The Chinese Portrait series by Feng Zhengjie exactly stand contrary to the tradition of portrait painting. In his composition, what a portrait can convey is the impossibility of painting portrait. He has taken great pains to produce so many faces, but none of them can lead the viewer deep into the figures’ inner hearts. We might even conclude that all of the faces deliberately refuse to expose the innermost and intend to destroy the “expressive” tradition of portrait. There exists a long tradition of portrait with an aim to “express” the figure’s “internality” and to engrave his or her main qualities once and for all by painting. All of these portraits, representational or abstract, attempt to capture the figure’s eternality by his or her face fixed in one moment. The limited space of portrait should serve as a medium to sketch human boundless and mysterious world. To expose human mystique, depth, internality, unique spirit and glory is undoubtedly the ideal of portrait painting. However, under Feng Zhengjie’s brushes, such a tradition can never be found. The faces in his portraits seem to consciously conceal the innermost and human singular internality. Feng Zhengjie has created so many portraits which are so akin in our eyes that we can see neither the “personality” of each portrait nor the mysterious and crazy world beneath it. In all, it is just by concealing the inner realm that the portraits by Feng Zhengjie have acquired their own originality.

　　What’s more, these portraits hide the body as well as the internality from view. Their planes are so flat and their lines are so fluid that neither human skeleton, nor flexion, wrinkle, joint of human body, nor highlights of man can be seen. It seems that these figures have no bones and meanwhile their flesh is picked and concealed as well, and the face without flesh contributes to the most spectacular in Feng Zhengjie’s composition. Strangely enough, these women’s faces depicted by Feng Zhengjie have no bit of flesh at all, no flesh color (no vigorous red color typical of flesh), no feeling of flesh, even no smell of flesh. Thus, no doubt, so many young and fashionable women go so far as to have no sex appeal and not to induce sex association. In other words, the sexy lust and imagination are oddly expelled from these portraits of young women.

　　Where are the bones and flesh of human body gone? Why are they eliminated? These women presented by Feng Zhengjie are wrapped by skin, so to speak, solely have skin. What Feng Zhengjie has painted is all skin so what we can see on the surface of painting is merely skin, exactly speaking, merely cuticle or face skin. Here only skin is left and both flesh and skeleton are tightly wrapped up by it. The flesh and skeleton all disappear under the heavily made-up face skin which is so coverable, so polished, and so pale (that no bottom is visible) that flesh is totally buried. The figures in his portraits seem to merely have skin rather than flesh. But what will happen to the face without flesh? Flesh is the most obvious indication of senses since flesh can convulse, shake, move, stretch out, and draw back. A face without flesh is definitely a lifeless face, a passionless face, and even a face of less vitality since the movement of life should be achieved by flesh on which passion relies. In short, both skeleton and flesh consist of a structure. If flesh can embody the passion of life, skeleton usually represents the spirit of life. Originality and dignity often result from the structure constructed by skeleton. A face neither of flesh nor of skeleton is doubtlessly a face of no passion, a face of no qualities either, and in essence a face without body since body always exhibits itself by will while its fervent waves surge and its fermenting senses thrive. In this way, it is certain that the portrait work produced by Feng Zhengjie is nothing but a face, a face with passion, blood, and flesh rid rather than a face in a specific body or a lively face. Perhaps, among the contemporary Chinese artists, Feng Zhengjie is one who has most radically refused flesh. In this sense, Feng Zhengjie is on the way opposite to the tradition of portrait. The final aim of his creation pattern is to exterminate human passion, to exterminate the body and life beneath face, to exterminate human singular personality. In effect, it will lead to the nonexistence of man, to the extermination of man, and to such a consequence that a portrait appears as a non-portrait and portrait stands as anti-portrait.

　　Plenty of passionless faces depicted by Feng Zhengjie are richly disguised. And the evident feature is that all faces are disguised and made-up. The disguise has double significance. On one hand, such a face is a disguise of flesh and skeleton, a disguise of the internality of body, and a disguise of human internality which can not be perceived from the face. On the other hand, the face as such is decorated and disguised as well. Obviously, Feng Zhengjie has painted the figures’ faces with heavy cosmetics, namely the highlight of face skin and the practical existence of face, so the face here appears in the form of chemical substance. In this sense, the face is exactly a skin soaked in chemical substance, a chemical face in effect, and thereby it is further materialized. Till now, it is clearly demonstrated that the face has double function: to conceal and to be concealed, that is to say, to conceal the body and its internality and meanwhile to be concealed by chemical substance. This is double concealment or double disguise or decoration since it is an unnatural face, an artificial face. How flat and calm the face is! It has no convulsion, no wrinkle, no twist, no movement, no surging thought, and even no delicate change of colors. Isn’t it a man-made and well-wrought product? Anyway, it benefits from decoration, from disguise, and from elaborate calculation. In addition to the plastered face and skin, all facial organs are completely lifted and decorated, completely unnaturalized, that is, completely artificialized, from face to hair, from neck to nose, from mouth to eyes. This is a remolded image, an artificial person.

　　Let’s take a look at the hair first, purely green or purely red, which constructs such a perfect image with its color and luster that no different substance can be found. The mass of hair color provides a striking contrast for the background. Here, the hairstyle is mostly artificial. No hair hangs low for natural force, but against the gravity, the curly perms often stubbornly wind upward, explosively stretched themselves into every side, or disorderly stand upright as if blown by violent wind. Definitely, the hair has been transformed and its present form results from chemical technology. Anyhow, it is still a chemical product, or in other words, the industrial hair, or the hair in the techno-age.

　　As to the eye, it seems like a white apparatus fixed on face since it is by no means akin to an organ but a doll as if it can be picked off from face at any time just as a part is carelessly taken away from a toy. The eye, whiter than face skin, acquires its own location only separated from the face by red rim. How lifeless the eye is! What’s more, the two eyeballs are separately posited in the two opposite ends in stead of in the middle of eyes. Merely two black dots in white mass, they are almost moles on skin, inactive and insignificant moles. The eye no more serves as “the window of human soul”, and on the contrary, it simply closes the window of soul and never leads to the inner world. Besides, the eyeball is located in an unusual place and out of all proportion to the eye. No doubt, Feng Zhengjie has deliberately reversed the original positions and natural shapes of organs. The eyebrow is an independent line in which no scattered hair lies. Similarly, the eyelash is pulled long by force, arranged in order, and endowed with precisely sculpted perfection. The mouth, never open (therefore neither teeth nor tongue can be seen, and certainly it is impossible for us to see the interior), is the solely complete organ isolated in large white mass of face, usually in a specific shape (the marriage of upper curve and under oval line), and in peculiar red (a sort of dazzling red). The red lips are the most outstanding on the surface of painting and by gathering the density and intensity of red color they possess such an explosive power that they become the highlight of painting. Shining and sharp as they are, they are far from enchanting and enticing. In Feng Zhengjie’s portraits, all of the facial organs are artificial and whitewashed.

　　Why has Feng Zhengjie devoted himself to depicting such young women (we can surely sense they are in blossom)? It is quite evident that these young women are entirely in posing state, or more exactly, in performance (in fact, some models are professional actresses). What people display is merely externality which is by no means the natural and simple one but the whitewashed one, that is to say, it is the performing externality. In this sense, I would like to define Feng Zhengjie’s composition as a narrative of performance and life of performance. Nowadays, everybody strikes a pose like an actor, or in other words, everyone disguises himself as an actor who has lost his original appearance and his own blood and flesh (replacing blood with lipstick, flesh with rouge and powder). Seemingly, Feng Zhengjie attempts to mould stars in his canvases. But significantly, all of us, all of nowadays people are in essence actors who have been disguised by our own halo. Nevertheless, it is really a paradox that what these actors, these performances, and the splendor of performance serve is a passionless person, a lightless person, a plastic person, a person of no personality, or a person whose flesh can never convulse or flex. It is a stiff plastic puppet that the light of performance is illuminating, which is perhaps our reality. Our present life is not only a gaudy and vulgar one but also a performance. Of course, gaudery is the same as performance while performance is not merely equal to gaudery. In performance, what everyone can see is another’s flaunty hairstyle, what everyone can see is another’s sharp lip, what everyone can see is another’s made-up eyelid, what everyone can see is another’s “disguise”, but everyone can not see another’s eye, everyone can not see another’s oral interior, everyone even can not see another’s face since only a disguised face can be seen. In our time, it is such a disguised face that we can see in another person, or more exactly, what we can see is just face skin.

　　(Translated by Cao Leiyu)