On Being Present
by Anna-Viktoria Eschbach
How can the past and future be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? As for the present, if it were always present and never moved on to become the past, it would not be time, but eternity. (Augustine of Hippo: Confessions, 387 AD)
Our presence is derivativ – a present underlying the future. It is produced and created, but is it therefor also poetic? At least it has poetic potential and requires to be written with confidance to influence a time-complex presence. Maybe the key feature that painting has, is to capture a moment and let the viewer revisit the moment eternally. In comparison to the flow of real time the depicted one can be revisited and analyzed by unveiling a multitude of time levels and creating an atemporal world.
But in Liang Hao’s recent works we are not only given the chance to take as much time as we desire to contemplate about the depicted moment, also the protagonist of the paintings seem to participate in the analysis of their world(s). With the utmost care, they handle object like silver plates, balls and birds that inhabit their white and gritted world. They stay and lay very still in this glistening, bright momentum that we are allowed to observe. They all wear very meticulous and uniform like clothes and the glistening white background does not give us more information about them. So, the objects that appear are charged with even more meaning. The silver plate that is folded, wrap around and measured against the bodies and the silver balls draw all the attention on them. Moments like the person holding the bird or the man polishing the shoes of a woman seem so peaceful, that the viewer subconsciously holds his or her breath to not disturb the scene.
The only interaction with the portrayed people we get is with the woman in one of Liang Hao’s recent series, when they calmly look back at the viewer with their multicolored eyes. The eyes as a bridge between outer and inner reality have a long iconographic tradition and represent clairvoyance, omniscience, or a gateway into the soul. The faces of the women are without any readable emotions playing with the archetype of the “Blind Seer”. As being blind seeing more than the eyes ever could. It is recurring theme in mythology: Justice is blind, Odin plucked out an eye to gain knowledge, and the Graeae had only had one eye between three of them. Time and time again, the sacrifice of sight is shown to result in greater cosmic knowledge. The nothingness in their expression can be foundational for a gesture of multiplicity rather than a gesture of absence. Maybe they can see the future already in their present.
Like with the women portrays, Liang Hao’s world creates a fold in the time/space continuum. Like time, space is flattened in our memory. While time is not the antithesis of space, one can understand, the quasi-dialectic that links the two. The notion of non-space or non-time is problematic. Rather, the reality of the one is impossible without the other. Organizing objects in space appears to be a three-dimensional domain. However, time is an inseparable domain between distances whether observed in the real-time, or in the curious illusory space of two-dimensional images. When objects are grouped in space, the void between defines them as much as the physical components themselves.
Liang Hao masters to create a stand-still, a moment of peace and reflection and inviting us to his visual world. This involves a passage from representation to presentation, that is, instead of showing a perpetual present in a parallel temporality in order to make the absent partially present, the image has become sheer presence, immediacy: the here and now in real time.
Our presence is derivativ – a present underlying the future. It is produced and created, but is it therefor also poetic? At least it has poetic potential and requires to be written with confidance to influence a time-complex presence. Maybe the key feature that painting has, is to capture a moment and let the viewer revisit the moment eternally. In comparison to the flow of real time the depicted one can be revisited and analyzed by unveiling a multitude of time levels and creating an atemporal world.
But in Liang Hao’s recent works we are not only given the chance to take as much time as we desire to contemplate about the depicted moment, also the protagonist of the paintings seem to participate in the analysis of their world(s). With the utmost care, they handle object like silver plates, balls and birds that inhabit their white and gritted world. They stay and lay very still in this glistening, bright momentum that we are allowed to observe. They all wear very meticulous and uniform like clothes and the glistening white background does not give us more information about them. So, the objects that appear are charged with even more meaning. The silver plate that is folded, wrap around and measured against the bodies and the silver balls draw all the attention on them. Moments like the person holding the bird or the man polishing the shoes of a woman seem so peaceful, that the viewer subconsciously holds his or her breath to not disturb the scene.
The only interaction with the portrayed people we get is with the woman in one of Liang Hao’s recent series, when they calmly look back at the viewer with their multicolored eyes. The eyes as a bridge between outer and inner reality have a long iconographic tradition and represent clairvoyance, omniscience, or a gateway into the soul. The faces of the women are without any readable emotions playing with the archetype of the “Blind Seer”. As being blind seeing more than the eyes ever could. It is recurring theme in mythology: Justice is blind, Odin plucked out an eye to gain knowledge, and the Graeae had only had one eye between three of them. Time and time again, the sacrifice of sight is shown to result in greater cosmic knowledge. The nothingness in their expression can be foundational for a gesture of multiplicity rather than a gesture of absence. Maybe they can see the future already in their present.
Like with the women portrays, Liang Hao’s world creates a fold in the time/space continuum. Like time, space is flattened in our memory. While time is not the antithesis of space, one can understand, the quasi-dialectic that links the two. The notion of non-space or non-time is problematic. Rather, the reality of the one is impossible without the other. Organizing objects in space appears to be a three-dimensional domain. However, time is an inseparable domain between distances whether observed in the real-time, or in the curious illusory space of two-dimensional images. When objects are grouped in space, the void between defines them as much as the physical components themselves.
Liang Hao masters to create a stand-still, a moment of peace and reflection and inviting us to his visual world. This involves a passage from representation to presentation, that is, instead of showing a perpetual present in a parallel temporality in order to make the absent partially present, the image has become sheer presence, immediacy: the here and now in real time.