Sky Nine Earth Eight 1999-2007 

Far and Near: Two Aspects of the World

on the Art of Zuo Zhengyao

Feng Boyi

Zuo Zhengyao is a senior well-acclaimed artist and you may have a glimpse of his career from the artistic practices in a series of paintings from his 85 Art Movement until today. Meanwhile, his resume has a full demonstration of his superb capability in application of various materials and different art languages such as the traditional Chinese ink and wash, pottery and installations, in which he has broken the boundaries of different media. It is evidently an organic combination and expression of the source materials of the traditional Chinese and foreign cultures and folk arts, his memories of life, his accumulation of growth, the rapid-changing realities in China and his artistic imaginations.

What I am especially concerned about is that he has made a comparative expression of the leisurely and carefree mood of the traditional Chinese paintings of man-of-letters, all sorts of issues in the period of social transformation and contradictions and confrontations in our daily life, such as in the paintings of "Digging Deep Caves", "Sky Nine Earth Eight", "A Road Leading to the City", "1.3 Mus of Land" and other series. By observing and probing into the injuries and grievances of his life experiences, Zuo Zhengyao has presented us a vivid description of our worries caused by the modern way of urbanized life and the bad mood of spiritual depression and loneliness, thus, putting forward the meanings category and speculative objects worth pondering. As an artist, he is used to tell about the inner experience of "I". Although such an experience is in the category of daily life experience, it is simply related to self-consciousness. The different aspect of Zuo Zhengyao is that the life the experience described in his paintings is different. From the extremely individualized expression of daily experience on the one hand and, on the other, embodies the social contents in certain aspects. In other words, he is not only involved in the daily life, but also a bystander of life. It seems that he or she in his paintings is not the master of the urban life. He or she has left his hometown and live in another world of the city which was called "intoxicating and detested" by Charles Pierre Baudelaire, cherishing a great longing for the new life in the city and experiencing the hardness and indifference like cold concrete and steel. In this regard, it seems to be his comprehension of what he has seen and his perplexities over the state of existence and longings in his imaginations. In a broader space of psychological vision, everyone of us is uncertain about the current state of our existence. Same as the females floating in the sky which have been repeated in Zuo Zhengyao's paintings. Their identities have been randomly changed at any time, but they are nowhere to live though floating in the interconnected space. There is a unique ecological form in each of the periods and its inner structures of characters are expressed in an exaggerated way. It is what Zuo Zhengyao has been trying to reveal. Similar to a looking glass, his works is a reflection of the truth of our current age: the one is that he is never be involved in the current age and the other is that he is a part of his hometown. Such a minor difference is what he has emphasized about the current age is different from others, but is related to individual changes of our time. In the past, you might find another one to undertake your misfortune, but your I have to bear more and more responsibility today. You have more freedom, but you feel more disturbed in your heart. As a result, you have lost yourself in a reverie. His face is somewhat dim and not quite clear-cut, but it gives the people a more authentic and natural feeling and conveys more implications. As a matter of fact, the life is complicated itself and it will become more feeble and meaningless if it was simplified and purified.