ART’S COOL OF NIGHT

At some point, I don’t remember when, Yu Aijun started emailing me photos of his ink paintings. He modestly called them “little works”, and them gave them all sorts of graceful names: “Hidden Spirit”, “Extinguished Fire”, “Empty Valley”, “Tangled”, “Evening”. Whenever he came to Beijing we would eat and talk, speak of these “little works”, speak of exhibitions and collecting. Now, finally, his dream is coming true. When I edited Jiang Xun’s “Six Talks on Loneliness”, I used some of Aijun’s paintings for the illustrations, which he readily agreed to. Looking at the finished book, I think those paintings fit perfectly with those articles about loneliness.

Aijun doesn’t talk much. We’ve never spoken in detail about his “little works”. I was asked to write an article for his exhibition, and as I am not very involved in art, when I tried to use “artistic” words to discuss these “little works”, it ended up feeling stiff. As I was thinking about the article, before I knew it, night had fallen. Outside the window the bright moon was high above, and in a flash I returned to the sleepless nights of my youth.

I thought about Heinrich Heine’s poem: “Our death is in the cool of night/our life is in the pool of day/the darkness glows, I’m drowning/the day has tired me with light”, and how I fell in love with its quiet waning. Thinking back, youthful nights are not necessarily all peaceful coolness; they actually bubble with secret, bright desires. In the jumble of indescribable distress, ripe shame and unrestrained self-pity, sometimes, in the moment before dawn, you can hear the far off train’s whistle, and in a second it seems you understand yourself, understand the world.

I’ve long forgotten those nights. When I see these paintings, I think to myself: In Aijun’s heart, there might reside a love of the nights of youth. He wrote in his “notes”:

“All eyes, every cell, all distracting thoughts are shut, hidden deeply, there are only corn leaves steaming, unfolding, spreading, like a green pestilence. Besides the pumping of my own blood, there is no other sound, only wind—only wind, like a sob. The corn field surrounded by black mountains, all eyes on the corn field. The black corn field hides a secret.”

For me, Aijun’s paintings have accumulated the secrets of northern country nights, and they hold a youthful desire and loneliness. I tend towards those pure imaginative scenes, pinks, deep blues, washed rings of light. Some of his works have strong overtones of symbolism, less silence. I don’t know how Aijun transmits northern desolation through this intricate screened beauty--perhaps the secrets come from the nights, from the village, from the ink and the paper.

I will say that Aijun’s paintings are “art’s cool of night”.

What is “art’s cool of night”? It is the water marks left after the tide has ebbed out; the first breath of wind on the earth after it cools; what is left between the eyebrows after worry has dissipated; the gradual exposure of everything after the fire is extinguished; the souls muttering to themselves after the falling of silence. It is the world returning to the earth, ART returning to artistry, art returning to action. In this adrift and disconnected moment, painting returns to painting.

What significance does today’s painting have? This is the question that every painter must face. The answer may be clever or earnest, but all are somewhat adrift. Aijun has tried his hand at many different forms of art; when I listen to him talk about it, I don’t entirely understand, but get a vague Don Quixote-like melancholy.

I am happy for Aijun, for in this kind of painting he has discovered a way to communicate with himself. I can’t begin to imagine his mood while painting these 1000+ works—the painters of pre-historical cave murals drew wild cow forms in endless darkness and dread.

And now these nighttime paintings will be exhibited in daylight, and here they will be gathered together. We must approach them quietly and gently, not alarm these little works, allow them to remain in the starry night side-by-side with youthful desire, to smolder undisturbed.

Apr 8, 2012