WU YIMING

Wu Yiming and the artists of his generation shouldered a mission to reconcile the conflict between Chinese and Western painting. Moreover, he drifted round the edges between traditional spirit and modernism, which constituted precisely the unique style and quality of his artwork. The characters in the early stage of his work appear very impressive. They lack facial expressions; they seem distorted or stretched, often hovering or dashing. Wu’s unrivalled language of expression was formed during this period. By ink, watercolors and acrylic applied in a multiplicity of layers, the paintings were rendered with ambiguity and intimacy. The images characterised by obscurity and alienation show the artist’s view towards the furor of contemporary Chinese society and his refinement and interpretation of people’s psychological distance. In a further step, Wu created images of Buddha, the Statue of Liberty and Beuys all destitute of facial expressions and presented them in the language of sculpture. Even after materialisation of the “blankness”, viewers can still easily identify these “faceless classics”. In this way, Wu investigated the construction of cultural symbols as well as the spread of cultural authority, giving a hint on the concepts which probably bore the semblance of the purposes and possibilities of art.

In the new series of ink paintings, however, we can hardly find reproductions of the artist’s concerns with either society or history. His art creation has entered a new phase of intensified personalization, like literati at leisure and in a playful state after a nice cup of tea or a tasty meal. Wu Yiming depicts a blooming orchid, a corner of a water pond, a pair of dancing swans, a car on an empty ground and the spectrum of a neon light and so forth, for painting has been naturally integrated into his everyday life. At this moment, the portraits by the artist already possess a concrete meaning, such as these of friends or designers. Rendered in a seemingly casual way, they are nevertheless utterly dissimilar to the blurred and average faces of humankind. Wu Yiming is quite familiar with the people in his own paintings, including their life experience and academic achievement, and thus manages to paint their portraits with remarkable vividness. WU Yiming’s paintings move towards idle privacy, which exhibits exactly an aspect of the development of Chinese contemporary painting. After clarification of the intricate relationship between tradition and modernity, the new realization of the social functions of artist and the understanding of the purpose of art enables WU Yiming and other artists to focus consciously on the notion of self-existence. Closely related to their creators, these images are associated as well with painting per se and the social reality.