ARTIST 艺术家
EXHIBITION 展览
SUPPORT 支持
潜存思忆
2024.11.01-2024.12.07
The exhibition draws inspiration from In search of lost time (À la recherche du temps perdu), the masterpiece of Marcel Proust, the 20th century French novelist. “Physical time” is the generally understood, one-way linear, uniform flow of time in real life. To make events in life simple and measurable, we envision time as a balanced, mechanical, one-way, and an absolutely sequential flow. But such an understandingis at odds with the feeling of the human consciousness, which is shaped by our experience of psychological time. Our aesthetic sensations and perceptions are not bound by the physical order of events; instead, they exist as a “state of consciousness,” where beginnings and endings need not obey the physical sequence, and we primarily savor the various states of each object in our consciousness. As Proust states in the novel, “It is not the object that counts, but how we feel about it; nor does the external physical time matter, but the flow of our psychological time does.” This echoes Henri Bergson's theory of time, which emphasizes interiority, continuity, and change.
Through the works of five artists presented in this exhibition, we delve into the question of“resist the irrevocable passage and erosion of physical time.” The painters' “self” becomes the central subject, where time is neither an objective external existence nor an intrinsic attribute of any object but a subjective phenomenon rooted in their mental senses. By integrating their daily sights, sounds, thoughts, and emotions, the“moment” captured in each painting transcends its literal definition. It becomes a day spent with one’s daughter, a morning hangover after a joyous party with friends, an embrace of strangers witnessed, the savoring of a delicious burger, and an “empty” scenery shot in the mind. These images, revolving around a certain relationship between daily sensations and memories, do not present a meticulously crafted central character, a complete narrative with a grand structure, or the ebb and flow of a stream-of-consciousness technique. Instead, they offer clues to the individual complexities that run consistently, a deluge of personal emotions and self-awareness projected by the artists in their psychological time. The purpose of their presentation is not to transcend personal vision and experience, but to present both a multitude of subjective feelings based on their mood swings and the sensations when different spaces and objects integrate into a single moment.
Thanks to the “psychological time” extended and permeated by these artists, viewers can recover and reproduce fragments of the past: a bouquet of flowers, a black cat, a flight of steps, a night, a park – each imbued with the substantial freedom, arming us as individuals the possibility to resist the passage of external time. Those cherished, earnestly experienced moments will become the sites that we later revisit for aesthetic reminiscence.
展览灵感来源于20世纪法国小说家马塞尔·普鲁斯特Marcel Proust的《追忆似水年华》，小说的法文名为“À la recherche du temps perdu”，直译的意思是“寻找失去的时间”。“物理时间”即一般理解的现实生活中单向线性、匀速流动的时间，人们为了使生活事件显得简洁、易于计量，将时间设想成均衡的、机械的、绝对遵循先后顺序单向流动的状态。但这样的理解与人的心灵感受是不相符合的，意识是由心理时间的长短决定，如此，人的审美感受则不必再遵循事件顺序而可以变为“状态感知”，不需按物理时序去认知事件的起始与结局，只需体味事物在意识中呈现的种种状态。如小说中所感：“重要的不是事物，而是我们对事物的感受，不是外在的物理时间，而是我们的心理时间的流动。”这正与亨利·柏格森（Henri Bergson）强调内在性、连续性和变化性的时间理论呼应。
借此，我们希望通过本次展览中所呈现的5位艺术家作品，讨论“怎样才能与这无可挽回地流逝与销蚀的物理时间相抗衡”这一问题，展览以绘画者“我”为主体，此时此地时间并非一个在他们身外客观存在的有形之物，也不是任何一个事物自带的属性，时间本就是存在于他们的心理感觉中的主体。将其对日常的所见所闻所思所感融合，画面中存在的“一刻”并不只是“一刻”，它是与女儿相处的那一天、与朋友欢聚后宿醉的清晨、看见陌生人相拥的某一天、吃到美味汉堡的那日、脑海仅剩空镜的地方等。这些围绕着日常的感觉和回忆间的某种关系的画面，整体看来并没有细腻刻画的中心人物、宏大结构的完整故事、波澜起伏的意识流技巧，有的只是贯穿始终的个体情结线索。是创作者们在心理时间中，紧紧环绕于内心的个人情感的泛滥和自我意识的投射，这里的呈现并没有带着超越个人视野、经验的目的，仅是根据情感的风向对事物做出的多样体味，及将不同的空间或事物融入同瞬间中所获取的感受。
凭借创作者们延展与渗透的“心理时间”，观者可以追回和复现一些过往时间：一束鲜花、一只黑猫、一段阶梯、一个夜晚、一个公园等等；正是如此自由，为我们作为个体抗拒外部时间之流逝提供了可能性。那些在爱着、在认真体验着的时刻，才成为日后审美回忆返顾的时间。