艺术家｜Artists:

段建宇 Duan Jianyu

黄周妥 Huang Zhoutuo

栾重阳 Luang Chongyang

Jing Yitian: We are delighted to have Duan Jianyu and Huang Zhoutuo here today. The two of them will join Luan Chongyang to talk about their everyday lives and their painting. A brief introduction to Luan Chongyang's solo exhibition: the second floor features works depicting the subject of the boxing gym, while the third floor presents works related to place, focused primarily on Zhengzhou, where he lives, and the places he travels to. Let's start by asking Chongyang to share about the "everyday" in his pictures.

Luan Chongyang: My paintings are pretty close to daily life. Especially these past few years, I've been practicing boxing a great deal, and that takes up most of my time. I also went through a lot in the years before that, including the pandemic, during which I had plans to study abroad that didn't work out. After that I worked for a short while, then considered going into a university position, but I would have had to spend years as a student counselor first, and I really didn't want to do that, so I didn't. Anyway, after all that aimless wandering around, I hadn't been painting much, but I kept practicing boxing the whole time. For the past couple of years, without a studio, the small paintings were done slowly at home in my spare time. The large paintings were made for this exhibition, after I found a new place to work. Boxing and painting have basically been my daily life these past few years.

Jing Yitian: What about the works on the third floor?

Luan Chongyang: The subjects on the third floor are scenes from my life: train stations, street scenes, construction sites in Zhengzhou. I'm interested in mechanical things, like trucks, excavators, cranes. I really like all of that.

Huang Zhoutuo: When I saw Chongyang's work at the last group show, he had two or three small paintings, not a series like this solo exhibition. The second floor has a very strong subject identity, but with those two or three small paintings from last time, I found myself asking: where is this artist from? Where might he be living? If I'm looking at boxing gym subjects, I don't necessarily think to ask where he lives. With the place-based paintings on the third floor, including how the scenes are handled, if you have some experience looking at painting, you start guessing and making judgments for yourself.

Jing Yitian: There are specific place names in the work, like Dashiqiao and others.

Huang Zhoutuo: Even without the names it works fine. But going back to what you said about regionality: how does it actually manifest? We talk about it more these days, but if something is deeply personal, it isn't regional anymore. Individuality and regionality are two different systems. I think a lot of artists, a lot of painters, including myself, sometimes work in thematic series.

Duan Jianyu: What first caught my eye about his work was this genuinely unaffected, almost naive quality. That's a feeling, an instinct, and it's wonderful. But if you look more carefully at the details, including how color is distributed and how the compositions are structured, you can immediately see the training behind it, and a very good foundation. His aesthetic sensibility is clearly dignified and generous, and there's a natural quality to it, like that naivety. For someone his age working in painting, I think this aesthetic direction is actually quite good. He has his own appropriate feeling and way of communicating it. Because there's so much information out there, many artists born in the 1990s tend to chase fashionable pictorial formulas, but Chongyang conveys more of his own life and temperament. He studied as a graduate student under Duan Zhengqu, and I can identify some of what he's absorbed from his teacher. I studied with Duan Zhengqu before university myself, so I recognize some of the distinctive ways of handling detail in landscapes, like that naive quality of outlining walls with line, or using dots to paint the ground. The effect is really strong, and the compositional approach is very effective, pulling you in immediately. Beyond absorbing these influences, I also sense that, in the years since graduating, Chongyang is still searching for his own pictorial language. In the landscape works from an earlier period upstairs, you can still feel traces of his teacher. Every painter goes through a difficult process of moving from student work to finding their own way of expression. When I was a student, I started by imitating Baselitz. A classmate once told me my painting was too "northern," which I understood as a polite criticism, and I started to take that seriously. Once you become accustomed to a certain language and aesthetic sensibility, wanting to change means starting from scratch, which requires relearning, rethinking, and practicing. Everyone's path is different. Looking at these paintings, especially on the second floor, I feel Chongyang has absorbed something from his teacher while finding his own pictorial language, and has naturally incorporated what he's learned into his own system. In that sense, Chongyang is fortunate, but in my experience most students find it hard to actually develop their own language.

Huang Zhoutuo: I think Chongyang is emphasizing something distinctive and personal. It's not simple decorativeness. The way he handles bodily posture in the picture is very strong. From that perspective, the feeling is intense, and there's a slight sense of solitude. In every open scene, there's just one person practicing boxing, without even an opponent. From the perspective of painting, a lot of people today are asking: what is bodily memory? Does what you do in your daily life get channeled directly into your painting? There might be that kind of connection. So I think the bodily postures he paints, the sense of presence, may have been accumulating over many years. But I'm also curious: how did this particular pictorial formula come about?

Luan Chongyang: When I started painting these, I wasn't consciously thinking about questions of bodily posture. But once the show was hung and all the paintings were together, it became quite obvious: that slightly lonely feeling. I think one reason is the subject itself. Boxing isn't a team sport. At its core, it's one person fighting. I also really like those ink landscape paintings where there are one or two tiny figures.

Huang Zhoutuo: That richness of the scene is clearly something you want to emphasize. And some of the paintings have a picture within a picture quality that makes the whole thing feel very alive. But there's just that one person, and that loneliness.

Jing Yitian: After the show was hung, he said to himself: "Why is it always just one person, and small?" We ended up discussing the question of painting figures.

Huang Zhoutuo: There's a self-portrait quality of projection in it.

Luan Chongyang: In some of them, yes.

Jing Yitian: The subject in your painting, "Young Boxer" — is that you?

Luan Chongyang: The figures are basically invented. There's no specific model. I think about the movements from training and paint from that, so it's also a kind of symbol.

Jing Yitian: A lot of people who've seen the show mention one thing: "You can immediately tell this is a northern artist." Is there a strong linguistic characteristic that comes through, related to place, to soil, to a kind of locatedness?

Luan Chongyang: To some extent, yes. Place does influence me. Zhengzhou isn't as developed as Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, but it's in the Central Plains, with a very deep cultural foundation. Certain things happen elsewhere, but because Zhengzhou is a transport hub, sitting in the middle, it gets touched by trends from other places too. It's like the outer ring of ripples when a stone is thrown into a pond. In an essay Cao Xinlin wrote for the series "Middle Ground," he put it very well. He said roughly: "The Central Plains region is geographically in the middle, large in scale, and capable of absorbing everything. It's a place where east, west, north, and south all mix together, and it has a quality of zhōngyōng, the moderate center: nothing stands out too extremely, nothing too much or too little." You can see some of that in me. My paintings aren't particularly forceful, and if I absorb something new, it doesn't show up all at once.

Duan Jianyu: Some of the painters I know from Henan do share certain qualities. In terms of sensibility, including my own, you can see some commonality in the forms: a kind of solidity and simplicity, the influence of the decorative bricks, the carved figures, something ancient and grounded that still shapes our aesthetic. But if you take that aesthetic commonality as a kind of Central Plains identity, or what others might call "earthiness," I'd also point out that there are very cosmopolitan artists from the same region who don't follow that line at all, like Geng Jianyi. That has more to do with learning environment and knowledge structure. What Chongyang said earlier, that when he absorbs something new it doesn't show up immediately: that actually is a characteristic of art-making in the Central Plains region. I don't think it's necessarily a weakness. It's a kind of fidelity to one's own feeling. They feel that new things have to be genuinely absorbed and digested before they can be expressed in their own way. My brother and Duan Zhengqu, for instance, were both exposed to the '85 New Wave, but they chose their own methods and practiced them for decades. It's that quality of the place, and of the people. I came to Guangzhou for school. There I encountered Xu Tan of the Big-Tail Elephant group, who was my teacher, and Chen Dong's Borges Bookshop. I'd already had a certain resistance to the reflective realism dominant in the Central Plains, and Guangzhou gave me new nourishment. My intellectual structure was built on that, combined with a desire to explore new methods. Each person, through some particular encounter, forms their own background. Chongyang went to school in Beijing, so he was probably mostly in contact with northern artists, right? I feel the environment of the north and south is actually quite far apart. When I was in school in the 1990s, Beijing felt very oriented toward ideology as the basis for making work, very confrontational. But the south also had its confrontational spirit, only it came through the details of everyday life, very grounded in living, like the Big-Tail Elephant. And the people here: at night, most of them weren't watching the seven o'clock news, they were watching Pearl River Channel films at nine-thirty. They didn't call each other brothers like people up north, but they took care of their own business, did what was theirs to do, very grounded and reliable. All of that influenced me. I'm really glad I came south to study and received a different way of looking at art.

Jing Yitian: Zhoutuo, you're from Guangdong and have lived in Guangzhou for many years. Can you share whether there are local linguistic characteristics in your work?

Huang Zhoutuo: These past few years, I've sometimes thought about this question, but not before. Because I'd never left Guangdong for long. Then I got to know some friends from up north, and they'd look at my work and say it didn't feel like it came from someone living in Guangzhou. I didn't quite understand that at the time. What Duan Jianyu said about the north, the grand narratives: there does seem to be more of that. I did my undergraduate degree at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in the early 2000s. That was when communication networks were starting to expand, and Guangdong's art also started to have a slightly louder voice again. Sometimes I observe that certain work has a somewhat intellectualized quality. I actually have doubts about that, but there's no avoiding it. Everyone carries their educational system and their regionality. Later I discovered that art in Guangzhou is actually so close to daily life. Duan Jianyu mentioned Big-Tail Elephant. When I was in school, I met Chen Dong. Later I got to know Zheng Guogu, who lives in Yangjiang and has always talked about the same thing: the three-kilometer radius around home. Within three kilometers of his house is his creative arena. By the late 1990s they were already working like that, and this approach has become fairly widespread in Guangdong now, though not necessarily in painting. Actually the range of forms in Guangdong is quite wide, and different from the past. Before, that political, confrontational work would be described in grand terms. Now there's still political work, but it's right next to you. That's not my practice, but I have many friends who work that way. If that's also a regional quality, I think I quite like it.

Duan Jianyu: There's another kind of thing I find quite interesting here. Guangdong has always been known for self-organization: small groups of a few people forming their own units. In their eyes, what we do is mainstream art, and they might not particularly respect it. So a few people form a small group and do something even more underground. Not through conventional gallery shows, but maybe through a self-published small book, or through an online platform. I think this whole art ecology, these organizations, are extremely important, and they actually influence us too. We study them and ask whether there's something good to absorb into our painting.

Huang Zhoutuo: You do notice certain teacher-student lineages, and certain pictorial formulas that appear fairly regularly over the years. We've talked about this. Does Guangdong have anything like that? It seems not, or at least the transmission isn't as wide. Maybe in small circles, but I've never felt a particular painting style become even slightly influential in Guangdong to the point of broader circulation.

Duan Jianyu: When I was in school in the 1990s, the New Generation painters had no influence on us, and neither did Political Pop. Once I came to Guangdong I understood: everyone has to invent their own method. That's the biggest thing Guangdong gave me. Everyone has to reinvent their own method. You can't walk the main road. You have to find your own small path. I'd like to hear Chongyang talk about his figure drawing: where does it come from? Things like tomb bricks, outsider art.

Luan Chongyang: I'm drawn to naïve art, rock art, things like that. Rock painting is incredibly simple and vivid, full of life force. Once that kind of image is in my mind, I push in that direction when I paint, and if I feel it's come through, I try to preserve it.

Huang Zhoutuo: That quality of outsider painting: how did you work through that? Because we've all had academic training, and to get something slightly outsider-feeling is extremely hard. Some things you can't go back to. I feel you handle it very well, there's a real flavor to it. Is it something you've processed, or was it already your natural way of painting?

Luan Chongyang: I think I have a bit of it naturally. The Central Plains tradition values simplicity and roughness as a high aesthetic ideal, and I think that influenced the formation of my sensibility. There's also something I remember very clearly: when I first entered university, my painting was very academic. In second year, Teacher Yuan Guang was taking us through a small creative exercise. I'd been sitting there working for a while. I felt I was still in draft mode. But Yuan Guang came over and said: "You can stop for now. There's something in your painting that other people don't have. Don't paint any more today. Sit with it for a while. This might be something that helps you in the future." That stayed with me.

Duan Jianyu: Looking at the paintings, there's something distinctive in Chongyang's nature. That's a very significant energy inside you. You need to keep drawing it out slowly, and then put everything into making more great paintings. Painting still demands everything you've got.

Jing Yitian: The Central Plains tradition's pursuit of the simple and rough: how do you transform that in the present moment? How do you use it?

Luan Chongyang:China itself has that aesthetic tradition. And growing up in the Central Plains, there are so many ancient remnants around you. Like Zijingshan Park in the city center, where part of the old walls connect to the ancient Shang city site. Zhengzhou is fairly developed, so it's not always obvious, but if you go west toward Luoyang, there are hundreds and thousands of earthen mounds and burial mounds along the way. Further west, at the Gongyi Stone Cave Temple: on one side is the cave temple, on the other side is a farmhouse, and the family is still living there. The traditional and the contemporary are just interwoven in daily life.

Duan Jianyu:I think that's a common quality among painters from Henan, myself included. But personally, I think this is also a step that needs to be crossed, because it is ultimately a regional aesthetic habit. It can easily become another formula. It's not without quality, but if you want to push further, I think the forms need to become freer. Not limited by a single taste, like simplicity and plainness, which are fine qualities in painting, but which sometimes don't connect well to certain modern sensibilities. When your painting wants to express something modern, that kind of form can become a heavy constraint and prevent you from reaching the effect you want. So I think of it as one starting point, and from there you continue exploring form, giving the painting greater freedom. That's my personal understanding, drawn from my own experience of painting.

Huang Zhoutuo: What Duan Jianyu is pointing to is probably a question of rhetoric: in each period, the content of each picture might call for different formal decisions. I think that's very hard. I remember Duan Jianyu talking about faces once, and her answer was very funny: "As soon as I paint a frontal face well, I immediately turn it away." When you paint the back of something, what kind of space is that, what emotion are you reaching for? That needs to be precise too. And when you turn it around, what is the state of that? It's actually a question I have for myself too. Duan Jianyu has moved from those goddess figures to more recently using the concept of the self-portrait. The body, the face. What is that need?

Duan Jianyu: With self-portraits, I think more about an ethical question. If you paint a lot of unflattering images of other people, it feels unequal not to include yourself. What I pursue in painting is something encyclopedic, influenced by the novelist Umberto Eco. Painting is a flat thing: how do you give it maximum energy? A flat surface with enormous energy. That surface has been edited, a great deal of information has been processed and compressed, and it becomes a crystallized plane. I want that plane to have energy. To do that, you first need to be free. That freedom might be the ability to handle all kinds of forms. Maybe what I've been doing these past few decades is in part training and experimenting in that area, all in the service of giving painting a very great energy.Because it's not like before anymore. Having a distinctive style, that's no longer enough. There's no such thing as a painting that works once and for all. A painter might be doing great work these past few years, but a few years from now those paintings might look "dated," and dated often means something in the picture wasn't resolved well enough. So painters also have to keep attending to shifts in context and adjusting, mastering a range of vocabulary and rhetorical methods, asking how to recalibrate in the face of new realities. Your position is always moving. It isn't fixed.

Huang Zhoutuo: In a certain sense, painting today is the opposite of that older symbolic approach. In roughly the 1990s, symbols dominated everything. Everyone wanted to conquer the world with a single symbol. But if a young artist today still does that, using a symbol at a certain moment, it's absolutely not meant to become their brand. If it becomes their brand, I think it has nothing to do with painting anymore. It becomes something from iconology or semiotics, a different system entirely, and that's why it works in that other context. But there's a difficulty here: the flux of the reality we're in is so enormous. If our painting keeps changing with every shift in society, we face another problem: it also becomes ineffective. If you're responding to every change in the immediate situation, won't that also fail? I'm genuinely unclear on this. If something keeps working over time, it must be the rhetoric: the combination, however you look back at it, is right. It carries the thread of its era and the mark of its language. That's a real master.

Duan Jianyu:Duan Jianyu: Right now in my painting, the figures are mainly connected to what I want to express. For example, the first painting in the shamate series came from reading a lot of news. At the time, real estate development was going hard, and a lot of rural land was being sold off by village officials for almost nothing. The Southern Weekend ran extensive coverage. I read it and was furious. I wanted to paint two middle-aged rural women holding knives. That's how the figures came to me. But because I didn't want to use the standard realist approach, I couldn't paint a realistic middle-aged woman holding a knife, bare-chested, standing at the village entrance. So I stylized it using Malevich-style stripes. But then I felt: you're this angry about something, and you're stylizing it? That felt like watching from across the river, morally indefensible.

Jing Yitian: So with figures in painting: do you generally aim to have a close connection to the present?

Luan Chongyang:The boxers in my paintings aren't portraits of real fighters. I distill my experience of and feelings about boxing practice into the picture, place a boxer's image within a large scene, and through that process of internalization and release, let certain things resonate with the viewer's own experience. I don't consciously balance personal experience and social dimension. I start with what interests me and what I'm capable of. As my own experience, circumstances, and interests shift, what I focus on changes too. Something a teacher said while I was in school stayed with me: roughly, "When you start making work, you can go in any direction. What matters is how far and how deep you can go, whether you can reach somewhere no one else has reached."

Duan Jianyu: Right now in my painting, the figures are mainly connected to what I want to express. For example, the first painting in the shamate series came from reading a lot of news. At the time, real estate development was going hard, and a lot of rural land was being sold off by village officials for almost nothing. The Southern Weekend ran extensive coverage. I read it and was furious. I wanted to paint two middle-aged rural women holding knives. That's how the figures came to me. But because I didn't want to use the standard realist approach, I couldn't paint a realistic middle-aged woman holding a knife, bare-chested, standing at the village entrance. So I stylized it using Malevich-style stripes. But then I felt: you're this angry about something, and you're stylizing it? That felt like watching from across the river, morally indefensible

I set the painting aside for six months. It wasn't working. Then I thought of an analogical approach: I painted a second image of African hunters marking their bodies with stripes for protection, and placed them together. With that analogical structure in place, the series opened up. The whole framework relates to my ethical concern as much as anything else. The "fisherman and woodcutter" paintings I've been doing recently came after reading an essay by Zhang Wenjiang and a book by Zhao Tingyang. Zhang Wenjiang says the fisherman and woodcutter can live in deep mountain seclusion, but because they have to sell their fish and firewood, they also have to go to the marketplace and deal with ordinary people. They can move between both worlds. He says every person today is a fisherman and woodcutter: when we eat together we discuss national affairs, world affairs, gossip about others. In daily life we just live it. We're not at the level of the fisherman and woodcutter, but we are all of us fisherman and woodcutter. I found something in that passage, a thread connecting to contemporary life: a way to shape the figure you want to paint so it doesn't become merely conceptual. That's how I determine my forms.

Huang Zhoutuo: Maybe I'm simpler. Duan Jianyu is like a Rubik's cube with all kinds of material to draw from at any moment. I can't do that. In the past I was led astray by symbols, maybe cultural symbols of some kind, I'm not entirely sure. A painter can't really do that much. Even with realism, you can't do much with reality. Saying more than that gets pretentious, and it's painful.

Maybe it's related to things in your shallower memory: you can use past cultural identifications, even figures, to reflect your emotion, but that's fluid and shifting. So I'm not going to keep working with one type of figure. It's tied to my own understanding. For instance, these past two years, working with some simple contour lines. I feel emotion can be brought out that way too. Once you have an idea, the idea is also a way in, but by the time the painting is done, it may not have much to do with the original idea. That's fine. How someone else reads it is another matter entirely. So I think it's just a constant forward movement between relative closure and relative openness.

Duan Jianyu: I feel Zhoutuo has been moving quite fast these past two years. In his last solo exhibition, there was a purification of the symbol that I thought was very well done. Like the way you used the image of the phone: it's both a phone and like a black hole. I felt it sitting there in the picture and it makes you think of so many things. That openness is really something.

Huang Zhoutuo: There's one feeling I love above all: being stopped in your tracks. That split second of being stopped. It's extremely hard to achieve. There's interpretive possibility, but it's also slightly closed. I'm not very interested in straightforward realism, but emotion can project in that direction. Including what we said about Wang Xingwei: that critical quality has been there for decades, and however he changes, it's his ground color. So even a simple-looking painting of his has an intent that is not simple at all. It's oblique. Self-reflexivity has become a noun now. Among painters it's really just self-reflection. Anyone who truly commits, whether in painting, art, literature, photography, the best ones have that capacity in extraordinary strength. But whether it works is a matter of individual ability, and nothing can be done about that.

Jing Yitian: Thank you all three for sharing. Now we can move into open conversation.

Audience Member: That large oil painting: I'd asked Chongyang earlier, and he said he started with the championship belts. I would have assumed he started with the boxing ring or something. He told me he started with the row of belts. I found that really interesting. There's nothing conceptual about it, nothing a priori. Maybe you painted the belts first, and then everything else came.

Luan Chongyang: I sketched a rough outline of the ring first, then painted that row of belts, and later filled in everything else.

Duan Jianyu: He handles the relationship between environment and density and spacing very well. It's very distinctive.

Huang Zhoutuo: Including that black: the dotted black feeling, and he does a lot of that kind of work. Why did those black dots come about?

Luan Chongyang: Those dots are the audience. I was painting from memory after watching a match.

Huang Zhoutuo: I wouldn't read them so literally as audience members. If I forced myself to read them as audience, it would actually limit me.

Duan Jianyu: There's no perspective.

Huang Zhoutuo: Those dots are so interesting to me.

Jing Yitian: He uses dots a great deal, in many different ways.

Duan Jianyu: This is the same approach you often find in naïve art: not minding the effort, painting point by point.

Huang Zhoutuo: Very patient.

Luan Chongyang: At the time I thought painting individual faces for every person would take forever. I was looking for the lazy solution.

Huang Zhoutuo: Chongyang's spatial imagination in the pictures is substantial. I've been thinking these past couple of days about his way of living, his physical state, the reality of the body. Once a certain set of methods comes out of that, a lot of things fall into place. The construction of his whole method is very full. What comes next is his own business, but this gap, I think, is extremely important right now. Chongyang's unaffected quality really suits his personality, and from there you can keep extending things that carry real possibility.

Luan Chongyang: Zhoutuo, I remember you also occasionally paint everyday things. I remember you painted a pomelo rind.

Huang Zhoutuo: I do keep painting small still life subjects, certain everyday objects: those two subjects come up slightly more often. But I don't want them to be purely a still life in front of me. It's extremely hard in terms of form and aesthetics, because it's so common, and so many masters have done it. To make something really strong, something that within all the shared territory is clearly yours: that's very hard. But it's interesting, because it's so simple.

Duan Jianyu: What you've been doing these past two years, Zhoutuo, I find quite interesting.

Jing Yitian: Outside of painting, do any of you work in other art forms?

Duan Jianyu: I occasionally make sculpture. Chongyang, you could do sculpture too.

Luan Chongyang: My old studio was on the outskirts of Zhengzhou, near a few scrap metal recycling yards. I tried making some things from discarded materials, but they never really came together, so I never showed anything.

Duan Jianyu: I think you have that ability.

本期 对谈艺术家介绍 
段建宇About the Artists Duan Jianyu, born 1970. Graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Lives and works in Guangzhou. Winner of the CCAA Best Artist Award in 2010.

Huang Zhoutuo, born 1982, from Yangjiang, Guangdong. Graduated from Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. Lives and works in Guangzhou.

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