Outsider, Zhong Shan, and his Trance

by Pi Li
March 2016

Zhong Shan was my best friend in college. At the Central Academy of Fine Arts, he was in the Mural Painting Department and I was enrolled in the Art History Department. He was a couple years older and had entered college a year earlier than me. We came to know each other through his teacher, Tang Hui, who had been recruited as a faculty member in the Mural Painting Department just after graduating from the Academy. Tang Hui’s and my parents were colleagues and old friends, while Zhong Shan’s uncle Cao Li was also a faculty member in the Mural Painting Department. Both families hoped that Tang Hui would help look after of us, and it is from this that Zhong Shan and I became good friends. I always thought that Zhong Shan and I had many similarities; for example, each of us had family members that were doctors. As a result, we both attached importance to cleanliness, which in the cramped dormitories of the period with students mostly from the outlying regions, was exceedingly rare. At the time, the students enrolled at the Academy had either graduated from the affiliated middle school of the Academy or taken a series of entrance exams over five or six years to gain entrance. Regardless, students from either track would have left their parents by the age of 15 or 16, and had formed scary health habits that were more than a little worrying. As my major, I had to study the decidedly unpopular area of art history at college. While Zhong Shan, who was considered a troubled youth and was always getting into fights, came to the Academy after it was estimated he didn’t have the interest needed to pass the entrance exams to a regular university. I studied at a horrible middle school where often an orderly class would be rushed by other students and fights ensued; being detained after class was a commonplace occurrence. Zhong Shan also spent his adolescence embroiled in fighting and learning to draw because of the huge challenges faced in getting admitted to regular university. These common experiences forged our friendship. I was very lonely when I first entered college, and Zhong Shan was like a big brother to me: naturally we would band together to carry out assorted misdeeds, like drawing fake film tickets on the weekend in order to sneak into the Longfu Temple cinema for the all-night movies.

Born in the 1970s, our generation led a life that seemed more dull and uneventful, with fewer ups and downs. During the dynamic period of the 1980s, we were considered just kids; when the fine arts scene started to boom, we had only just graduated from college. When the market economy emerged, we were still looking for direction in our careers. Thus, our generation seemed to always be lagging behind; forty years passed in a flash for us. Our lives had less the victorious face to face confrontation with destiny’s plan and were rather more like the humble man prodded along by time’s pushing hands, which appeared soft and gentle, but would strike you when your attention wondered, and caused you to lose your center of gravity. Zhong Shan’s path as an artist, as an earnest artist, was not one that led to overnight recognition. With his quiet, contended disposition and individual honesty, he always seemed to be roaming outside of the established art circle. After a few mixed years following graduation from college in the early 1990s, he took a job in the decorating industry for a year before resigning to become a professional painter. Later, he moved to Shanghai for an extended period before returning to Beijing again at the beginning of the century. Even after so many years, Zhong Shan in my mind has remained the same; he has always adhered to an evolutionary creative process in his art. When the market was booming, his works sold well, but he terminated his exhibition contract with the gallery and turned to a new process, scripting numbers onto long scrolls of silk. Even when the market contracted, he still engaged in creating works of completely different styles. As his old friend and a critic, I have witnessed the changes in his approach and written articles on his many varied series of work.

After he graduated from college, Zhong Shan developed a unique surrealist style, one that combined the puppets and games of his childhood with social reality. This style draws on influences from his two most important teachers, Cao Li and Tang Hui. Cao Li and Zhong Shan were both born in Guiyang. Cao Li became known in the art world in the 1980s for his uncanny but idyllic pastoral style of work. I always felt that the artists from the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau had an oddly sly and crafty temperament. Time moves slow there and the folklore stories of ghosts foster in the artists a natural affinity with primitivism and surrealism. The artistic style of Tang Hui is also based in a form of surrealism. Yet, his style differs from Cao Li in that he uses animation and cartoons combined with depictions of history, revolution, and futurism to create a sense of coldness and indifference in contrast to the mellowness and rich colors of Cao Li’s work. Thus, we can see that the earlier artistic style of Zhong Shan was deeply influenced by these two teachers; he possessed the ability to deconstruct deep space as in Tang Hui’s paintings, while producing works with warmth, like a glowing light in the darkness.

As an artist, Zhong Shan is fortunate to have left Beijing for Shanghai, as it allowed him to quickly advance to new approaches. Although he had already developed diverse styles, and established his own artistic language and a set of methods, the commercial atmosphere of Shanghai served as a new stimulus for him psychologically and visually. Surrealism gradually disappeared from his work, yet as a kind of sublimated temperament, it had instilled a sensitivity to time and space. The urban environment gradually became the central focus of his work during this period, but with particular interest in the psychological relationships of the urban individual to time and space. In many works, the artist employed a “mirroring” technique to express a change from the gaze to the trance, which I believe also reflected the experience of Zhong Shan living as an “outsider” in Shanghai. He has referred to these mirroring as “Double Images,” not to indicate a relationship in language but rather a co-existent time-space relationship. During this same period, he developed a performance-like painting process, done year in and year out, which involved repeatedly imprinting the numbers 0 through 9 on silk scrolls tens of meters in length. These works are referred to as “recording time” by the artist. This ritualist writing provided a means to claim time and still the mind, while the long and winding silk scrolls themselves occupy the time and space of the exhibition hall, embodying neither proximity nor distance. These two forms of creation, which might appear on first view to be different, in fact reflect the same issue of the individual’s sole and mind in the process of urbanization.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Zhong Shan returned to Beijing. After nearly a decade, people finally saw these new groups of work. The artist had begun to abandon the canvas and draw on transparent silk. Thus, the “Double Images” originally mirrored on one side were now transformed into images unfolding through a positive/negative space; the transparent silk enabled the mirrored images to overlap while still producing a sense of separation between them. This approach creates a myriad of parallels in the exhibition hall, while compressing time and space. Though each image is realistic in its rendering, the relationships between the different images are surreal. In terms of the thematic content, the artist shifted from general observations on human existence and the capturing of urban scenes from years earlier to an examination of his own existence, dreams, and experiences. For Zhong Shan, evident throughout the exhibition, there is a continuing interest in confronting the issue of space, namely the problem of how paintings exist in space. He combines two stylistic forms in Shanghai, yet bravely abandons those identifiable symbols to claim a unique personal form. The content of each screen is rich and flexible, while the existence of the painting breaks away from the wall and integrates with the space, becoming an object in the gallery. Here, multiple images are compressed in space, creating a unique visual experience.

Over the past years, I have felt an engagement with the changes I see in Zhong Shan’s process; I admire his courage and I’m amazed by his growth. In today’s China, we often feel that we are out of touch with our times; the education we received taught us the taste, techniques, and persistence of the last century, but the rapid development and changes occurring around us in this era make us feel helpless and restricted. Some artists try to conceal these difficulties by constantly chasing a new horizon. Other artists, like Zhong Shan, instead turn inward to examine themselves and their life experience, and then transfer this experience into new forms of vision and space, yet behind these forms is still a kind of nervousness and uneasiness. Zhong Shan’s works and what they represent are consistent with his state of mind. He is an introverted man and often absent-minded; yet whether in conversation with us, in the city he lives in, or in the circle of contemporary artists, Zhong Shan is present while at the same time making you feel he is an outsider. It seems that the development of art in our era has lost a united direction; with its accelerated pace, every artist can rise to fame on WeChat for a fleeting moment. Acknowledging this reality, one is able to understand the floating images in the exhibition space: they are the momentary suspension, trance, and departure from real life in our era. What the artist can do is to open his heart and wait calmly. Art, in fact, means waiting: one creates a work with one’s hands and waits for others to be surprised and to understand. This response might arrive, or possibly not. But most likely, if it does come, one no longer cares about it. So now, as you enter the exhibition hall, you enter the artist’s awaiting. And at this moment, as his contemporary, colleague, and friend, and because we share the same experience of this tumultuous period, he and I feel the same uneasiness.