Jaspar K.W. Lau

On Pictures: A Figure and his Ground

"Inevitably, pictures are used to tell stories about people, places, institutions, historical events, and many other things, and it can come to seem as if they are principally opportunities to tell those stories. But first and last, pictures are not the narratives of art history: they are stubbornly illegible, weirdly silent, "meaning-less artifacts where all our best attempts at understanding fall apart." - James Elkins

I.

Christopher Ku, born in 1957 in Hong Kong, started to paint during secondary school in Taiwan. At nineteen he was sent to school in Great Britain. To focus on his own creative work, Ku chose to settle in the relatively quiet town of Aberdeen in Scotland. There he first earned a diploma in art and design, and then entered into the local Gray's School of Art. In 1988, he graduated with Honour (1st class) and was accepted into the prestigious Royal College of Art in London in recognition of his talent. After receiving his master degree in 1990 in painting, Ku went back north to Edinburgh and started to nurture his personal style, persisting to this day.

Just before the turn of the millenium, Ku decided to move back to Hong Kong. In 2003, he moved his studio from Tai Wai to the Fo Tan Industrial Estate (both in the New Territories) to join the new artists' hub there. Ku announced his presence in the local art scene by participating in the Hong Kong Biennial 2001 organised by the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Among his various shows around town, "Beyond Boundaries" in Artist Commune at Cattle Depot Artists Village is the largest, and its title expounds the artist's long held philosophical stance. While Hanart T Z Gallery has certainly noticed Ku's appearance, the artist has also long been impressed by Chang Tsong-zung's curated shows that came to Britain, first in 1993 of "China's New Art Post-1989" at Marlborough Fine Art Gallery in London, and then "Reckoning with the Past" in 1996 at Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.
 

II.

Since writing for the show for Lui Chun-kwong which I curated at the Hong Kong Arts Centre, my interest in writing about painting (particularly focusing on painting per se) has come to a halt. The debate stirred by art theorist Thierry de Duve, targeting American critic Clement Greenberg, concerning the history of modernist paintings, seems to be no more than a flat surface reflection on the modernism pursuit of purity. The entrenchment in its own medium turned out to be just a backward perspective in locating (Greenberg's) painting's limiting self-definition. It was, however, not the entire universe of Modernity, certainly unable to point toward the ever expanding capacities of what painting may still achieve.
 

As an artistic medium with its own autonomy, painting is supposedly under the threat of imminent death, and yet a contrary view is shown by the life shown by its creators. As another art theorist Boris Groys has argued, now that photography is going through a full range of different styles as a new art medium, there is no reason why painting cannot do the same. Artist Gerhard Richter has made paintings after photographs, and it is a particularly significant gesture to claim this renewal of license to paint anything, and in any way (I mean in whatever style). But this (re-)gaining of legitimacy of image-making in contemporary painting is really nothing more than a reconciliation of post-conceptual art with painting, rather than the other way round.

Another discourse on painting views the ups and downs of painting in history as a pendulum swing of fashion. It treats the re-figurative painting after abstract expressionism in the same way as Heinrich Woefflin treated the distinctive (hence comparative) "style(-s)" of Renaissance and. As Robert Hughes stated at the end of his book, American Visions, claiming that "America is not new but old" now, and that people swamped to Europe to experience the neo-version of the old expressionists, the critic also did one symbolic thing interesting enough to mention in this context. In between the writing of The Shock of the New and American Visions, Hughes spent his time and effort on finishing his only single (painter/artist) monograph to date, Frank Auerbach. This book being one of the most neglected of Hughes' output, points to the position of British painting in commanding the art world's attention during the 1980s.

Art critic Richard Cork, from his series of writing on the British art scene, started its "Art in the 1980s" with:
"From the outset, the 1980s were marked by an aggressive attempt to reassert the old dominance of painting." Yet the traditional gap between the British and the continent still existed, as he noticed looking back with the full swing of the New/Young British) Arts in the 1990s in mind. The 1980s were remembered mostly for the Freeze exhibition curated by Goldsmiths student Damien Hirst in 1988. When the Saatchi Gallery was first set up in 1985, the Saatchi collection had still not focused so clearly on British contemporaries.

III.

I sketched the background of Hong Kong painter Christopher Ku, and then gave "stories about people, places, institutions, historical events, and many other things" in Britain; readers might be curious to learn more about how they are connected. This is exactly the reason I put James Elkins' quotation in the beginning. In face of painting, we constantly try to establish links, context, milieu; despite all these stories, when are we really able to face the pictorial images and do justice to them, plainly as paintings? Painting, even in the case of Marcel Duchamp, is not just a concept, otherwise it would not have driven him to the world of "ready-mades" (a passage that could only have originated, in de Duve's argument, from painting).

The painting of Christopher Ku, likewise forced me (at a time when I wanted to quit doing further injustice to painting by talking only of "Painting" conceptually) to pick up again an important book by James Elkins. The title of this book by Elkins is On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them. What Elkins really liked to discuss in this book was stated immediately after the quotation given above. He said: "I imagine a version of picture in which a miscellany of ill-matched and ill-behaved marks congregate into assemblages that sometimes look as if they possess linguistic sense and then dissipate into rudimentary "meaningless" elements." Christopher Ku's paintings, to me, are paintings that are so hard to find matching words (or even to grasp visually), that they stand as testimonials to the "un-representable" that only painting can fulfill.

What James Elkins is obsessed with in his book is the nine strategies for destroying the signs of order in pictures, so as to overturn ideals such as symmetry, lighting, rhythm and form. For Ku, it is almost the reverse. Ku, in light of Elkins' book, represents a painter who troubles to bring difficulties into his own path by seeking to achieve these ideals shunned by Elkins while going up these "Nine steps down the ladder of disorder." With unfamiliar ways that we at first find inconceivable, he occasionally arrives at the ideals of the tradition of Western paintings. Stability, balance, harmony and rhythm; such pictorial elements and their formulas are not hard to represent in a purist and reductive manner, but if applied as such in painting, we will only be painting paintings within the limits of our limited capacity to read paintings. A far greater part of the unspeakable "image" of painting would have to be sacrificed.

IV.

There are some theoretical stances and focuses raised by James Elkins that can help us explain why we won't be able to describe Christopher Ku's paintings better. One is his anti-semiotic stance (a stance against the dominating semiotic reading of painting as the only optimal, transparent, or trans-theoretical approach),
another is his questioning of the consistency of the"figure/ground" relation used to describe paintings.

In Christopher Ku's paintings, we come across figures in the shape of legible signs; common ones include the plus sign, the X-cross and pointing arrows. It is because we have given each of them some particular meaning (function to perform), that we could identify these marks that resemble graphic characters in writing. But when these marks have no "function" to perform, it becomes doubtful whether they are signs at all.

Furthermore, different degree of rotation of certain signs makes it difficult to read; for example it is hard to decide between a tilted plus and a cross at a tilt. As for some crosses made of small dots, it is really through the gestalt processing of our vision that we tell ourselves that they existed at all; at close examination they may even disappear before our eyes.

One trick that is paradigmatic in gestalt switch of vision is the illusion between the figure and the ground, the interchange between the solid shape and the void space. But the signs in Ku's paintings are usually flat and thus float on the surface of the phantom background that is constructed out of broad swiping brush-strokes. The relationship between these signs and the background are sometimes achieved with a sort of shadow projection, as such the cast shadows suddenly turn the misty space back into a flat surface (with a certain depth). And yet it is a challenge to our gestalt sense of intuitive adjustment in pictorial coherence to conceive those ghostly images in the background as flat, or to envision those flat applications of paint such as the receding dotted line according to its vanishing perspective.

 

One way for modern painting viewers to overcome this instability is exactly to instruct the reading mode of the mind to switch from the (illusionist) image back to a (materialistic) surface. Yet in Ku's paintings there are constantly a strong presence of heavily highlighted and shadowed figures in shapes of crooked branches that resist our doing so. Even more troublesome are the 3-dimensional treatment Ku sometimes gives these signs. Arrows, originally meant to direct people's vision, thus become solid objects anchored in space. Again, many graphic drawings originating from chemistry and biology textbooks appear in the later paintings; these also contradict their original function as minimal 2-dimensional linear markers of objects.

Saying farewell to his earlier grayish blue paintings, constructed with layers and mutual boundaries out of expressionistic brushstrokes, Ku's experiments already plunged headlong in this intriguing direction in paintings such as "The Misty City" (1991), done during his transitional period. In this work, shapes of spade, shamrock (or four leaves clover) and five-petals are formed as if by stenciling of paper-cuts, suggesting a kind of layering that echo with the ink-experiments on rice papers Ku has been doing recently.

As for colour, Ku's recent paintings are also getting more and more liberated in range of hue, posing further challenges to the viewers' eyes and minds. Standing in front of Ku's painting, one has to grasp the composition density constructed out of images of different sizes and shapes, textures and depths, before one can form a comprehensive view of the picture as a unifying whole. As details, those small units repeating in different places with different colour backgrounds, or organised groups of colourful dots in a transitive colour background, are all feasts for the eye. However, the subtleties of oil colour layering, together with the palette knife's thick arom the virin a picture frame, definitely require from the viewer a very strong aesthetics stomach.
 

V.

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Apart from just challenging the eyes (aesthetic taste) of the viewers, what Ku experiments with relates very concretely to the expansion of the pictorial language as a common knowledge. Due to the texture of the surface of the paints applied, different viewing distances are required; a rough wall as in the case of the mural differs from that of the canvas, again it is very different for paper. Each surface is very specific.
 

Since a language has to be shared to be a language, to speak about (who) influences (who) in pictorial language only suggests that the language in view is yet too personally tied, or that what is in discussion is too superficial and lies outside linguistic rules. Anglo-empiricist forerunner philosopher Francis Bacon has argued that it is we who are the ancients, and an old giant of traditional wisdom will certainly not take too seriously the fifteen-minutes fame of the little dwarf dancing on one's own shoulder as to demand irrelevant credits.
 

Rather than using negative extremes to construct a structured field of possibilities as Elkins did, Ku has uncompromisingly embraced heterogeneity. To strive for a breakthrough in a long tradition, to construct out of deconstruction, to seek newness without sacrificing harmony, to find a new harmony that is not traditional, are all seemly paradoxical conditions and impossible tasks that Ku has set up for himself. Having come so far in my discourse, I guess I have already told my readers stories about people, places, institutions, historical events, and many other things, though in an inexplicit way. To be more suggestive, I wish to take the metaphor of how the "ground" and the "figure" strive to fuse and influence one another while at the same time upholding its own autonomous identity, and overlay this onto the personal struggle of the painter himself.
 

From the margin of the "Sino-" to the margin of the "Anglo-": How does one establish oneself in a foreign tradition and yet retain one's own individuality in that mainstream? It is a road decidedly difficult from both sides. Jumping out of that double loop which sometimes crisscross but rarely run parallel, I truly hope Christopher Ku will find his audience here in his home-town. Having arrived home, we should have no further need to alleviate the anxiety of influence; there will be no need for more stories, so that finally we may spare time to look at the paintings. My discourse on Ku's painting thus also ends here.

​

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談說畫面的畫家

劉建華

「無可避免，繪畫已被慣用來談說一些關於人事、地方、機構、歷史及許多其他的事情，甚至被看成是談論這些事件的最主要機會。但是從頭到尾，繪畫也不同於藝術史的論述：繪畫是一些固執地不可解、異常地沉默、「無意義」的（藝術）作品，是一些每每連我們去理解它們的努力嘗試也被變得分崩離析的作品。」—依堅斯

（一）

谷敏昭，一九五七年出生於香港，先在台灣的中學學習了一點繪畫，後來在十九歲遠赴英倫留學的時候，為了專注創作，谷敏昭挑選了在蘇格蘭的鴨巴甸落腳。先是修讀藝術與設計的文憑課程，繼而進了當地的基爾藝術學院，一九八八年以油畫創作取了一級榮譽學士學位畢業。憑此成績，谷敏昭考進了倫敦的皇家藝術學院，並於一九九零年於該院碩士畢業。雖仍是專攻繪畫，谷敏昭的畫風在就學期間卻起了一次根本的變化。離開倫敦後，谷敏昭重新北上回到蘇格蘭的愛丁堡從事繪畫創作，畫面進入了一種另樣的風格探索，而這探索就可說一直延續至今。

就在千禧年前，谷敏昭終於決定搬回香港定居，並於二零零三年將畫室從沙田大圍轉到火炭工業區，成為該新冒起的藝術家聚焦區的大家庭一份子。從入選二零零一年香港藝術館主辦的「香港藝術雙年展」，作為參與香港藝圈的一次見面招呼後，谷敏昭陸續在香港露面，其中又以二零零三年於牛棚藝術村「藝術公社」的展買覽規模最大型，讓畫家有信心地以其藝術的哲學「零界道」作為展覽的標題。漢雅軒作為香港的重要畫廊，自然留意本地的繪畫動態，相對來說，谷敏昭在海外看到《後八九中國新藝術》（1993）以及在愛丁堡《追昔：當代中國繪畫》（1996）兩個展覽而早萌與張頌仁合作的意欲，兩方因而一拍即合。
 

自從為本地畫家吕振光策劃的展覽執筆以後，筆者對於評論繪畫（尤其純粹專注談述畫面的繪畫）的興趣似告了一個段落。由藝術理論家杜福（Thierry de Duve）對於美國藝評家格林伯格（Clement Greenberg） 有關現代主義繪畫的爭議一路發展的理論，到底似乎只是現代主義的媒體純粹性作一次自我的平面反照。格林伯格的所謂媒體的推展，不過是（格林伯格的）向繪畫最根本的定義作一次鏡中回溯，而非開拓性的真正推前。

繪畫作為獨立媒體而論：其「已死」的命運陰影，和具體畫面所展現的生命，常被看作兩件截然不同的事情。如另一位藝術理論家（Boris Groys）所言：攝影的全方位新試驗應該成為繪畫借鏡的榜樣。畫家里克特（Gerhard Richter）以繪畫重繪攝影照片，借此而重新把繪畫解放開來，當代繪畫的畫面世界再次變得寬闊。但這種對於繪畫要通過概念而確立自身的合法性，其實更像是後觀念藝術想要與繪畫和解的論述。
 

另一種關於繪畫的論述，是以一種藝術史的鐘擺理論來看繪畫的潮流發展，以及當中如具象和抽象的演變，而這就一如傳統沃爾夫林（Heinrich Woefflin）的所謂「藝術風格學」來看文藝復興和巴洛克時代畫風演變的道理近似。美國對於現代藝術的壟斷地位，如藝評家曉士（Robert Hughes）在《美國視野》最後所言，終於從新變成了舊。
 

然而當大家一窩蜂的留意由舊又變回成新的歐洲表現主義繪畫，曉士反在《新的衝擊》與《美國視野》之間，用心寫成了《艾亞柏（Frank Auerbach）》，這本關於英國別豎一格畫家的論著。該書沒有太多人談論，大概頗正反映英國那時代繪畫的窘境。

 

藝評家閣治（Richard Cork），從其英國的本位看二十世紀八十年代的文集序言，第一句便是以繪畫的積極欲意重建其強勢為最重要的大事。然而英倫與歐陸依舊存在距離，英國在八十年代於世界藝術的潮流位置，不過是九十年代叱吒風雲的新英倫藝術（YBA）的舖路階段。一九八八年金匠藝術學院的學生希斯（Damien Hirst）策辦的「凝」（Freeze）前，早於一九八五年就在倫敦建立自己展館的沙馳（Saatchi & Saatchi） 仍未以英國的新進藝術家為主力收藏對象。

（三）

先談了一點香港畫家谷敏昭的背景，再談了英國一些人們、地方、機構、歷史事件和許多其他的事情。如何把他們進一步連接在一起，或者很多讀者想續知下去，但這也正是本文在一開始用了藝術理論家依堅斯（James Elkins）這段引文的理由。在繪畫面前，我們不斷建立聯繫、脈絡、描述環境（milieu）、影響，但我們坐擁這樣多種論述，究竟我們何時才真正面向（討論）繪畫？甚至對於社尚（Marcel Duchamp），繪畫也不是龐統的「繪畫」概念而已，正因如此，（依杜福的講法），才逼使他走向「現成物」（readymade）世界。

谷敏昭的畫，同樣逼使我（在不再想為以「繪畫」概念來為繪畫胡下判言的時候）重新拿起依堅斯的書來思考如何談論繪畫。那本依堅斯的書名，叫作On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them。依堅斯的書，想討論的，是他承接上引文談到的：「我想像有一種類的繪畫是由雜集不對襯、不規矩筆觸聚結而成，集合了彷彿擁有語言性、卻又消散成仍是十分基本而『無意義』的元素。」谷敏昭的畫，對於我，正是這樣一種難以言述、在描述起來極之結舌的對象（或者應該說先是在腦袋對於如何把握視覺上的消化。）

依堅斯書中著迷的，是（第三章）那些如何能把畫面弄至全盤瓦解的九重梯階。而谷敏昭的畫，和依堅斯的書不同之處，正是辛苦地逆級而上，以我們原初以為不太可能的陌生方法，來慢慢建構出一個講究穩定、平衡、和諧、韻律等西方繪畫美學傳統典範的理想畫面。以純化、簡約的畫面，容易摸通這些規律，但若果把這些原則放到繪畫裡，這其實正是以閱讀「繪畫」的局限犧牲了繪畫。繪畫的畫像（image）並不僅是「繪畫」的畫面。
 

（四）

依堅斯的書（前兩章）就有幾點立場和關注點尤其值得拿出來助我們更好描述谷敏昭的畫，一是反符號學，另一是對背景和形像閱讀可行性的質疑。谷敏昭畫面的符號，常見的有十字（加號）、有x字（交叉）、有箭咀，這些都是因為我們的文化有了給他們的特殊作用因而給我們可以描述的符形，但在畫面上實際沒有符徵或符指。事實上，當一個十字的角度不斷變化，它們有些就必然更接近於x字。而由點點排列砌成的十字組合，要求一種格式塔的視覺觀照，否則箭咀就會消失於眼前。格式塔的轉換，一貫最常見的把戲，在於背景和前景、虛與實之間的跳躍式轉換。可是谷敏昭畫面的符號，往往反是通過一種徹底的浮面性，和鬆模的背景脱離，卻以類似投影的方式，把虛的背景在某一深度中平面地實化。筆觸掃刷而成的鬆模背景，基本上是抽象平面或具體深度的背景技法，然而其背後透出的殘影反傾向於平面化，而偶爾出現於畫面、如像馬路所見的透視性虛線，卻硬要以平塗給畫面提供一種深度的指引。指涉背景和前景的符像和符義，因此在視覺上是被刻意矛盾錯配的運用。
 

矛盾錯配的克服，有一個退路，就是堅定將畫面作（物質）平面解讀，然而在谷敏昭的畫面，我們又經常遇到給物像的強烈陰影（光暗而生的立體感），尤其黑白的捲曲枝幹形體。另一組使得空間變得味混的手段，是將本來早已被平面化的箭咀符號也加上陰影，將原來只是把眼睛帶動離開自身的符號變成為一自存的立體形象。符號，以及後期更多出現，挪用自化學、生物學等的繪圖，正是一種把現實簡化作非黑即白（單/雙色）的平面插圖，偏偏在谷敏昭的畫面上，它們被用於建構出層次，浮染於色彩間。
 

取代早期灰藍色調一批畫面那種表現主義筆觸加疊的層次和平面化互構邊界的形象，谷敏昭對於這種新空間感的實驗，如在其過渡時期的畫作《迷城》（1991）中，那些像是葵扇花、四葉草、五瓣花的圖案處理已有跡可尋，及至近期那些水墨的宣紙留白實驗，則似乎仍是在為這種畫面重疊的層次感而樂此不疲。
 

至於顏色在谷敏昭的畫面吃重的程度及鮮亮度每況開放，則進一步的挑戰觀者的眼睛，不單要從不同構成元素的形體在曖昧空間中的重密量度分配來統覽畫面；它們當中類似元件在不同的底色中的出現，或是元件下豐富的底色滲變，都是使觀者視覺經驗樂此無窮的細節。那些微細的層次變化，在盡顯油彩的穿透性同時，畫刀的厚塗，又是另一叫人要有雜食類的強勁消化胃口。
 

(五)

異樣、雜式如何融合，在閱讀眼光眼界的挑戰以外，關乎到畫身的質地（牆壁、畫布、紙本）與及觀賞的距離，是很實質的繪畫語言的知識開拓。語言本來就是共同使用的，談論（誰）影響（誰），其實不過是該語言的個人色彩依舊太強，或是抽樣出來的，不過是斷章式的印象，兩者都可能並未觸及客觀性的畫像語言本身。
 

英國經驗主義的哲學先驅培根（Francis Bacon）就以為，現代人因為承繼了古人累積下來的視野，因此我們才是擁有智慧的老人。安於悠久傳統的巨人當不會要與站在其肩上（代表根本不屬於同一個傳統裡）的小人爭十五分鐘的名氣，斤斤計較所謂的影響。
 

要在繪畫傳統仍能推陳出新，小心建構出來的反成規，求非反和諧的新、新的非舊式和諧，谷敏昭走了他的路：在貪新年代不新，在傳統裡的不循舊，道路難被兩邊認受。於是我想我在這裡，也借谷敏昭的繪畫，迂迴交代了一些關於人們、地方、機構、歷史事件和許多其他的事情。畫面元素與背景，在獨立/分離和融合/消失之間，似乎正像是見證一個人如何努力在異鄉，不以對方的風尚打入對方的主流，從而在對方的傳統裡建立一個被認受帶有差異的自我。

從中國的本土邊緣到英國的本土邊緣，走入到中心卻對個體主義有所領悟而不再一樣的心情走出來，谷敏昭這次
展覽展出的香港新作，我希望不必再成為這種扭轉歧視和自我肯定不全相等的圖畫說明；因為畫放回在自己家裡，真正細賞畫面的時間應該開始，這篇給繪畫的論述也該就此打住。