Present, Again
by You Yiyi
TABLES OF THE PAINTER
You bantered that whenever the linen or the wood panel was covered with the first layer, friends visiting your studio would say, “Don’t paint anymore. It’s better this way.” But you would continue anyway. You describe the first two layers as emergent impressions and turbid undulations. They are sanded down, returning smoothness to the surface. You then try to recover the pictures with the third layer, and to sharpen the lines and the light through the fourth. “This repetitive movement is not to make the picture more exquisite, but to render it such a long process that the next frame is always yet to come, [1]” you argued.
Indeed, the gesture of painting is never concluded. As one surface rests, the gesture will continue on another. This period of rest on certain pictures leaves them to become works, but it is an “assembling gaze” that perpetually inclines the pictures toward the “next frame” without turning them into it — a kind of gaze that is projected from the painter onto the viewers through the pictures. In fact, rather than infinitely defer the “next frame,” this gaze negates the use of the “frame” as a unit that holds sequential value. The painter’s gaze assembles the movements over the duration of time into pictures, while the durational consciousness and gaze of the viewers continue to assemble the movement of the pictures.
This assemblage of the gaze also renders your creations more of tables than tableaux. Georges Didi-Huberman distinguishes between the notions of tableau and table in Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science (2011): “The tableau is a work, a result on which everything has always already been played out; the table is a device on which everything can always be played again. […] the table serves first of all as an operating field of the disparate and the mobile, of the heterogeneous and the open. [2]” It seems easy to grasp that a blank or painting surface is such a table, but how can a varnished painting that has left the studio be more of a table than a tableau?
Let us imagine the following scenario in front of your works. In your bright studio, there is always a painting surface illuminated by the same, even, clear and constant light, in addition to a large worktable. The objects, instruments and materials scattered on the table are transformed into images to be assembled on the surface through your gaze. And again, you have the hands in the pictures perform your assemblage. The painting surface thus becomes another table top besides your worktable — a table on which assemblage experimentation is performed, recorded and exported.
The pictures, as exported records, are neither captured isolated moments from the experimental phase of assemblage nor presentations of its results, but the layered unfolding of its process that has not yet come to fruition and ultimately seems to be unfruitful. We fail to fathom why the assemblers use ping-pong balls, plasticine or even their hands to approach a spurt of flame from the opening of the steel column [3], nor why a neat and cautious hand would repeatedly and mistakenly make the water overflow from the glass onto the exact surface of the mirrored device [4] ... The repetitive assemblage of “the disparate and the mobile, of the heterogeneous and the open [5]” in the pictures not only detaches them from their assigned uses and meanings in everyday life, but also leaves their interplay without any realistic or rational purpose to be tracked. The experimentation will not fail, nor will it succeed. Naturally, it does not lead to any settled result.
For you — the painter, the assembler and the recorder — the records of experimentation are not sequential but serve as differential references for each other. The purpose of recording is not to refine the assemblage method in the “following” or “next” experiment, leading to a successful outcome in a realistic logic, but to keep rearranging everything at “another” time and exploring alternative methods through slight bifurcations. With each recording, the speculation on the motives, nature and direction of the experimentation is suspended, prompting the viewers to look beyond the logic of reality to experience and follow the odd intentions of the operating hands, and to gradually reassemble in consciousness the correlation between them and the things, and also among things .
VARIANTS WITHOUT BEGINNING OR END
The tables are blank canvas, surfaces on the tip of the brush, pictures assembled by the gaze. They are also tables-in-tables that appear in the painter’s ongoing works as a growing plurality of variants — calling them variants does not imply the pre-existence of their archetype.
In his earlier pictures, tables-in-tables often appear as the “support for the things,” mostly in the form of table tops, occasionally mattresses or human bodies. They spread out to receive things that are placed on them individually, which suggest the stories having been or are taking place: dinner plates, water glasses or leather shoes with bread, rectangular geometric figures or glass cases, a dead bird, plucked branches with leaves, a pistol, splashes of flame [6] … Tables-in-tables, while supporting these things, also serve as the “support for the sight” on which the gaze falls straightaway, and unfolds its narrative coordination by expanding the pictures to horizons of story scenes.
With the iterative appearance of silver materials in his pictures, tables-in-tables not only continue their supporting function, but also launch a series of rejections, becoming “reflectors.” First, they reject the light from inside and outside the pictures, but therefore aggregate the carried images onto their surfaces. At the same time, they want to meet the perception and understanding of the gaze in front of the pictures, bouncing it to other directions while leading it back to their own forms. They also reject the uniqueness, flatness and auxiliary of the “supports” in his earlier pictures and become the supported things themselves through deformation, fragmentation and multiplication, and thus twist and cut the reflected images into round, square, strip, sphere, convex, concave while pulling and pushing them to near or far.
In time, the tables-in-tables not only produce more and more forms in the switching or overlapping of support and reflection functions, but also assemble themselves by juxtaposing, overlapping and nesting with each other on the flat and extended table top that often appears in the pictures. At the same time, things on the tables are no longer placed alone or expected to fill a fictive role but participate in the assemblage as “incongruous and mobile, heterogeneous and open [7]” things in cross-pairing. As the site of assemblage, the table surface often uses reflection to reject a purely supportive function, so that the reflection refers to the assemblage operation itself. The tables-in-tables then become the “tables for assemblage” in this dynamic relation.
If “support” or “reflection” describe the other-facing function of a single table, then the “tables for assemblage” are first to operate on the plurality of the tables: they attempt their functions, forms and structures on different pictures, but do not assume an absolute assemblage. The tables are both the “device” and the components of the device, “where everything can be rearranged [8].” The gaze is deliberately drawn into the still pictures, and sometimes thrown back by images on the “reflectors,” not following a fixed arrangement — the plural tables interfere with the line of sight, making it shift and break across the pictures, bouncing between incoherent fragments — what unfolds between the painter and the viewers is an assemblage play guided by contingency.
AN INCOMPLETE COLLECTION OF PLAY SIGNS
Irrefutable Traces That Appear in Multiple Records:
The scratches on the cuboid mirror prisms and the surface of the operating table, the shapes and fingerprints left by hands kneading plasticine, just-spilled water hanging to the edge of a glass… These seem to be traces of movement left by hands experimenting on assemblages within the pictures themselves, but in fact, they result from the painter’s own mischievous hands. He attempts to shake the first impression of delicacy and accuracy, while allowing the movement of the hands to be traced — yet doesn’t such fortunate befoulment make his gaze and gesture of painting appear more deliberate and precise?
Presumption After a Clue:
He uses the title The Third Hands [9] to suggest the appearance of a third set of hands in the assemblage experimentation in the picture, and the viewers look for their reflections on the “reflectors” under the guidance of this “player prompt.” They seem to be suspended in the area on the left upper corner of the picture above. There one can see suspicious inverted images on the mirror prisms and discs beside the two given hands. These reflections do not seem to completely follow the physical principles of the real world — perhaps, the record does not reflect a third set of hands — and the third hands are his own just before the painting surface.
An Inconclusive Sign:
In A View of Architecture [10], a hand protrudes through a ring and extends toward the surface of a mirrored ball, almost touching it — the tips of the middle and ring fingers already overlap with the sphere’s edge — but the spherical reflection of the palm instantly corrects this misperception — it falls just a little short. The painter rests the hand on suspense, and we do not know why it is extended.
Speculation on an Inconclusive Sign:
Perhaps the image on the sphere bewitches the eye. The person in the white shirt standing in front of what looks like a technical scene might represent homo faber [11]. Gaston Bachelard once described this figure as follows: “Homo faber is a superficial man whose mind is fixed on familiar objects, rough geometric shapes. For him, a sphere has no center, it merely gives reality to the rounded movement of the palms. [12]” Would the superficial man be further seduced here by the representations given by the mirrored ball? And is the moment when the fingers touch the sphere an opportunity for homo faber, who reaches out his hand toward the illusion, to learn about the sphere’s center?
Second Speculation on an Inconclusive Sign:
It is not homo faber who holds out his hand, but homo ludens [13]. The former as a representation, bringing out the image of the latter under a slight repression. He does not produce or build, nor handle the objects at hand in a deft way — let alone that they have been removed from their usual use. His experimentation is not technical or scientific, but playful, moving objects and tables back and forth to stimulate new significances between them. He was suspicious of the appearance of the sphere, and wary of the real-world principles that attempt to disengage the play — not in a double reservation, but in a constant assemblage of perception and understanding to hold the tension between the two, so that the rules of the play could continue to be generated freely. His hand, which is extended and suspended at the edge under the “play drive [14]” makes a gesture of grasping this tension.
Identification of Homo Ludens:
Homo ludens repeatedly appears in his pictures — most of the time with face missing, and this, together with their prudish outfits and seemingly meticulous lab scenes, creates a calm, serious or even uptight first impression that establishes a Brechtian “distancing effect [15]” and makes it hard for viewers to establish emotional identification. Instead, they try to rationally understand the narrative of the pictures and the painter’s intention but will remain frustrated. Facing the groundless objects, scenes and movements, as well as the breakdown of traditional modes of viewing in favor of establishing new ones through the painter’s playful mischievousness, clues and creation of misconception, the viewers are curious to enter this imaginative play haunted by strangeness. In the play their perception and understanding are in harmony — which also makes them become homo ludens, letting the play continue freely.
RECALLINGS THAT DEFER RESPONSES
He came across a piece of fossil coral while looking for whale bones at a market in Iceland. A few years later, the fossil coral reappeared on a table, featuring its other side. Titled Recalling [16], it recalls the side that had been shown on another table a few years earlier [17].
In the long interval of the recalling, the same fossil coral has been reappearing on other tables as an irrelevant thought [18] outside the picture, a haunting fragment [19] on the “reflectors,” a manipulated object [20] on the “supports.” The recalling is repeatedly interrupted between tables, bouncing back and forth into recallings of each other, and also into a polyphonic recalling towards the outside of the tables — is it recalling the fossil acquired years ago, or to early coral polyps? Is it recalling the dry pores of the fossil on the painter’s worktable, or the warm breath of the coral in the shallow sea? Facing this fragment of life that casts human horizon back to the early earth environment, the images under the painter’s brush are naturally in no position to precisely evoke the latent knowledge it carries — hence, who are the ones being recalled?
The coral fossils and whale bones were brought back to his studio and are anachronistically arranged on the worktable along with objects such as plasticine, steel pipes, aluminum sheets, soap, knives, lighters, glasses. He then sparks the lighter when he smokes, peels or dices the apple with a knife when eating, and unintentionally pours too much water into a glass when thirsty. Bring the fire, apple and water, which are essential to human life, to the table top from time to time. These odds and ends are often related to different narration times and to symbolic meanings assigned by human beings. L’imparfait narrates the remnants of ancient creatures as objects of natural historical knowledge. The artifacts narrated by the present perfect tense, as “organ projections [21]” of humans to the outside, are iterated from the development of the techniques by which human beings understand and make use of the world and themselves, while the natural existences that are constantly accessed in the simple present tense accompany the perpetuation of the human life, seeping into the reverie of their cultural histories.
The painter entrusts these odds and ends to the hands on tables, engaging them in the assemblage experimentation in the present continuous tense and accentuating their relation of “the disparate and the mobile, of the heterogeneous and the open [22].” Yet he does not intend to arbitrarily reduce them to explicit symbols to be paired into definite significations. Instead, he lets their images reappear ambiguously between tables, loosening the process of symbolization with the open gesture of reciprocating recalls. With each reappearance of the odds and ends, they are assembled on another table with the images of others. Just like the fossil coral, it appeared at the same time with the flame concealed by palms to become Two Mysteries [23], yet these mysteries were not unraveled with their respective reappearances elsewhere. Just like the mysterious firelight, it soon became a laboratory flame of reason [24], a heat source for keeping warm [25], or a surreal tongue of flame above the blade peeling an apple [26] ... Yet what undulates with the repetitive recalls is their intensified echoes. What is being recalled is both the recalling itself and the proliferating imagination of the complex bond between human beings and the odds and ends.
[1] Quoted from Liang Hao’s foreword for the catalogue of his solo exhibition “A Kind of Gaze” in 2019.
[2] Didi-Huberman, G. (2018) Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science. Translated by S. Lillis. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. p.47.
[3] Liang Hao, The One Who Wants to Let the Ball Burn, 2020, oil on linen, 150×200 cm; The One Probing the Flame, 2020, oil on linen, 140×200 cm; A Hand Testing the Flame, 2021, oil on linen, 140×200 cm.
[4] Liang Hao, The One Who Makes the Water Overflow, 2020, oil on linen, 60×50 cm; The One Who Makes the Water Overflow Again, 2020, oil on panel, 22.5×30.5 cm.
[5] See Note 2.
[6] Things listed here all appeared in the oil paintings and watercolor works by Liang Hao between 2013 and 2015.
[7] See Note 2.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Liang Hao, The Third Hands, 2021, oil on linen, 150×250 cm.
[10] Liang Hao, A View of Architecture, 2020, oil on linen, 120×160 cm.
[11] In philosophy, homo faber is a conceptual description of the human life form as a creature capable of making tools.
[12] Bachelard, G. (1964) The Psychoanalysis of Fire. Translated by A. C. M. Ross. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. p.55–56.
[13] Huizinga, J. (1949) Homo Ludens, A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Homo ludens is a notion first formulated by the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga in this work. Unlike homo sapiens and homo faber which are also conceptual descriptions of human life forms, homo ludens emphasizes the importance of the play in human culture and society.
[14] The “play drive” (Spieltrieb) was introduced by the German poet, playwright and philosopher Friedrich Schiller in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, 1795–1796). As a third impulse or instinct that reconciles “the sensuous drive” and “the formal drive,” it allows for a harmonious coordination between life and form, in which freedom, morality, and self-consciousness emerge, and this ongoing process is the aesthetic experience itself.
[15] The theory of the “distancing effect,” developed by the German dramatist and poet Bertholt Brecht, refers to the method of interrupting the spectators’ natural identification with fictional characters during the play. For Brecht, this effect reduces the passivity of the spectators, thus allowing them to contemplate the content and functioning mechanisms of the play. In addition, the amusing approach of the play is an important factor in achieving this effect.
[16] Liang Hao, Recalling, 2021, oil on linen, 40×30 cm.
[17] Liang Hao, The Spiral Shell, 2019, oil on linen, 40×30 cm.
[18] Liang Hao, Constant Speed, 2019, oil on linen, 115×200 cm.
[19] Liang Hao, The Gesture of Empire, 2019, oil on linen, 200×250 cm.
[20] Liang Hao, The Shape of Heart, 2020, oil on linen, 30×40 cm; Slip or Twig, 2020–2021, oil on linen, 170×250 cm; The One Who Shows the Coral Fossil, 2020, oil on panel, 22.5×30.5 cm.
[21] The notion of “organ projection” was developed by the German philosopher Ernst Kapp in
Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (Grundlinien einer Philosophie der Technik, 1877).
[22] See Note 2 in Tables of the Painter.
[23] Liang Hao, Two Mysteries, 2021, oil on linen, 150×200 cm.
[24] Liang Hao, The One Who Wants to Let the Ball Burn, 2020, oil on linen, 150×200 cm.[25] Liang Hao, Flame and Model, 2020, oil on linen, 140×200 cm.
[26] Liang Hao, Apple and Flame, 2020, oil on linen, 30×40 cm.