resetting and a sign of new beginning.