Looking and speculating on Bi Jianye’s (b. 1985 in Dandong, Liaoning Province) paintings it is no doubt that they appear very challenging. Having started practicing with oil painting only since 2007 in a few years many interesting experiments have come out from his canvases all linking to himself, his life experiences and his approach to painting. On occasion of his solo show at Platform China, the artist has chosen to present works from different periods, with a particular focus on the most recent ones attempting to highlight his art position with inherent connections. In the exhibition introduction, Bi Jianye, adopting very modest and moving words, recounts the last few years experiences in painting for him, from the memory of his first time approaching the canvas till the dramatic realization that everything at the end is just futile as a dead background, from the imagination of the content to the erasure of connective elements and narrative structures towards the pure speculation on the essence of painting itself, from scenery filled with emotion to common objects – all these precious memories work in accordance for us to enter Bi Jianye’s creative landscapes.
However, as spectators and critics, when we discuss the entire production of an artist as the starting point of our speculation we cannot but confront with a dilemma: whether or not we should fully accept the meanings and the logics of his “œuvre”. Talking about history of art since Modernism, the sense of time in relation to an artwork is often debated (in relation to nature, time is nothing more than a life’s existence). Moreover, when discussing the beginning of an artist’s production, if we consider him as a creator, what we should face first is not his artworks, but focus instead on the overwhelming imagination and anticipation prior to the realisation of the work itself.
In a broader sense, in the context of contemporary art, painting as a medium reveals itself set against many oppositions: it is exhausted by the excessive description of theory, it defends its some thousand year tradition and sometimes doesn’t fit with a more socially engaged contemporary art, it nurtures great distrust towards the ready-made, graphic-realism and also the virtual world. However, in the history of Chinese contemporary art, especially when approaching the contemporary art industry of the post-90’s, the medium of painting appears as a trend all along, at the centre of criticism and commercialization; comparing with other mediums, artists who choose painting have actually experienced all issues related to formalism, critique of society, conceptualism and the essence of painting itself. Hence, underthe lead of discourses lacking their own criticism, the practice of oil painting has been divided into different categories, typologies and styles by protagonists anxious to write about the history of Chinese contemporary art. The necessity for an ‘art history’ and the strong demands from the market are very much tied one to the other continuously squeezing to the point of reducing the space of painting itself. Bi Jianye’s teachers at the Lux Xun academy, to name one the artist Wang Xingwei, have personally experienced this process. Therefore, looking at Bi Jianye’s working context, he undoubtedly has to face huge challenges.
Latest works by Bi Jianye focuses on ordinary objects; at first glance it could look like a common aesthetic strategy. However, under Bi Jianye’s brushstrokes these objects evidently differ from Duchamp’s replica of industrial products and those of general aesthetic taste. The work “The Endurance Machine” (2011) has given its name to the title of this exhibition: the work represents a spongy shape seemingly an exercise machine. As Bi Jianye explained in an interview, he doesn’t have any clue on how to use this machine or what this machine is used for. This difficult to define “unknown” yet known object has been positioned in an angle of a wall, but with a close-up focus it seems just in front of us. At the same time, we cannot see very much of a detailed texture as the artist attempts to express it through the volume, the colours and the irregularity of light and shadow. Works that are quite conceptual as they representameaningare“SimilarBody”(2011),“Every5Mistakes”(2011),“SixBoxes” (2011), “Front” (2011): they all form a cross shape built with hollow cubes. The shape of this object is even more unfamiliar: it is not a ready-made, and it is not even a truly symbolic cross. When Bi Jianye depicts these objects on one side he attempts at ‘suspending’ their meaning, and not without a humour that teases any misreading or association: for example, a life saving buoy in the shape of a sausage and three metal plates in the shape of the Arabic numbers 1,2,3. On the other side, he attempts at describing undefined aesthetics: he leaves on the canvases traces of brushstrokes as hand crafts, the shape of the object doesn’t seem natural but quite absurd as if it was floating on the surface, however in front of all these meaningless overtones he provokes a reaction whether it is to ridicule them or not. This ambiguity can create fear and hesitation reinforcing the content of his oeuvre.
Indeed, Bi Jianye’s more recent works investigate the very essence of painting. Broadly speaking, this investigation easily leads to the development of patterns of abstraction. However, Bi Jianye often chooses objects as vehicle for the message of his paintings, instead of drawing back from the expanded geographies of Willem De Kooning, Mark Rothko or Antoni Tapies. This choice discloses the artist’s position and attitude. Perhaps we can explain the reasons why he decides to paint random objects with an association to his early ‘situationist’ paintings or to those works based on his life experience in the moment of hesitation towards the meaning of painting. Bi Jianye displays both a charmed and anxious attitude towards time, the endlessness of time and the contradiction of its expression feed into a nagging anxiety of creation. Objects are a memory of time, however ordinary objects actually obscure their own temporality and therefore they break off from the sense of reality into imagination. However, in Bi Jianye’s works this ‘rupture’ is soft and slow, it appears as a process or an intermediate state. Yet objects are objects, we can still recognize them but they cannot be named. In this way, the audience’s voyeuristic desire to peep into an artist’s inner world through his works is blocked by a faded aesthetic where he plays the role of both judge and protagonist. Hence, the hesitation provoked by the works, these unclear qualities that seem to brutally reveal the artist’s mood- in reality it is nothing but the foundation of an aesthetic position, one that expresses the uncertain relationships between the artist and the self, between art and painting, between words and objects, or simply it’s a feeble rupture.
This fracture has possibilities for broader analyses in a contemporary context. Surely what Bi Jianye is looking for is not a spiritual truth nor he is after the traces imagination has left behind at the boundaries with the inner and outer world. What he is looking for are actually those crude objects that bring traces of truth- they are fragile and desolate, inhabiting his paintings and constantly questioned. In his practice, he discards abstraction and aesthetic, a decision motivated by taste and a position in relation to the power of the market; at the same time he avoids the guidance of words and turns to an expression of subjectivity. Hence we question: does the expression of subjectivity often appear in a self-absorbing modernist aesthetic? More specifically, his works, when participating of a mood, an instinct or of a subjective awareness, do they have a cognitive purpose? We cannot answer on the spot. These questions reside in the artist’s understanding of the essence of painting, and even if this understanding is right in front of us, it however takes shape in all sorts of relations that the artist builds with traditional aesthetics throughout his practice. It’s an unfolding process of cognition, experience and judgment in the artist’s work. Bi Jianye’s work doesn’t have the semblance of asceticism, it actually embodies different meanings: it is an effort that comes out from material things and abstraction, from experience and knowledge, from expression and delicate ruptures. Hence, for what concerns his works, no matter how difficult for art critics is to define his pictorial language in front of a vulnerable position, how confusing is the ambiguity of the innocence of his objects, it is impossible to ignore the unavoidable and simplified criticism in his paintings. This is his right to exist in the field of contemporary art and also the basis, whether he is aware of this or not, that he continues to build upon.