The rapid development of economy, politics and art has highlighted China as a dazzling star of the world. While the global financial crisis is cooling down the art world to its trough, Beijing is surpassing many cities in the United States and Europe to become one of the most prominent cities in the art world. Many outstanding Chinese artists are seizing this unprecedented chance to more actively create preeminent artworks. The economic turbulence presents artists an excellent opportunity to show the public how positive and encouraging the strength of art is and how art helps to rebuild people’s faith in life. It is my interest to know whether today’s artists are capable of subtly converting their feelings of reality to artworks and whether they can establish unique methodologies to represent art. Unlike their predecessors, young artists are greatly diversified in their mentalities and perspectives of art, reflecting the individualism of the post-modern commodity society. We can see the coexistence of post-’60, post-’70 and post-’80 artists, among whom many are hailed in numerous advertisements and commercial slogans. However, nobody among them is charismatic enough to be a leader followed by others. Maybe it is because personality inherently means independence and exclusiveness; maybe it is because art has found its way back home by combining artworks’ social and realistic meanings and artists’ personalities. This tendency poses a new challenge to all artists, i.e. in addition to representing reality, how to invent unrepeatable art language to awake the public.
　　The personality we are talking about is something brilliant only when it is independent, and excellent artworks are hailed and applauded only when they are unique. It is in their strong differences that their similarities are reflected. An artist can have his or her own unique methodology and perspective. Chen Zhiguang, who has been creating artworks in Zhangzhou of Fujian Province, is not a familiar figure in Beijing. However, no one in Beijing’s art domain can ignore his existence. Like the artworks of other outstanding artists, Chen Zhiguang’s sculptures impress their audience with irreplaceable and unparalleled visual language. Chen Zhiguang’s ambition, however, goes far beyond creating a unique visual language. His ultimate goal is to integrate his sense of social responsibility into his works. I have known him for almost six years and I am deeply impressed by his character. As a man born in Fujian Province, he possesses a subtle, delicate and contemplative mind. Interestingly, he is also passionate and decisive, which are some traits typically seen in a man from northern China. Maybe it is the intertwinement of temperaments that endows his works with a unique attribute marked by ambivalence.
　　Chen Zhiguang lives in a country where there is rapid development and constant change, and he encapsulates the legendary experience in his artworks. He likes ants, which make him a well-known artist. The artist uses ants as a symbol and endows them with new vitality. In his works, ants, as a single species, seem to bear the pressure on all living things caused by the intertwinement of history and reality. As an insignificant and helpless species, ants are personified in his works to represent the artist’s understanding of globalization and urbanization. Ants have inhabited the earth for billions of years. Like humans, they live together, have social structure, exist in great number and launch wars from time to time. This enables the artist to associate the roles of humans to those of ants. Chen Zhiguang uses stainless steel for his ants, which can reflect the images of the audience and the surrounding environment, to further enhance the interaction between ants and humans. Images reflected from the stainless-steel ants represent the anxiety of people living in cities and the artist’s concern about the future of mankind. We can get a huge amount of information from his works, including the relations between ants, between ants and surrounding environments, and between ants and humans. The artist puts the stainless-steel ants, sometimes in a wasted factory, sometimes among buildings in a city, sometimes in a traditional construction, sometimes in the front of Olympic stadium and sometimes in rural courtyard. He intertwines the symbol of ants and the symbols of environments to enrich the connotation and enhance the visual impact of his works. Different environments allow the ants to have different forms of vitality and different kinds of relations. Chen Zhiguang not only creates the ants, but also endows them with diversified social identities. When juxtaposed with different surroundings, ants possess different contextual meanings and cultural logics. He can put the ants anywhere he wants without having to worry about the results, because he always knows the ants are bound to form new symbols, new elements and new uncertainties, when integrated into new environments. The new spaces constructed by this provide the artist with a basis to define his identity and clarify social status, where his attitude towards, or even criticism of, reality and history can be freely expressed. Although his ants are from the reality, they have far surpassed it and have been deeply imprinted with traditional Chinese culture. In the context of contemporary Chinese art, where complex art forms and new concepts coexist, outstanding artists have begun to meditate on more profound questions about art from the angle of social complexity, like what kind of contemporary artworks are intrinsically Chinese, yet at the same time universal. To a certain extent, contemporary Chinese art has learned from the West. The new generation of China’s artists, however, is trying to shake off the symbolic purpose of contemporary Chinese art, which is deeply entrenched in western people’s minds. They are creating artworks with more “Oriental Spirit”. This positive tendency of contemporary Chinese art is vividly reflected in Chen Zhiguang’s Scroll and Stage series. The West’s emphasis on art conception and desire to intervene in politics are a Marxist tradition since the existence of the Frankfurt School represented by Juergen Habermas, and reflect the cultural logic of Post-Modernistic philosophy, or Late Capitalism, represented by Frederic Jameson. In the East, especially in China where Confucianism is deeply entrenched in people’s minds, the philosophy of the West does not establish itself in the ideology of most people with the advent of globalization. Rather, there is a trend of returning to tradition, which is exemplified in some new scholar artists’ paintings, some new water-ink paintings and the so-called “Vulgar Art”. In fact, we can see that the reflection and regression had already begun slowly but steadily, after observing contemporary Chinese art in recent years. From Xu Bing and Cai Guoqiang, who “invaded” the western art realm with Chinese elements, to Zhang Xiaogang and Zhou Chunya, who tried to mix reality, ideality and romance, to the ’60 and ‘70 artists, who are marked by collective self-consciousness, we can see the progress of national civilization and the awakening of national consciousness. Younger artists, like Chen Zhiguang, have explicitly demonstrated their strength, unlimited potential and a great sense of responsibility.
　　Chen Zhiguang has created a new species, which does not eat and has no gender, but can self-reproduce. It seems to be a perfect species in the artist’s opinion. Human beings are greedy, jealous, and sometimes malicious. The world would be a perfect place, if people were able to feed themselves and self-reproduce. The images of stainless-steel ants reflect the artist’s desire to maintain his character in a society marked by materialism. From the standpoint of sociology, this can be regarded as a kind of criticism against reality. The reflective stainless-steel surface symbolizes bizarre social phenomena, and the biological image of ant symbolizes the intangible essence of the society. Chen Zhiguang is a scholar artist, who uses art to represent his understanding of the world and he uses stainless steel the way ancient painters use paper and ink. The artist combines a bizarre social phenomena and his rational understanding of the society in an unbelievable way. In doing so, he doesn’t only elevates his art with his experiences and feelings, but he also elevates his life with his art.
Liu Chunfeng
In National Art Museum of China on May 16th, 2009