微观叙事：张小涛+李一凡的社会图像
开幕：2008年8月25日
展期：2008年8月25日至10月4日
地点：伊比利亚当代艺术中心
地址：中国北京朝阳区酒仙桥路4号798艺术区E06
参展艺术家：张小涛、李一凡
策展人：巫鸿、冯博一
主办：伊比利亚当代艺术中心
总监：夏季风
艺术总监：左靖
展览简介：
“微观叙事：张小涛+李一凡的社会图像”是由张小涛的《迷雾》与李一凡的《档案》两个个展所共同组成的一个主题性的展览。“微观叙事”是两位艺术家在艺术实践上具有的共同特征：张小涛是一位主要从事绘画实践的艺术家，李一凡则是一位纪录片导演，虽然两位艺术家从事的媒介有所不同，但他们都十分关注对于当下中国社会文本的叙事研究。张小涛近年来一直以跨媒介、跨学科的实验观念，以显微镜式的视角，以象征的视觉形象来显现深埋在转型期中国社会内部的焦虑与不安，作品弥漫着强烈的宗教情绪；而李一凡采用一种田野考察式的工作方法，在中国社会的底层进行视觉采样，展示了中国社会基层的生存状态与精神面貌。《迷雾》与《档案》在内容与叙事两方面都构成一种文本上的互补。
在当前的这个展览中，微观和宏观的二元对立在张小涛的作品中被进一步消解。他把创作这些作品的灵感归结为在生活和记忆中不断感到的一种联系：从重庆钢铁厂的巨大沉重暗影到类似于“文化动物园”的北京798再到深圳荒诞而矫饰的世界之窗公园，一个称为“梦工厂和垃圾场”的主题开始浮现出来了。虽然这个主题中的场景并不存在直接的联系，但是对张小涛说来“有一缕时间的暗线在我的内心中把它们荒诞地串联了起来”。延续着他一直探索的微观叙事逻辑，他把这些作品计划为采用“抽样”的方式去反思前社会主义时期中国的集体现代化理想诉求的本源及其付出的惨痛代价和经验教训。在这个大题目下他提出了一系列问题，包括“社会主义的遗产中什么依然存活？什么已经死亡？过渡时期给我们带来什么样的结构性变化？在全球化的进程中如何确立自我身份的认同和转译？如何从过渡时期的无序状态进入到真正的‘和谐社会’的经济、政治、文化的多重立场的复杂建构？”我们在这些庞大、沉重的问题中所看到的是一个极为宏观的理论视野，但是作为艺术家的张小涛给我们的答案却是以导演的身份营造出的一个微观动物世界的梦幻剧场——“试图用动物之眼来观察和视觉分析重钢和世界之窗之间在时间和空间上的精神联系和延续，在瞬间的时空更替中遭遇的剧烈而迅速的社会变革”。
李一凡在这里所提出的“病理学研究”是和张小涛的“微观叙事”相互平行的概念，为理解这两个艺术家之间的关系提供了一个重要的契机。与临床的诊断和治疗有别，病理学(Pathology)通过对人体病理材料、实验动物材料以及其他类型的微观实验材料---如细胞组织的培养---研究疾病的起因、发病机制、病变中形态结构和组织功能的改变，以阐明疾病的本质、揭示疾病发生和发展的规律。它因此可以说是一种通过对微观现象的观察去理解和干预宏观世界的科学。与此相类，从拍摄纪录片《淹没》开始，李一凡已经把自己的工作规定为对中国基层社会“组成细胞”的研究和分析。用他的话说，《淹没》是“对现代化实现过程中底层社会付出代价的调查”；随后的《乡村档案》则是为了“询查城市社会底层的根”。值得注意的是，与张小涛相似，他的这种微观研究并不在于简单地解构宏观叙事。他说：“我不想错愕、焦虑，也不想简单的解构社会，我希望建构一种新的对底层社会的认知和对当今社会的检讨方法。”
这种倾向在《淹没》里已经有非常明确的表达。这部纪录片中包含了对某些个案---如一个教堂的拆迁过程——的极其详尽的近距离跟踪，但是整部影片描绘出的则是三峡大坝实施过程中百万普通百姓生活变迁的巨大画面。这种微观和宏观的交融在《乡村档案》中被给予了一个更加明确的叙事结构：李一凡把他对四川奉节龙王村村民生活、劳作和宗教活动的观察和记录纳入了一个从春分到冬至的“历谱”(calendar)，这些底层人们的存在因此成为和环境不可分割的“自然时序”的组成部分。他对目前这个展览中作品的思考显示出对“叙事”的更复杂的考虑。在我看来，这些展品所从属的四个部分在本体论的意义上构成三个“艺术再现的平台”(platforms of artistic representation)。第一个平台是“档案”（archives），通过对现成品（包括法律文件，资料照片等材料）的收集、分类和位移进行叙事。第二个平台可以称为“素材”（materials），由未经编辑的片段记录片和零散记录图片组成。与“档案”不同，这些材料有意识地记录了艺术家本人对再现过程的参与。第三个平台可以称为“作品”（works），包括三个纪录片（《淹没》、《乡村档案》和《不眠与失眠》）以及题为《施虐与受虐》的仿纪实风格的摆拍摄影作品。用李一凡的话说，这些不同图像和材料的集合“强调在当下政治道德背景下解读底层社会，强调解读的多视点和深度同样的重要，力图对那种以猎奇为目的的解读方式，以简单的文本解构显摆精英阶层的高明的解读方式进行反拨和批判。”
“微观叙事”的概念在这个展览中因此具有不同的含义。它可以是艺术再现的对象，包括张小涛的微观动物世界和李一凡的平凡无奇的底层社会。可以是观察的视点，从一个昆虫或城市无业游民的眼中反观生活和历史。可以是讲故事的方法，以此发掘出通常被忽略和掩盖的种种秘密。也可以是艺术家确定个人身份的渠道，通过这种叙事与艺术界及批评界协商互动。张小涛说过，从2000年起他已经开始从心理学、个人经历和个人经验的方法上追问生命的原点。他的绘画方法不再是先做出一个宏大叙事的历史框架，然后去找论据，添砖加瓦。而是首先是从个人的价值展开。其结果是“语言像一个个细胞一样蔓延，当蔓延到一定的时候，就生长成一种个人的方法和语言的系统。”李一凡最近希望的是“打碎我原有的纪录片导演身份，使我原有的以纪录片导演身份完成的作品成为重构的新文本的材料碎片”。参照这些陈述来观看这个展览，相信观者将会懂得他们的艺术追求和实验。
Microscopic Narration: Social Images by Zhang Xiaotao and Li Yifan
“Microscopic Narration: Social Images by Zhang Xiaotao and Li Yifan” is a thematic exhibition composed by two solos—Mist and Dossier, featuring respectively two artists Zhang Xiaotao and Li Yifan. The exhibition title “Microscopic Narration” presents the homogenous aspect of their art practice. Zhang Xiaotao is frequently exhibited as a painter while Li Yifan works as a documentary director. Though working with different mediums, both of them have been devoted to textual research and narration of Chinese modern reality. In recent years Zhang Xiaotao has been experimenting on cross-media and interdisciplinary concepts while employing microscopic perspective and symbolic visual images to foreground the anxiety and restlessness embedded inside Chinese society that is undergoing a major transformation. His work thus is shrouded in an intensely religious atmosphere. On the other hand, Li Yifan undertakes field surveys and draws visual samples from the underclass of Chinese society, unveils the realistic and spiritual facets of an existence in Chinese bottom society. The two solo shows Mist and Dossier are co-referential, constructing a complementation at both content and narrative levels.
In this current exhibition, the dualist oppositional nature of the microscopic and macroscopic has been further dispelled in Zhang Xiaotao’s works. He has categorized the inspiration for these works as some kind of connection in his life and memories that he is constantly perceiving: from the massive, heavy shadows of Chongqing Steel factory complex to the “cultural zoo” that is 798 and on to the absurd and extravagant Windows to the World theme park, a theme of “dream factory and rubbish heap” begins to float to the surface. Though there is no direct link in these scenes, Zhang Xiaotao says that “there is an obscure thread in my mind that absurdly links them together”. Following along the logic of the microscopic narrative he has been exploring, he wants to use a “sampling” method to rethink the “nature of collective modern ideals in pre-socialist China and the painful price paid and hard lessons learned”. Under this overarching theme he has proposed a series of questions, including “what still survives from our socialist heritage? What has already died? What structural change have we gotten from the transition period? How do we attain affirmation and translation of our identity amidst the progression of globalization? How do we enter into the complex, multiple viewpoint structure of economics, politics and culture of a truly “harmonious society” from the disordered state of the transitional period?” What we see in these grand and heavy questions is an extremely macroscopic theoretical field of view, but the response Zhang Xiaotao gives us as an artist is to, through the identity of a director, create a dream theatre of the microscopic animal world – he “will attempt to use the eyes of animals to observe and visually analyze the spatiotemporal spiritual connections and continuity between Chongqing Iron & Steel and Windows to the World, and the drastic and rapid social change we have encountered in an instantaneous spatiotemporal shift.”
The “pathological research” of which Li Yifan speaks and Zhang Xiaotao’s concept of a “microscopic narrative”, which run parallel to each other, provide us with a critical link for understanding the connections between the two artists. In contrast to clinical diagnosis and treatment, pathology uses information about human disease information, animal tests and other similar microscopic experiment material – such as cultivation of cell colonies – to research the cause, mechanisms, pathological and functional changes in organism and tissue to explain the essence of the illness and the patterns of the illness. So one could say that it is a science that uses microscopic phenomena to understand and intervene in the macroscopic world. In the same manner, beginning with Before the Flood, Li Yifan has focused his work on research and analysis of the “cell colonies” at the fundamental level of Chinese society. In his own words, Before the Flood is “an investigation into the price paid by the middle and lower levels of society in the process of realizing modernization” while Village Archive “probes into the root of bottom rungs of society”. It is worth noting, that as with Zhang Xiaotao, Li’s microscopic research is not about simply deconstructing the grand narrative. He says, “I don’t want to startle and surprise, and I don’t want to simply deconstruct society; I hope to construct a new method of recognition of the lower rungs of society and exploration of current society.”
This penchant was already clearly expressed in Before the Flood. This documentary film included extremely close and detailed coverage of certain individual cases – such as the demolition and relocation process of a church – but what the entire film depicts is the big picture of change among the lives of millions of common people in the process of executing the Three Gorges Dam. This confluence of the microscopic and macroscopic gained a much more defined narrative structure in Village Archive Li Yifan has taken his observations and documentation of the lives, labors and religious activities of the residents of Longwangcun, in Fengjie, Sichuan, and compiled them into a “calendar” that spans the entire year, which turns the existence of these lowly people into an inseparable component of the “natural change of the seasons”. His current works for this exhibition reveal much more complex conceptions of “narrative”. As I see it, the four components that these works make up ontologically comprise three “platforms of artistic representation”. The first platform is “archives”, a narrative that is enacted through the compilation, classification and displacement of existing objects (including materials such as legal documents, files and photos). The second platform is “materials”, which is comprised of documentary film segments and scattered photographs. Unlike “archives”, these materials intentionally document the artist’s participation in the representation process. The third platform can be called “works”, which includes three documentary films (Before the Flood, Village Archive and Sleeplessness and Insomnia) as well as a series of photos staged in a documentary style, entitled Tyrants and the Tyrannized. According to Li Yifan, the compilation of these different images and materials “emphasizes a decoding of the lower rungs of society against the backdrop of contemporary political morality, emphasizes that the use of multiple perspectives and depth are equally important to decoding, and strives to pick apart and criticize the brilliant and dazzling elitist decoding methods through deconstruction via a simple textual method.
From the above it can be seen that the concept of the “microscopic narrative” can cover various meanings. It can be the subject of artistic representation, as with Zhang Xiaotao’s microscopic animal world and Li Yifan’s mundane lower rungs of society. It can be the observational perspective, looking back on life and history through the eyes of a beetle or an unemployed migrant in the city. It can be the storytelling method and the once ignored and obscured secrets it reveals. It can also be the path the artist uses to affirm his identity, using this kind of narrative to consult and interact with the art world and the critical world. Zhang Xiaotao once said that he has been searching for the origin of life through psychology, individual experiences and individual perspectives since 2002. His painting method will never again begin by establishing a grand narrative framework, then follow by finding grounds for an argument and finish by adding bricks and tiles. Instead, it unfolds from individual value. The result is that “language multiplies like so many cells, and once it reaches a certain size, it grows into an individual method and linguistic system.” Li Yifan hopes to “shatter my original identity as a documentary filmmaker, and turn the documentary films I once made under that identity into fragmented materials for a new text.” With these descriptions as reference for the exhibition, I believe that the viewer will be able to understand their artistic pursuits and experiments.
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