水与火——李金远2010年新作展

参展艺术家：李金远

策展人：蔡晓

开幕酒会： 2010年5月2日（周日） 下午3时

展览时间： 2010年5月2日—2010年5月14日（10：00 — 18：00 周一闭馆）
地    址：  太阳虹画廊
               上海市莫干山路50号0号楼3楼
电话/传真： 021-62993931

邮箱：taiyanghuo1111@gmail.com
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天桥——《水与火》李金远2010年新作展前言
蔡晓

　　“火”与“水”，自然界中最常见的二种物质，因为不能相容，故常人将它们视为对立。时至今日，这种对立甚至扩延到了绘画领域中的中、西材料和思想。

　　艺术中的“所知”与“所见”虽然不像“火”与“水”那般的对立，但一般的画家大多只能通过有限的“所见”在艺术的局部范围内作绘画“所知”的努力表现，而高明的画家却是通过对事物的“所知”来讨论“所见”的无限。所有的“所见”只是事物能被进行记录的一种符号，用纯粹的符号来完成的绘画的图像，充其量不过是一堆符号的堆砌，评价的结论是“像”与“不像”。如果画家能够舍弃符号的束缚，运用“所知”对事物的客观符号进行主观的驾驭，那么所有似乎支离破碎的或者片段的符号都可以成为艺术的“刍狗”，最终成就艺术的便是画家“所知”、“所要知”和“无所不知”。

　　李金远的《火与水》系列便是“所知”的表现。作品《天空地白》在漆黑漆黑的宣纸上用饱和的丙烯色彩作挥洒，淋漓至极而又积郁至极。天的静寂和地的苦寒，回忆的温暖和未来的猜测……一切似乎的和谐都是现实中的对立，然而所有的对立又被和谐地进入了画面。画家是用“所知”来描绘宇宙天地万物，同时也描绘希望理想追求，让人直到窒息，直到喘气。

　　为现代社会设置的交通信号灯，让传统保守的人墨守成规，让前卫激进的人暴死街头。而智者可以从容地、安全地、随时地穿越马路而不必等到绿灯亮起，是因为他们行走在天桥上。

　　道家“取坎补离”、“水火共济”，是因为架起了“鹊桥”，李金远能从容自信地对话“天地”、“古今”和“中西”，是因为他就在“天桥”上。

On the Bridge Amidst the Universe

Preface to the Fire and Water Series By Li Jinyuan

Cai Xiao

Fire and Water, the two most common elements in nature, openly at variance, have been by convention conceived of only as opposition. This duality now has come to assert itself markedly in the painting with regard to both subject-matter and work-being.

Seeing and Knowing, the two artistic tendencies to render the image of what we see, tell themselves apart considerably though they do not stand an antagonistic relation with one another as acutely as do fire and water. The ordinary painters, notwithstanding a painstaking and laborious handling of the visions and resources at their disposal, cannot but concentrate on the factual which is the object of knowledge. The discerning minds, however, are apt to elicit from the sensual world of the eye the infinite that suggests a metaphysical connection of visible and invisible. The appearances, all in all, merely function as the icons registering the external reality, works merely consisting of which are nothing but a motley collection of images without inner life, carrying the viewers no further than the initial astonishment at their likeness of form. If the painter could ever aspire to leap out of the boundaries of the empirical and view men and things as a world of symbol that presupposes inexhaustible suggestive potentialities; then the whole phalanx of images, however ostensibly broken or contingent, would come its way only for truly artistic application, in which sense, what generates the artwork ultimately relies on the artist's symbolical prowess of managing a kind of contemporaneity of what he has known and what he is to know, Therefore it may safely be said that the genuine art of work is a free play enacted by an all-knowing mind.

The Fire and Water series by Li Jinyuan is fairly the representation on the strength of such a knowing mind. To take one instance, Aloof Heaven, Remote Earth, one piece of the series, rendered on pitch-dark paper with quick breathing strokes of exuberant propylene colour communicates in a most vivid manner layers of hidden emotions which seek to rise from out of the antagonism wherein the muteness of heaven runs parallel with the forlornness of earth; the warmth of the past takes Its place beside the uncertainties of the future, The opponents, in the essential striving between themselves for the self-assertion of their own nature, rather, incite each other to the birth of unity eventually reconciled and framed in the artwork. The myriad impressions of the universe, represented by the knowing mind thus have always turned up already along with the given core in which relentless struggling is ever going on: hope and despair, aspiration and frustration, glory and death, The primordial contradiction pulsing through the Fire and Water series pushes the viewers to the point of hardly breathing one moment and of being badly In want of gasp the next.

The traffic lights devised to ensure the continuous operation of the mechanism of modern society signifies variously for the walks of life. It reduces those of habits to be stuck in the old ruts and galvanises the radicals into pointless deaths in the gutters. Only the minds unfettered by vulgar adherence to the actual appearance of the green light can cross with measured gait to the opposite side safe and sound, now and always. This ability to unbind from the phenomena of the visible world particularly owes to a metaphysical fact that they are going over the bridge connecting Heaven and Earth,

In I Ching, known in English as the Books of Changes, Li is a hexagram consisting of a doubling of the trigram with two Yang lines encompassing one Yin line while Kan, conversely, two Yin encompassing one Yang. Li and Kan, in cosmological terms, represent fire and water respectively, By Qu Kan Bu Li, switching the enclosed lines of Li and Kan, there bring about the Pure Yang, the hexagram named Qian representing Heaven and Pure Yin, Kun Earth, hence the integration of water and fire, the fusion of Heaven and Earth. The interchanging of hexagrams of I Ching has obvious associations with the interacting Yin and Yang within the human body when Qigong is being practised, the achievement of which owes primarily to Queqiao, a channel that allows for the gathering of pure energy form. (When one breathes in, the nature of the breathing is water, when out, fire.) Such Daoist notions of interpenetration, in a manner o speaking, readily apply to the case of Jinyuan when he represents the reality in the painting. Precisely because he is right on the bridge amidst the universe, he is able to carry out the spontaneous intercourse with Heaven and Earth, past and present, east and west.

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