Yuting Wang
Overview
At the start my painting focused on how people’s emotions decided the way to look at the landscape. The landscape in people’s memories was not the entire picture. Details were missing, and fragments were selected by emotions. My paintings Pond and Daydream depicted landscapes from memories, and emphasized the traces of emotions reflected in the image. Methods I often used are abstract shapes and flat colours, abandoned meaningless details, exaggeration of the contrast of colours.
KEY WORDS: Negative emotion, Memory, Landscape, Abstract and Contrast.
KEY INFLUENCES: Peter Doig, Hernan Bars, Carl Gustav Jung.
In the second term, I started looking at pollution issues and how pollution effects the landscape and environment. Humanity harmed nature and did so without thinking of the consequences, damaging the environment. This harm stemmed from the negative side of humanity, such as greed, arrogance. Meanwhile, the damage in nature also can influence people’s psychology. I started to explore people’s response and reactions to the surroundings. I always make overt the dark side of the world and I am very sensitive of people’s negative sentiment. People’s emotions can influence what they see; on the other hand, people’s living states also can trigger different and complicated feelings. But I do not want to just simply show the polluted images, I want to depict scenes provoking the sense of uncanny; to entice the audience to search what it is exactly in my paintings; and then further remind people to think the environmental issues.
Freud explains ‘uncanny’ as something of uncertainty, something between familiar and unfamiliar. For this purpose I mix the imagination and the real pictures together, employ ambiguous images and colours to make my paintings.
KEY WORDS: Polluting, Negative emotion, Uncanny, Ambiguous.
KEY INFLUENCES: Sigmund Freud, Daniel Richter, Luc Tuymans, Anselm Kiefer, Peter Doig.
This last term, I began to notice the collage and use collage in my practice, it breaks the ‘logic’ of the painting, it means all the elements in the painting are more flexible to composition, they do not need to obey the narratives order or the perspective rule, but still maintains the possibilities to storytell. The collage element for me, also adds to how the viewer can look at the painting, depending on how they look at the painting and its collage, they will have a different interpretation. Depending on their background and their own environment they will form/could form a different narrative to the one painting. The collage also helps the painting become more unsettling, uncertainty. Dexter Dalwood and David Salle’s paintings give me new inspiration; they do not stick the images directly on canvas, but use brushes to paint them as collage. This way it is even more interesting than just a paper image stuck to the canvas. In this term, I still focus on the pollution issues, uncanny feeling and darkness of humanity and the world.
KEY WORDS: Collage, Contrastive visual language, Uncanny, Dystopia, Destruction, Post-civilization
KEY INFLUENCES: Sigmund Freud, Dexter Dalwood, David Salle, Anselm Keifer, Ragnar Kjartansson.
Paradise Lost
In this painting, I use two contrasting elements, beauty and danger/evil, (the last piece Illness express the beauty and morbidity), to create a sense of uncanny. The image is of plants surrounding and decorating a black square pool. The plants I paint are complicated and full of details, employing bright colours. The plant life pulls the eye with its intricacy. But black square pool is expressed sharply and regularly, dim colours are associated with some kind of man-made stuff.
Carl Gustav Jung said ‘Like the instincts, the collective thought patterns of the human mind are innate and inherited. They function, when the occasion arises, in more or less the same way in all of us.’ (Man and His Symbols, 1988, P.75) The image of people standing in water came from the internet, the composition of this image attracted me because it disturbs me, the water is unclean, and you do not know what is happening. Another inspiration is Peter Doig’s painting Canoe. I think the visual experience of an image that person lonely stand in water
Still life
The inspiration of this painting is from a real life photo and the early memory of a series of cartoon illustrations. A photo taken from Richmond Park when I visited it last year in winter, there was a tree fallen down on the ground, but it still looked like it was alive, the branches were strong and aggressive. It was such a powerful image in my mind. The tree was definitely dead, but in my sight it was like a creature. It also reminded me of some illustrations I saw before when I was a high school student. These pictures belong students of a Germany school. They are these students homework named the Three Musters in Your Mind. Each student painted three musters. They are impressive to me.
Floating world
Before I started making this piece, I visited the Painter’s Painter exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. I noticed the excellent use of collage in painting by Dexter Dalwood and David Salle. This led me to think, that collage can provide for a more flexible composition and convey complex information. Painting combined with collaged images can contain more visual details, more information, more potential intention and willingness. The audience then has more difficulty in finding clues to interpret.
For my painting there are some questions, i.e. what is my range of collage? How many collaged images will I use in one painting and how should I use them. Different usages will lead to totally different orientations. The different options depend on whether the painter wants to bury clues or just build a beautiful composition. My mission is to find the balance point between the overall energy of the painting and the collaged fragments; between narrative order and irrelevant composition.
I want to use collaged images randomly, but still keep the possibility of a narrative. A painting with less narrative, can give the space to allow people to imagine by themselves, or just guide people’s experience through the painting. Just as Susan Sontag said in her book Against Interpretation, ‘that the knowledge we gain through art is an experience of the form or style of knowing something, rather than a knowledge of something in itself.’
This time I wanted to experiment with the undercontrol method. I just had a half sketch, and then I began to paint. In this painting, I mixed my imagination with real life photos, building a scene that looks like a landscape, but with demolished buildings, a geometric box, people’s limbs and a doll’s head float in there. These images help convey a sense of the uncanny. I am not sure about how to paint the background in very beginning. Based something I already painted, I tried many ways to depict, and I gained some new effects. Other collages are chosen randomly and occurrently, I just consider colour and composition. These collages are animal fur, and decorative patterns.
or swimming pool is familiar and common for audience. This imagery always associate with loneliness, suicide, sadness all of these negative emotions. But if painted as a black pool, then nobody knows what exactly it is; it becomes more fascinating and dangerous. Based Freud theory of uncanny, these uncertainty led painting become uncanny.
In the process of making this painting I encountered a problem. This painting lost my control in the very beginning, it became completely different to the original idea after the first layer was finished, it is not the painting I wanted to paint. After the struggle, I started to think if I didn’t change it to back my first idea, what is the new direction of this painting. If I follow it, let it grow by itself, I just added new things, perfecting the details, taking care of the composition, continuing the story. So I painted it without certain effects or results. I knew not how it would end, but I started to feel excited. I am also afraid it would fail, but it did not.
This painting raised the question of how does painting develop. If I overcontrol it, it means it is fully prepared on every step, being conscious to paint the work towards a certain direction, even making many experiments and practicing skills just for the painting the final effect. But if I undercontrol it, you just have a rough idea and then start painting, it takes risk of course, you probably will experience failure, but you also have the chance to meet the surprise of the happy accident. So I start to want to try both of ways.
To make this painting, I changed the tree’s appearance, gave it more ambiguous features. I altered some of the branches direction, added more texture, used fresh red and a pink colour to depict the tree, and simplified the background, painted it with flatness and darkness. I adopted the thick bright colour and a coarse texture for the tree to contrast with the smooth, dark background. I wanted to push the figure of the tree to be stronger and stranger. It is bright and attractive but dead. Remind people the sense of resonance of the environment situation.
In this painting I overcontroled, by making a strict plan and sketches first, and then strictly following each step. The advantages of this way of painting is that I exactly control every detail. Once I have started, I already know the final effect. However I will get less chance to meet a challenge, which means that I will lose the chance to learn new things and encounter new possibilities.
Wave
Two documentaries Before the flood and Beijing Besieged by Waste, both expose the terrible truth of the environmental situation, and how people ignore the problem, even denying it. Especially in Before the Flood, some people’s attitude shocked me. And some images in Beijing Besieged by Waste are so horrible they are like a nightmare. If I didn’t watch this movie, I would never have an idea, of how the government and citizens neglect such a basic problem. There is always a huge trouble hidden behind the daily habit of modern life. Modern society is represented a high achievements of human civilization, but at the same time, it also brings about a massive destruction of nature.
In this painting, I intend to express the modern people’s attitude to environmental issues. Most people will ignore or pretend nothing bad has happened in nature. Because we enjoy the convenience of modern life, we can easily get everything we want. Such a perfect life, nobody will bother to worry about nature, which is something far away from us.
This is why I painted the rubbish pile in a cartoonish style, it becomes a colourful picture without being threatening, looking innocent and harmless. This reflects the attitude of people to environmental issues, most people just hear about these serious troubles, but never see them and never try to do something to correct these problems. These problems are like legends, just living in the news. One piece of collage of a real life photo is a demolished building, because this is the only damaged thing we can see in daily life. Also, this painting depicts a post-civilization scene, the inspiration from Keifer. If one day human society ends, civilization will disappear, just a damaged earth and countless pieces of rubbish will be left behind.
Canoe Peter Doig
Illness
This painting is kind of turning point for me. I start to refer to more themes, not just memory. When I read the news of the nuclear pollution of Fukushima, Japan, the picture of this report shocked me. I collected many photos of pollution for my material resources. My purpose for this painting is through using contrastive visual language, beauty and morbidity, to depict a dystopia scene polluted badly but still charming and beautiful. The distance between the painting’s appearance, and reality, will give rise to a feeling of the uncanny. The snow like white colour expresses an abnormal illness in the world.
Pond
This painting based memory of a forest park. In that moment, I focused on people’s loneliness in our modern society. Now that technology is more developed, people more easily feel isolation and loneliness. This situation is a problem for everyone. But often we don’t realize, and once people notice, they will feel swallowed by this extreme loneliness. So this painting attempts to depict the same emotions from when I saw this pond in the center of a big silent forest. It was just me in there, and the memory was very strong. I choose to paint the thick trunk abstract, and ignore the details of the fallen leaves on ground. Also I change the shape of the pond, depict it more regular like a geometric shape and use realistic way to paint it.