Since Emotionalism Has Been Endless

Since we have been used to looking from the contemporary arts for divers solution and outcomes of “compromise” between an individual being and his existing status, we will be led by an encounter of Jiang Huajun’s art to a doubt again: whereas emotionalism has more or less been a frame that the contemporary art practices are intended to obviate or break through, what kind of value in reality is there then if a painter engages himself fully in esteeming his inside feeling and experience, his obvious motif on growth and emptiness in life, and an audience’s excitement from a traditional view?

In a survey of the contemporary practices, Jiang’s art probably counts as a “different figure”, independent of an eye-catching trait of painting language itself as well as of a priggish strategy for delivering an art notion. With a contemporary artist’s passion that he has already taken into his inner world, his art is truly a flourish of his own understanding and thoughtfulness about his own life status on canvas, presenting a visualized dilemma of human spirit being vacant, lost and tacit in the worldly survival today, which constructs an art space absolutely individualized with his own intuition and instinct. Indeed, it is his concern of individual existence as a motif rather than about any avant-garde notion of art form that is correlated to his passion of a contemporary artist. Rather to any innovation in painting language or depth in insight, he perhaps prefers seeking an unlimited delivery of a resisting will that germinates from an individual’s wearing-down in life.

No matter that painting was or will be in the gold era of record in the past or in a nice era not lack of good will in future, it is far from the realistic status where Jiang’s art comes out – a statue in an age of suspicion with full of crises – if we say that those already seen and written into the art history can offer us any ideas of handling art crises, those ideas should be always from individual choices rather than from collective experiences. For instance, it is Tintoretto ’s unexpected overall arrangement, El Greco ’s distortion and incorrectness of coloring, Hans Holbein ’s exclusive subjects of portraiture and Pieter Bruegel ’s genre painting that respectively breaks the perfect formula of Renaissance, and it is the three aloof figures (Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin) who went forth first after the Impressionism’s uproarious revelry. Shan’t we evidently believe, then, that the arts also need certain individual views originating from direct experience since they have had a growing trend of being records of images with a seek of Zen or inaction in theme? Perhaps this also explains why the cubism was “undervalued” in the end at all, even though its material application, subject choice and view pattern significantly enable art to have something fairly new – there, all individual styles are already cancelled.

Thus, Jiang’s holding his ground of his own emotionalism is not only connected to the current status felt and realized by his own but also his self-consciousness of resistance against the “main-stream” of the contemporary art strategy – compared with any selective delivery as a “compromise”, Jiang’s art delivery exposes his experience rather than learning, his feeling rather than reasoning, his frankness rather than intention. To him, emotionalism turns to be a need just because it has been endless. Via his painting expression, he and his audience gaze at each other in eye. What the visions from his inside world tell and convey to their utmost are about himself as well as about the palpitating, distracted and nonsensical feelings along with our growth.

And then, it is because a will of resistance consciously conveyed by the artist has been constantly yielding that we start in hopes of such a will making his individual view exclusively touching and his inner visions fairly significant.

translated by Jiang, Wenhui

Artists	Jiang Huajun
Exhibition	No Way - Jiang Huajun’s Solo Exhibition

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