Painting density
Reality lacks the poetry of melting into air
by
Anna-Viktoria Eschbach
Looking at Liang Hao’s images you get a very calm feeling as if time would stop to exist and the whole world would freeze for a second. It is the sensation of everything standing still and moving with high-speed simultaneously. There is something – a memory, an atmosphere, a recalled experience or encounter, hinted at but never delineated – lurking in all paintings.In combination with carefully added geometric abstraction the canvases can look almost too polished, too knowing.
This carries through to a rather dark undertone of Liang Hao's work: His color palette stays rather opaque, but reaches an enormous intensities by staying in shades of greys, blues, whites and blacks. Capturing a moment in time like his painting do opens the possibility for a microscopically close look and endless strings of associations.
You find yourself wondering, if these nondescript places hold bigger secrets. Do those places exist? Could you actually find these locations in real life? Could they be places that have a particular personal importance for Liang Hao? Or are those maybe spots from historical importance, places you already saw in the books, newspapers and on television? Who are the protagonists of the images and what is their story? Why are they all dressed in white, almost sterile clothing? While the painting seems to zoom in on particular details in the scene, the search for clues continues and one cannot help but start analyzing the recurring elements like cats, bread, pistols, fish, shoes and other objects. They seem to tease the viewer with hints, but end in blind alleys.
He, cannily, is not telling. The mystery also resides in the weight of remembered experience the viewer brings to the work. Everybody seems to see personal memories, personal prejudices, personal hopes or fears reflected back from those calm surfaces. It is there not just in the seemingly mundane subject matter, but in the almost realist style, a style that, in lesser hands, could slip into kitsch or even banality.
If you looking for art historical determinations and links to the oeuvre of other artists there is a variety of directions worth looking at: Possible associations include Dadaist sculpture and linear abstract painting. But it also recalls early Cubism and mid-century photomontage with the fusion of stark realism and lyrical romanticism. Undeniably closely allied to the 1980s tradition of photo-realism, Liang Hao’s paintings are careful compositions made up of concrete observation and ambiguous, unreliable memory.
Rooting the work not in one but in a multitude of different artistic influences is establishing an exciting tension. Exactly those multiple ways in which the artist mines the languages of both the abstract and representational traditions, in their multiple iterations however broadly conceived, remind us that every mode of working has a time, place, and specific motivation. Working with different sources and bringing together a variety of narrations like sublime geometries - sometimes hovering above the scene - at the same time as Freudian dreams.
Liang Hao makes his own almost imperceptible nod towards conceptualism, towards the supremacy of the idea and the process behind the art. He is lifting the paintings out of the realm of the purely representational, the ultra-realist, and takes it somewhere else, somewhere both old-fashioned and timeless, conservative yet contemporary.
Our concept of painting is notoriously vague. Arguably, any of our categories and concepts of art are. In this confusion there is still a broad consensus that painting has a hard time doing justice to the theoretical and practical claims of contemporary art production. Douglas Crimp argues along these lines in his essay “The End of Painting” (1981), when he states that the imminent end of painting could not be overlooked in the late 1960s. Crimp’s historical outburst against painting is of course already outdated again and has to be read in a less general way. For, as Yve-Alain Bois has pointed out, this notion of an historical endpoint affects less painting as such, but instead – although it often remains implicit – modernist painting with its specific practices and discourses. It therefore does not mark a factual end, but justifies specific forms of producing painting.
This means that, after modernism, “painting” can be grasped less through specific material, technical or pictorial elements than via a set of conventions, through and against which it defines itself. Nonetheless painting holds the quality of constantly planting a philosophical investigation into its own status, prompting a continual investigation into what it means to be a subject and how much of your own memories are forming the perception of an art work. Painting is a site onto which artists and viewers alike project and interpret the abstract nature of thoughts and experiences.
Liang Hao’s work is a taking this discourse into consideration and I would state that, even if they are appearing like paintings, it would be wrong to limit them only to this category. Those works are queering picture making, undermining and subverting expectations of how a conventional painting should behave. Borderline photographic, borderline conceptual, borderline based in the aesthetic of video works, there is constant doubleness humming through the work.
However, Liang Hao’s works are using one of the best features of painting: Collaging memories and compressing them to something new and dense as only paintings can.
This carries through to a rather dark undertone of Liang Hao's work: His color palette stays rather opaque, but reaches an enormous intensities by staying in shades of greys, blues, whites and blacks. Capturing a moment in time like his painting do opens the possibility for a microscopically close look and endless strings of associations.
You find yourself wondering, if these nondescript places hold bigger secrets. Do those places exist? Could you actually find these locations in real life? Could they be places that have a particular personal importance for Liang Hao? Or are those maybe spots from historical importance, places you already saw in the books, newspapers and on television? Who are the protagonists of the images and what is their story? Why are they all dressed in white, almost sterile clothing? While the painting seems to zoom in on particular details in the scene, the search for clues continues and one cannot help but start analyzing the recurring elements like cats, bread, pistols, fish, shoes and other objects. They seem to tease the viewer with hints, but end in blind alleys.
He, cannily, is not telling. The mystery also resides in the weight of remembered experience the viewer brings to the work. Everybody seems to see personal memories, personal prejudices, personal hopes or fears reflected back from those calm surfaces. It is there not just in the seemingly mundane subject matter, but in the almost realist style, a style that, in lesser hands, could slip into kitsch or even banality.
If you looking for art historical determinations and links to the oeuvre of other artists there is a variety of directions worth looking at: Possible associations include Dadaist sculpture and linear abstract painting. But it also recalls early Cubism and mid-century photomontage with the fusion of stark realism and lyrical romanticism. Undeniably closely allied to the 1980s tradition of photo-realism, Liang Hao’s paintings are careful compositions made up of concrete observation and ambiguous, unreliable memory.
Rooting the work not in one but in a multitude of different artistic influences is establishing an exciting tension. Exactly those multiple ways in which the artist mines the languages of both the abstract and representational traditions, in their multiple iterations however broadly conceived, remind us that every mode of working has a time, place, and specific motivation. Working with different sources and bringing together a variety of narrations like sublime geometries - sometimes hovering above the scene - at the same time as Freudian dreams.
Liang Hao makes his own almost imperceptible nod towards conceptualism, towards the supremacy of the idea and the process behind the art. He is lifting the paintings out of the realm of the purely representational, the ultra-realist, and takes it somewhere else, somewhere both old-fashioned and timeless, conservative yet contemporary.
Our concept of painting is notoriously vague. Arguably, any of our categories and concepts of art are. In this confusion there is still a broad consensus that painting has a hard time doing justice to the theoretical and practical claims of contemporary art production. Douglas Crimp argues along these lines in his essay “The End of Painting” (1981), when he states that the imminent end of painting could not be overlooked in the late 1960s. Crimp’s historical outburst against painting is of course already outdated again and has to be read in a less general way. For, as Yve-Alain Bois has pointed out, this notion of an historical endpoint affects less painting as such, but instead – although it often remains implicit – modernist painting with its specific practices and discourses. It therefore does not mark a factual end, but justifies specific forms of producing painting.
This means that, after modernism, “painting” can be grasped less through specific material, technical or pictorial elements than via a set of conventions, through and against which it defines itself. Nonetheless painting holds the quality of constantly planting a philosophical investigation into its own status, prompting a continual investigation into what it means to be a subject and how much of your own memories are forming the perception of an art work. Painting is a site onto which artists and viewers alike project and interpret the abstract nature of thoughts and experiences.
Liang Hao’s work is a taking this discourse into consideration and I would state that, even if they are appearing like paintings, it would be wrong to limit them only to this category. Those works are queering picture making, undermining and subverting expectations of how a conventional painting should behave. Borderline photographic, borderline conceptual, borderline based in the aesthetic of video works, there is constant doubleness humming through the work.
However, Liang Hao’s works are using one of the best features of painting: Collaging memories and compressing them to something new and dense as only paintings can.