Pending·Sometimes people seek loss just to, in some way, eliminate things that roil them.

　   --Jean Genet, French poet

　　1

　　Knowledge, experience, words, action and desire overlap and enrich one another, which doesn't make us more mighty or righteous since they also counterwork one another, and desire often fades away from them. In Su Xinping's art practice, the counterwork appears to be more effective on him; otherwise, he won't reserve some hesitancy and uncertainty in his works, which is not only revealed in the humming and hawing of his speech rhythm, or in the modesty of his dealings, but also in the pending and to-be-cracked atmosphere that he creates in his works, where he confesses his difficulty and hesitancy cordially and bluntly.

　　How can the fading desire and its appeal be activated as it confronts various symbolic systems? To him, the use of any symbolic system is merely a battle within the system. Although it appears fierce, the boundary of the system is still closed. Has desire lost its power after it is structured into the system? Or has it betrayed its original imagination? Every time I met with Su Xinping, he, in front of his works, would mention the feeling of being trapped. Many indistinct but persistent ideas seem to be blocked by a mighty consciousness, so what can he break it with? How? What is it? All these doubts and difficulties are brought into his works.

　　When he got down to "Landscape" series with these difficulties in 2006, he simply started the experiment in painting language, and the so-called landscape was only in a widest sense. He had the original intention that "landscape can embody more uncertainty". It can include anything and anything can be placed into it, including the characters in the previous series of "Cheers" and images in "The Sea of Desires". But here, the lingering man is merely used as an element, rather than an image, in the landscape. The subsequent landscapes continue with the experiment, and there is a rough tendency in the pictures where people become indistinct and the sense of ruins seems specious with the drifty people.

　　The completion of this change could probably be seen from the self-portrait in 2009. Compared with his previous self-portraits, its visual line is inward and involuntary, which reminds us of the horses in his lithographs. However, this time, he is more like a person thrown out from "The Sea of Desires" after "Cheers", who no longer asks questions or meditates anxiously. For a person being thawed by some internal power, where does the power come from? We are not sure, but what we can see is that the person seems to hear a covert melody, which he is willing to accompany on and blend into…

　　Yes, just as what he said, the groping of painting languages made a great difference. In the "Landscape 2012" series, the orientation appears distinctly.

　　But in terms of completion, it is only in the sense of picture, far from the completion of a desire. In the "Landscape" series starting from 2006, the creating process of the first work best revealed the orientation. Up to today, he is not sure whether it is completed or not since it never has an integrated conception or plan. The work originated in a vague motivation, but when he finished the first part and tried to make it independent, there came some uneasy restlessness from the brim of the picture, which is perhaps his unease. The uneasy motivation that triggered the painting? Anyhow he couldn't tolerate the unease, so he moved forward along the first chapter. He worked on the work intermittently for more than one year, and in 2007, it was suspended with a continuous long scroll of eight pieces with variations.

　　Extension, advance and transformation, he has abandoned conception or any Utopian programming, freeing his expectation and allowing it to thrive in the seemingly haphazard connection. It seems as if he has indulged his sight in an excursive and out-of-focus state, and abandoned the counteractive ideological framework of the motivation. He was most voluntary in avoiding the adept techniques trained in the academies, which means his labor has lost the teaching function of an academy. Just like a housewife in a neorealist movie who has lost her housekeeping function in a specific link, he has encountered a problem that is unsolvable and undecodable for a professional painter. He said, "It seems as if I am unable to paint. It's so difficult that I need to search for visual genes everywhere, even in a garbage heap."

　　He is risking because both the knowledge that has gained him independence and those handy techniques have become "powerful obstruction" in his experience. So he would rather throw himself into an involuntary state, or at least put his knowledge chain and the symbolic system consisting of knowledge chain in unstability. When some critics inquired about the connection between these landscapes and classical Chinese landscape, he was noncommittal and so was he when asked whether they were criticism on the absurd reality or the exposure to the abominable environment. This is probably because it's too difficult to truly break away from any system, and the struggle reveals that he is really trapped. His practice method is to confine the knowledge in all these systems to a state of preposing so that he doesn't have to concern or discuss repeatedly. Therefore, characters, wastelands or landscapes, instead of being images in the modern symbolic structure, have obtained an open space, which his knowledge and related words can also enter to find a usage again.

　　Then the decisive structure became vacant and lost its conclusiveness. It's haphazard that he might lose the "independence" of a professional artist simultaneously. He said he spent almost 10 years on that, from 1996 to 2006.

　　That was an afternoon with bright sunshine and strong wind, and the wind seemed to have blown sunshine to the floor of his studio. He took out the eight-piece landscape again and spread it on the floor as if to remind those new works standing against the wall where they had originated. Tardily he talked about his work, difficulty and experience, answering my trivial questions seriously. He was usually close-lipped, and it's the first time that I heard him talk so much. I was most impressed that with his damnedest for 10 years, he had driven himself to desperation, a state of being seemingly down and out – the so-called "being unable to paint".

　　At first, I was not serious enough about this statement because he is not the only one to do it by material means and they often make it another "being able to paint". I was wrong. Actually, his difficulty was so far more complicated, and ponderous as well, than his expression that he even had to abandon the remedial explanation he was used to, which was also a sort of restriction and temporary safety. At that time, he didn't design – what he designed seemed to be unable to satisfy him; he didn't conceive – the system that he relied his conception on couldn't win the trust of his experience any more. What he did was to allow the picture to extend and grow vainly but stiffly, and to exceed his judgment, to leave experience to itself and stop it from tracing facts and accumulating fantasies.

　　Even so, even he seems to be unable to paint, he is not bound for a renascence without any burden, let alone he is unable to be like that. Then what is it like to be "seemingly unable to paint"? While continuously painting the extending wild landscape, he might be testing, so what is it that he has at hand and truly belongs to him? What's undeprivable? In the progress, the painting is extending and he has compelled another independence from the turbulent growth of the picture.

　　Is it the externality that Su Xinping has endued his desire with? Or does the self-growing picture shape his desire?

　　2

　　There are remarks that Su Xinping "belongs to the generation who interpret society from an integral perspective", but he wasn't that conceited since long ago. Perhaps those integral narrations didn't bring integral gratification and accuracy, either emotionally or experientially. From the texts and interviews about his early experience we could see that he is truly not adept at integrating his experiences in an integral way, for instance, he signed up to join the army simply because his close friend did. It's striking that he leaves the most soulful and profound remarks to the life on the grassland, which widened his imagination and allowed him to experience a detached power.

　　You have to believe it is the life on the Inner Mongolian grassland that allowed him to experience a visual line, which might be summoning him all the time – because I've heard him say so many times, to be "back to the innermost being". What is that in his heart to draw him back?

　　In his self-talking expression, I felt, in a trance, that I was in the face of the characters in his early lithographs, in which the herders, male or female, have a particular visual line, dull but acute, keen but serene. He must have borrowed a certain visual line to frame them and their grassland in the pictures, many of which don't have a structural hub, but they are guided to a direction by the visual line or momently focus on a transient event. They are witnesses, sometimes guardians or media of a central event, but the central image never appears and always stays outside the picture. Perhaps it's exactly because they are not the inspective objects of the artist and the artist doesn't mean to inspect himself through them, so the Mongolian herders in his paintings are distinctive from those popular ones about minorities.

　　The Rising Sun and Expectation present this to the point. You can see their visual line and where it casts – the unnarrated but obvious central event. But due to the frankness, the power of the visual line doesn't take full effect.

　　In Woman and Ox, the visual line displays its great power, but the central event focused by it is still unable to appear in the picture. It's impossible to depict its power because any depiction is unreal, but it never appears vainly, distinguished from the waited Godot. Therefore, what the picture provides is definitely not an ornamental object, but how the significant central event is experienced. The characters work as the guide to the emergence of another visual line. The first one to be guided is the artist, and then more audiences.

　　It was not until one afternoon at the end of last year, when I went to observe his latest oil paintings, that I was aware of the idea, which was naturally inspired by his later work. The sun was fading away from the studio, so his assistant Tang turned on the lights. The light reflected the inner study, which was like a backstage, dusky and littery, but it seemed to be where the trick was. I asked him what those paintings were, and he told me they were just old works. When the lights were turned on, I saw some familiar lithographs. We stood in front of Wooden Peg and Horse, A Lying Man and a Fading White Horse and A Quiescent Town for a while, but he didn't say anything about them. At first I thought that was because those were old works, so he didn't have much to talk about. But after all the other noises were filtered by the silence, I realized he was looking at Wooden Peg and Horse in the same way as I did, as if it was not his picture, or as if he was not inviting me to look at those pictures, but was adjusting along the horse's visual line to an appealing direction, until our visual lines were consistent with it.

　　Then I took notice of the three visual lines from different angles: the first was the visual line in the picture, the second was the one to identify the painter's and the third was mine that was guided by the painter's. When I turned back to Su's lithographs, I also found the three visual lines in Floating White Clouds and Man and Horse. Even in Dialogue, the central event was no longer the dialogue between two people, but the indication, in the way of dialogue, of their common inner visual line toward the outside of the frame.

　　The visual line inside the painting involved us, so the spatial relation has changed transiently. The real physical space and the virtual space in the picture, the position of viewing and being viewed, both were reorganized to a new relation by the three visual lines: people in the picture, the painter and the viewer, with no one as an on-looker, planner or being viewed. All of us are reformed into the same dimension, in an equal experience position. Standing in front of Su's lithographs with him, I was clearly aware of the position; and the central event that always stands outside the frame has become the focus of the three visual lines, experiencing the same event together. That is the other side of space. It is present, but neither in imaginary space nor in our physical space, or we should say it crosses both sides, so there is no proper method to visualize it.

　　With such a visual line, Su successfully drew a focus to a distance that could be noticed by people, but he also feared it would be ruined by interpretation, so he pushed it farther to stop it from being confused by the depicted symbols. If we contrast Su's lithographs with the different forms of authenticity that Bazin used to analyze neorealist movie, there is an authenticity, instead of having been decoded, to be decoded.

　　3

　　These lithographs have won him wide reputation. In 1992, Su Xinping Lithograph Exhibition, his first solo exhibition, was held in Shanghai Art Museum, then in the National Art Museum of China, and later in some renowned museums in Europe and North America. Those were great achievements for him and had significance at that time. In the next two years, his exhibitions, solo and international, came one after another. But in 1998 when I first met him in Red Gate Gallery, his appearance completely disaccorded with his fame, being a bit anxious and dejected. What disturbed his visual line then?

　　In the two years after 1992, while attending exhibitions, he visited all the museums and galleries, attended art activities and visited artists in those cities, and he commented it "so shocking" that even his art concept wavered. It was interesting that he was not shocked like Mr. Liu Haisu to be sharp-eyed and deft-handed, but dazed and didn't know what to do. Just in those two years, Deng Xiaoping's Tour of South China fueled the economic reform in China, with trends changing in every industry and customs snapping. He came back right at that time, so he was stunned, unable to keep up with the pace. Under the great tension from the two sides, he had to adjust and restart again to cope with his restless thoughts.

　　Jonathan Goodman also observed this when criticizing his works at this stage, "The fast development of economy in China has outshone any personal initiative. What can artists do?" I noticed that Su mentioned his idea at that time in an interview with Art World, saying that he felt that his previous works had strayed far from social reality and lost the control of the overall spirit of reality. Therefore, creating images for the overwhelming "sea of desires" and reminding the neglected public order and good custom in the historical reform had nearly become a responsibility, with which Su set about his new creation.

　　However, inner sights vary and so does perception. In those years' work, some stubborn idea always reminded him of the lack of thoroughness in his criticalness. New vitality was revealed in the transformation of images, which made it clearer for him to perceive the ideological bondage that blocks thoroughness, one direct example of which was the interpretative system formed by academic training. He was not sure whether, working in such a system, the antagonistic images also depended on power. Deleuze once pointed out the vexed problem that we would rely on some resistance when we were confined to a certain power. To Su, where did his resistance come from? He hesitated. I asked him whether he had the doubt then. He said he did doubt and was uncertain all the time. However, he soon realized he had to attempt to avoid the disciplinary criterion or pattern, so as to evade various ideologized symbolic systems.

　　The emergence of Overlooking the Distance in 2001 was a significant clue. Both were about overlooking the distance, but it had the opposite visual line to the lithographs 10 years ago. I consider the work a "pause", which means he had escaped from the agitated state of independence. The agitated will didn't diminish a bit, but the reasons for agitation didn't work any more. The one who was looking still wore a look of fright after survival, and the direction of the posture revealed that she was ready for farewell. This work reminded me to review his previous works, such as The Sea of Desires No. 11 in 1999 and A Horse Turning Round in 1994, in which the pause had appeared, yet it was not as certain as in Overlooking the Distance.

　　The pause filled with struggles of thoughts revealed the tension of human will for 10 long years. In those large numbers of works, the usage of various painting manners and the variations of painting languages hided Su's self-expression, "I seemed to be looking for something, yet didn't know what for", and also his self-mockery, "to take a step back". What highlights the value of the pause is that it cultivates another vitality, "it was troublesome and sometimes I didn't know why I painted it like that. I wasn't sure whether it was right, but just did it. Just try it again."

　　4

　　The experiment of Su was launched in an involuntary state and set up a moldable and negotiable position, which vacated his desire and interfered, from the outside, in the balance of the symbolic system that he intended to break but was unable to. Here, the logic echoed his lithographs. The event that was undepictable and out of plan was made the central event, which organized the progress as if it was summoned.

　　The motivity coming from outside had revealed itself in the stormy pause in his heart, but good luck and courage is still needed to meet with it. In the works after 2006, we could perceive the determination that the poet Genet described: stop dreaming it but start to experience it. Sometimes, he would repaint the fragments of accidental meeting with the motivity in a new consciousness without caring anything; sometimes, he would indulge the materiality of strokes and paints, which was so powerful that it was even out of control. No deliberate image could control it so what he had in his hand was neither distorted people, nor landscape or real images. Are they haphazardly associative patterns in the windy cirrus, or mountains, or water? Chimneys, cities or seawater? Industrial ruins or our doomsday environment? Sense of absurdity or disillusion? Maybe all of the above because all are related to our knowledge and experience. What is worth discriminating is that knowledge, experience, words, action and desires test and counterwork one another from it: the more emphasis is laid on the materiality of strokes and languages, the more associative images will appear to negate the materiality; there is also one more counterwork functioning: the stronger the associative images are, the more power will shock those images to make it impossible to be related to any real situation. So what is he painting?

　　He is transforming the powerful mode that enfettered him in the past and freeing writing, even if it simply started from a haphazard, arbitrary image. What is the image? He can't explain it clearly. Actually, "arbitrariness" isn't truly arbitrary. In his studio, you can always see a wall with many notes, in which the possible image elements for motivation are recorded. Without careful inspection you can find they are either related to some symbolic system or to a certain taste, that is, they are not arbitrary. Nevertheless, the significant action lies in that Su manages to present them in a way other than their original symbolic logic. He always finds new vitality in nonstructural details so as to break the original symbolic order and restart the journey, allowing the elements to disengage the system, symbol and identification and cultivate them. And he, like a witness, is witnessing the growing of the vitality that could break the conscious fortress. The growing process of "landscape" is almost the process of his self-rescue.

　　In the "Landscape 2012" series and "tree" after "tree" in 2012, growing became more distinct as a desire and will. Watching his progress in work and re-understanding his "seeming to be unable to paint", I find that he persists in doing this to resist fakes with reality sense and conceal the rigidity of ideology rather than evade reality sense itself. Like in his early lithographs, the central event is still not the visual object, but the source of power to organize visual reflections. What is different is that "landscape" has broken the original fluency and silence, met with the growing force in a simulative savage action, cast the desire in it and endured all the difficulties, chains, pauses and expectations…

　　To confront it in the face will, without fail, arouse all sorts of feelings, much more than pure sensation.

作者：Shukewen