A Delicate OperatingTable:
Action and Image by Liang Hao
Article by Hai Jie
"Very ancient laws rule every detail of his gestures, saved for once from the uncertainty of human intentions; each second marks a pure movement: a sidestep, the chair thirty centimeters out from the table, three wipes of the rag, half-turn to the right, two steps forwards, each second marks, perfect, even, unblurred. Thirty-one. Thirty-two. Thirty-three. Thirty-four. Thirty-five. Thirty-six. Thirty-seven. Each second in its exact place." Liang Hao cited the wordsof Alain Robbe-Grillet who is the representative personage of French noveau romantointerpret his works. "Action" becomes the subject, while the displacement of action almost runs through most of works byLiang Hao. The delicate hands, metal strips, books, bones and other articles are prepared for "action". The momentsnarrated by Alain Robbe-Grillet are measured by the displacement of action in Liang Hao’s creation.
In the work The Sensory Order, the hands of the malewhose back bears a potted flower and makes the push-up became an important password. The time is clearand the action is labeled.
It is more a subconsciousimage than a painting. Even in some elaborately shot dynamic images, the changeandadaptionof actionsalso show us these "images" -- the visual routeofthe artistabout hispainting.
The history metaphorizedbybonesis decomposed in Historyand is reconstructed in the As Metaphorical Actionand As Metaphorical Action 2. The bone in front the figure(unknown gender) who are in white witha mop rod in hands seems like theobjecttreated on theoperating table, and the "action" showsthemovement. Does the action cause a falsified history?
Time presentsits existence through visualization.
Hands, as the carrierof action, are entrusted asan important role by Liang Hao and areadjusted and gazed repeatedly. The hands operate the metal strip which passes through the glass on the desktop and forms across. The hands holding the metal strip in parallelbecome the "eternity" in proposition, while the "hardship" displayed by both hands masking the face and the major "lengthiness" formed by a hand covering one side of the face also drivethe artist’s thinking aboutsuch media.
When we follow the “action” of Liang Hao and attempt to enter the long corridor with a historical metaphor, we are impededby notional image references. The rainbow and LGBT characterson the book held by both hands in The Glass under the Rainbow, the bisexual face in Portrait of Men and Women, and the cross-dressingfiguresin A Kind of Visionand The Other Vision, have raised our awareness of the historyof painting, and unfoldedthese social topics of marginalized group. The woman holds around mirror in an action of throwing a discus, while the male puts hands on the sofa with a backrest, which shows the replacement of both mechanical relationship and gender identity. This replacement, in addition to displaying the image, is completed with the "action" of hands.
The work A Delicate OperatingTablerevealsmy feeling when I enteredLiang Hao's studio and sawhis paintings in the array. Why is the operatingtable delicate, instead of being bloody? Such question means we shall findwherethe lostpart of life temperatureis.
In fact, the operation exists for real and is anatomical. It points tothe action, the discourse (book), history (bone and coral) and reality (marginal man) constituted by the action, instead of the flesh.
The word "delicacy" is industrial. The even and exact lighting only createsimages without shadows, hence it has no temperature. The expression of charactersloses its vitality, like a silica gel productand it reflects a kind of "technical precision" as mentioned by Laszlo Moholy Nagy) in 1924 whose early works focused on showing a kind of "objective criterion" and "abstinence-type restraint". Based on it, we could identify such"restraint" shot in an early “Deadpan”work Portraitby the German artist Thomas Ruff.The work continues the "objective criterion" of Nag, who said in his interview: "I think we lived in a western industrialized era at thetime.The world surrounded us, for example, the parking lot is with even industrial lighting. So I intend to handle with my models bythis method and take photosof some charactersin the same way. I don’t highlight anyone, andhope to use the same lighting for all, sincewe are friends. No one is superioror inferior."
Liang Hao's work displays the kind of industrial lighting which easily rouses our imagination to the cold operating table that doesn’t allowanyerrors, is even a kind of critical point between the virtual and realistic scene, such as the expressions seen in various advertisementsand games. To some extent, Liang Hao's works also display the delicacy and many circumstances ofthe elite class.
In Marianne C. Taylor, Liang Hao deepens the topic of action and image more thoroughly. He uses the action discussed by himself, and types Marianne C. Taylor in a people search engine, and constructs the metadataof such female as per the date of birth, income, telephone, company and other individual data, and even herfamily address which is in the middle of ahighway. Such absurd result causes more immediate cognition on information security and image recognition. The artist finally transfers such oil painting portrait into 3D virtual image. The real intention is revealed in the end. He has exposed the clear image route for his painting production and discussion about action.
March 4, 2019