Paintings as Independent Objects
——Chang Chih-Cheng’s Recent Works
Gao Ling
2009-10-8
Chang Chih-Cheng’s recent works are of two major themes—portraits and dreams. What makes Chang’s works unforgettable and lingering among the myriad of other artists’ works of the same subjects is his unique expressiveness in oil painting and a keen insight into the relationship between art and reality. As an artist whose career has spanned over 30 years, Chang has built a solid foundation in oil painting techniques, and was greatly influenced by Paul Cezanne in early years. “To treat the nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone” lies at the core of Cezanne’s art, and later became the theoretic principle of Picasso and Braques’ Cubism, making it essential to understand the famous dictum in the appreciation of Cezanne’s works.
In my understanding, Cezanne did not perceive the painting as a re-creation of the visible world, as Gombrich’s observation that it is a gradual enrichment of a simplified pictorial object through a much more complex correctional process until it matches the object in the real, material world. Cezanne aimed to portray objects with continuously changing and modifying textures, through the process of simplification, refining and extracting the essence. The continuously changing and modifying textures replace trying to depict objects using structural composition and light and shadow effects, and impression replaces reproduction. That is the central element in Cezanne’s art. His paintings are not simply imitations of nature, but modifications of it. However, this modification differs from abstract expressionism, which disregards entirely the appearance of the real object, and clearly differs from the realistic quality of classicism. Chang Chih-Cheng’s earlier paintings consisted of mainly stills, flowers and nudes. Although these are all real physical objects, Chang not only organized them according to designated symbols in his mind, but also obeyed and accepted the changing qualities in these objects, allowing himself to freely sense and convey the quality and substantiality of these objects. The objects in his paintings, although seemingly containing traces of reality, have in fact transcended the purpose of imitation and archiving, and eliminated commonly associated meaning of these objects.
To Chang Chih-Cheng, his artistry does not only manifest in the simplification, refining and extraction of essence of real life objects, but also in the bold, subjective and yet perfect application of colors. To me, that is also an influence by Cezanne, to whom painting is an act of presenting or realizing real objects through colors. Coincidentally, Cezanne’s understanding and expression of objects came as a result of his creative application of the color system. From Chang’s attempts to create a 3-dimentional sense of volume and substance that stemmed from a profound interest in light and shadows in his early years, to a preference for monochromatic expression after the 1990’s, Chang has gradually progressed towards a sentimental expression of purely colors. The use of lines and shadowing effect to achieve the illusion of three dimension is replaced by large areas of continuously changing monochromatic texture, a method that usually manages to create surprising effects.
In recent years Chang has focused mainly on portraits and dreams for his work. In the former, facial features are depicted with a mixture of many colors, according to traditions in oil painting. In the latter, the subject matter is based on the various combinations of relationships between unreal people and objects, and relies on a mix of techniques to convey the story. But what is really surprising is Chang’s ability to convey the image with only two to three hues, sometimes even one, and to fantastic effects. At first his paintings give the viewer the impression of a vibrant and lively color palette that is high in brightness and purity, portraying Chang as an artist of an extroverted and optimistic disposition. In fact, delving deeper behind the repeated and overlapping application of these bright hues, one can always sense loneliness in these characters. Here color not only assumes the role of the stylist, but also produces the effect of setting off by contrast the emotions conveyed by the image. In other words, in spite of a monochromatic theme and the high level of brightness and purity of the colors used, they do not come off as frivolous and flamboyant. Objects are covered by overlapping monochromatic color blocks and constantly changing textures, and thus viewer’s path to realism is block, but at the same time objects are extracted from the presumed reality, and are suspended in place in the image. This place, sought by Chang and by us as viewers, exists in the image and waits to be discovered. Like the people who are spying on us, it is spying on us as well.
Therefore, Chang’s selection and treatment of a monochromatic treatment is definitely not a sign of preference for certain colors. Instead, we should interpret his longtime efforts and excellent work of color as attempts to give colors the ability to exist independently as objects in the portrayal of the real world. Therefore in his works, color is a substance and a medium. The suddenly appearing and disappearing visual effect achieved by the overlapping and narration of colors is meant to replace lighting and shadows and to document the changes in objects over time—in humans the ebb and flow of life, in things the rise and fall.
Looking at Chang Chih-Cheng’s painting career, one often questions whether he should be classified as a realist simply because his creations come from his interpretation of real visual sensations, especially his recent portraits which are based on printed pictorials or photographs of his friends. The opposing question is whether he is an idealist because his works on dreams are based on a non-real world? I believe that Chang is not a realist who imitates or restores nature, nor a reality-escaping idealist. In a metropolis like Beijing, a social realism where things and objects greatly overpower human relationships, it is obviously impossible and senseless to disregard reality. The issue is that the number of portraits has significantly increased in Chang’s works during his years in Beijing. These character images are definitely not like those carrying specific social symbols, which have become popular in art in recent years, but they still reflect the artist’s observations of the social phenomena in China today. The artist has effortlessly stayed true to reality but is not limited by it, due to his own artistic philosophy built over the years. Judging from his recent works, his experience of reality has prompted him to explore new subject matters with his maturing color usage, and allowed him new challenges and possibilities with his colors. Like he has always done, his works are not interchangeable with the real world, nor do they belong to the real world. Painting to Chang Chih-Cheng is a spiritual world, parallel to the real one. And to us, it allows us to believe that paintings still possess possibilities and charms indescribable in words.
