“... one generation dies, Another in its place shall rise;

　　That, sinking soon into the grave, others succeed, like wave on wave.”

　　Excerpt from 'Vanitas Vanitatum, Omnia Vanitas' by Anne Bronte - (1845)

　　BIRTH and DEATH separate and connect, demarcate time and space and evoke departures and arrivals. Feng Zhengjie explores these associations fully in this new exhibition, Every Colour You Are, Weathered Death and Birth, first solo in his own country in two years.

　　This exhibition, a tour de force of sculptures, paintings, installations and motorised mechanics reveals Feng with a belief to push his faith in complexity and diversity, the fascination in capturing the universe of being alive and the eventual leaving of souls in a realm beyond us. Like the prism of thoughts and emotions to which it’s title alludes, the exhibition is fragmented into hyperreal illusions, fanciful representations and evidence of our iconic symbolism in eternity and spiritual. More importantly, this show is indicative of a self-healing aspiration and process for the artist to deal with personal loss and hope.

　　Throughout the history of contemporary art, the themes of personal death and birth, more so in the former, have been observed and tackled. The image of death in Robert Mapplethorpe’s self-portraits, Nobuyoshi Araki’s photography records of his belated wife, in scenarios before and after her death which echoed similarly to the late Thai artist Montien Boonma‘s healing reconciliation with the loss of his wife and the eventual cancer which also took the artist’s life in 2000. Another Thai artist, Araya Rasdiarmreansook also dealt with the loss of a family member in her work where she produced videos of her attempting to ‘communicate’ with the dead by reading to corpses. 1 For Feng, he has also turned this exhibition into a projection of private and public, art and life, to constitute a subjective and yet perceptive construction of transcience.

　　It is an understatement to even state that Feng is one of the most recognisable names in Chinese Contemporary Art today. With innumerable participations in international and local expositions, both group and solo, Feng has gained a formidable reputation for his visual metaphor towards the flashy, commercial nature of modern China. 16 years have passed since he assembled his first complete series of paintings. And the artist has spent the larger part of his career fixated on the portraiture, particularly in his most well-known series, China Series, where the painterly portrayal of women’s facials contain an exaggerated colorization that makes them look unreal in their uber-sultriness: the absence of true feelings and real personality. An observation by the artist towards the growth of consumer culture, this can be interpreted as an expression of the divide that exists between the inner life of an individual and the outer face that is turned on to the world.

　　This series and his other earlier works which transformed folk customs such as wedding and consumer habitations into a commentary of pervasive kitschiness of a growing urban lifestyle, has firmly established Feng’s artistic oeuvre in the last few years. However, his aesthetical strategies have, of late, become increasingly uncanny.

　　This has somehow changed in the last one year where two incidents happened within the span of one year have affected his personal life – the death of his parents and the birth of his son. This pendulum of emotions – both sorrowful and celebrated – has compelled Feng to reflect upon his entire life and that expands into his artworks as well. This period has also coincided just after the acceptance of this exhibition and the artist used the opportunity well to drawn upon the immediacy of his circumstances to approach the direction of this exhibition. And the result of which he has reconfigured parts of his familiar associations and subjects into something new and wonderful. Most of all, the theme is truly personal.

　　As significant as the preparation of what kind of artworks would constitute and be produced for this exhibition, the perceptual specifics between the artworks and the exhibiting space also became a new challenge and dynamism for Feng. The manipulation of light also plays a secondary role in how the artist attempts to generate an emotional presence in the gallery. What is finally presented thwarted expectations at almost every cornerstone of the representational oeuvre in Feng’s career. Compositionally, the artworks here, all completely new and created entirely for this show, recall characteristics of vanitas, no doubt aided by the symbolic appearance of skulls, flowers, and the world nature of what beauty encompasses.2 This exhibition shall, at the same time, boldly offer viewers, both new and old, the opportunity to reassess Feng’s artistic achievement.

　　In the gallery, the artist has created a spatial atmosphere with four large yet layered installations, displayed alongside seven paintings on which Feng is bold here in his revision of the compositions, clearly steering away from his tactical specifics of portraitures. Moreover, usually the artist’s signature colours involve luminescent green and pink but here, he added a punctuating gold to tie together these breathtaking and melancholy still lives, sculptural landscapes and portraits.

　　Speaking of portraitures, instead of his usual painterly subjects of women, of which they exude electrified sensuality and allurement, Feng draws us in with his take on flora landscapes. In the paintings, the details are dominated with edifices of leaves and bloomed tiny flowers to create an overwhelming effect that is both exuberant and graphically graceful. The artist’s burst bouquets appear wispy, creating flowery ‘gardens’ of delicate strokes and soft yet dynamic hues.

　　The painting of flowers has appeared in Feng’s artworks before, as early as 2003, where a single stalk, usually a rose, has been illustrated to produce staid yet romantic portraits of floras that could easily be interpreted as still life. In this exhibition, however, Feng’s nature of ecology has gone beyond nature. The tableaux here seem to share a duality – hovering of the juxtaposition between representation and still life. The imageries also mildly evoke the historical use of still life as memento mori.3

　　The seven paintings are divided into three parts. The first, a triptych of vertical paintings, each similarly sized at 300 by 210 cm, are filled with many beds of small pinkish flowers and few scattering branches of leaves. These floral fireworks are anchored in the middle with a line of white glow surrounding them and an intense green completes the rest of the panels. Seen together, these three paintings, titled The Great Stele, of almost repetitive motifs endow his compositions with an expansive radial energy. Compared to his previous portraiture series, the overall sense here is more abstract, more gestural and freer. Here we also follow the artist into an ecological landscape of the unknown. What lurks behind these blooms is not revealed, as we get closer to the paintings, we only see tiny pockets of dark spaces.

　　The other series of three paintings, The Skull of Flowers, in terms of compositions, asserts a different grandeur of vision. The petals are rendered larger and more graceful, fluttering amongst the crisp leaves and the overall nuanced hues dripped with an explosion so radiant and rich that the multiple blossoms threatened to grow out of the panels. Yet, amidst the shades of delicate details, their backgrounds lay a silhouette of a skull floating ominously behind the surfaces.

　　This combination of colour and form are also repeated in the largest single painting, aptly titled, Floating Floras where the appearance of the skull is more visible and dominant with lesser flowers enveloping the composition. The effect of softness playing against the clarity is almost surreal.

　　Overall, the seven paintings here, with their intense embellishment of flowery motifs and the creation of an oblique perspective, they force the viewers gaze with precision but never feel clinical. These delicate, luminous fragments of lives encourage us to take the time to see, to reflect and to shape our thoughts on the fragility of life. They are filled with humanity but never slip into sweetness. But all are moments in time threatened by extinction. In human language, death.

　　Flowers are of course present in Baroque vanitas paintings, as they represent ephemeral beauty, but with the appearance of the skull, the passage of fading is inevitable, similar to mirroring human’s short life.4

　　This transcendence of beauty is also reflected in the installation, Guardian. Here, Feng’s tango with the ephemeral never looked better. Hidden away in an enclosed area, the installation conjures up with space, colour and atmosphere. With three circular holes as evidence to tempt us to peek inside more, the artist has deployed his familiar portraits into sculptural forms and they still bear Feng’s unmistakable signature: seductive fragility. The three rotating sculptures are rested in the middle of the space, similar apart from one another. Surrounding them are rows and rows of human skulls neatly and uniformly arranged like guarding troops staring out into the viewers; the atmospheric nature of the installation makes all the more macabre by the dim lighting within the installation.

　　The ambiguity of the exchange forced the viewer to find a story in the installation composition – the darkness of the surrounding, the glaring nature of the elusive beautiful and the silhouettes of the shadowy skull.

　　At the center of the gallery sit two sculptural installations, one directly in front of another. The death of Feng’s parents last year has hit the artist tremendously emotionally. But out of the tragedy rose the installation, The Flower of Life, a uniform set of 81 fibreglass-based sculptures. Besides being the first of Feng’s attempt at a medium other than painting, this installation is also the initial impulse for this exhibition. The sculptures are materialized with a tableau comprising of a human skull being ‘bloomed’ out of a thorny stalk, which resemble those of a rose.

　　It is simply easy to identify the appearance of the skull immediately to symbolize as something deathly. Yet, with the heads growing out of these healthy, living organism, there also connotes a divine rebirth as we are all born with an skeletal anatomy as much as that remains the only part of us when we part from this earth. Hence, the further significance of the title of this installation.

　　Deployed just behind this installation is The Pyramid of Life, three pyramid-like formations built with bricks which, in turn, are imprinted with images of a woman, a rose and a skull respectively. And on top of these symmetrical triangles are three-dimensional versions of the imprints which also rotate consistently on a snail’s pace as if to record the passage of time slowly drifting always as we linger around the exhibition. The imagery caused by this multitiered installation is also strongly evocative of something that hovers on the edge of self-consciousness. Pyramids stand for the eternity of time and once again, Feng inhabits the structures with the temporality of beauty and youth.

　　Right at a corner lays Ascend, a spiraling installation that introduces an ethereal quality trailing off from a circle of hanged cross-like figures into a repetitive motion that seems to suggest the recurring cycle of life and death are bound together. With these simplified figures toned in vibrant pink, green and gold, the deceptively floating sculptures have the rhythmic energy of seamlessness, minimal and purity which is integral to the bare-bones aesthetic. Yet it also hinted at a place and time how we always think of birth and death as closely related to the spiritual iconographies of religion that has seeped into our daily consciousness regardless we are believers of faith or not.

　　Each of these sculptural installations, which collectively reinforce one another even as they successfully stood alone, filled the gallery with chilling haziness and premonitions. Death, birth and beauty intertwine in these works, as do disparate places and times.

　　The whole exhibition is itself actually a large installation, the sheer size is indicative of the labourious process involved in Feng’s creating of his highly detailed, surrealist-inflected sculptural installations and paintings. Echoing the spirit of vanitas paintings, these works, when viewed together, connote a personalised tale about the psychological landscape of birth and death. This thoughtful subject matter demonstrated that the artist’s aim was less conceptual than reverential. As lush as his colours are, it is the underlying theme and metaphysical qualities that should capture our attention. Feng knows what his works mean for him; we know what they mean for us.