Lu Xinghua and Wang Jianwei

 

This article is an extension of the many methodological discussions between artist Wang Jianwei and the author of this article on the creation and presentation of the VARIATIONS exhibition at the He Art Museum, and it may be useful to colleagues and fellow artists to share it in anticipation of responses and criticisms. Both of us work with Harman’s object-oriented ontology as our coordinate system, and in the curatorial process, we each look at the exhibition work with this object-oriented ontological vision, to ask each other to strictly abide by our own announcement that we are carrying out that ontological commitment. Artist Wang Jianwei is also a curator and critic, using discursive realist aesthetics and object-oriented ontology to demand this exhibition, which is equivalent to participating in curating and criticizing on an equal footing with the author at the same time, which is presumably unprecedented.

 

1.
‘New species come from symbiosis. …it is symbiosis that leads to evolutionary newness and new species. …No species existed until bacteria merged to form larger and larger cells that included the ancestors of plants and animals (Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planets, p. 6). Graham Harman thus concludes that it is symbiosis that leads to the birth of objects. The symbiosis between object and object forms a new object.

 

2.
‘At the gallery, at the white box, the viewer looks at both the painting and the territory. On the left is the landscape, with mountains, lakes, sunsets and deer; on the right is the forest. It must be left entirely to the viewer to decide whether (the artist has painted) the sun bright enough, the lake clear enough, the deer sparse enough, and the forest dark enough (Bruno Latour, Where Am I? , p. 48). Wang’s VARIATIONS presents an Anthropocene landscape, a non-human landscape, but also the territory of our future, in which the viewer is not only immersed in the scene, but falls into its depth of time, from which they are impossible to exit. VARIATIONS offers the viewer this experience of a black hole after falling from the process of globalization into all-planetary space.

 

3.
‘After Jacques Derrida, in the 21st century, we still have to come to think about the Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, biotechnology, neuro-brain technology, and transhumanism. We are even more disadvantaged than Derrida in that we have lost our own time, have fallen irretrievably into the Anthropocene, are surrounded by a chaotic landscape, are surrounded by a threat greater than the nuclear threat, and need to climb out of the apocalypse ourselves (Bernard Stiegler, Lessons from the Maiden Thunberg, p. 194). These beautiful rubbings and lines by the artist exhibited in VARIATIONS demonstrate the human endeavor to live in symbiosis with this inhuman landscape in the shadow of Global Warming and in the reality generated by Computer Vision, and at the same time show how attractive this inhuman landscape can be.

 

4.
‘The subject emerges from Shanshui and scenery. Shanshui（landscape）: the Chinese subject produces itself as if it is looking at Shanshui in a painting or landscape, presenting itself like the Goddess of Mercy (Francois Jullien, Towards Living, p. 21). A contemporary art exhibition offers a cold-media installation that helps contemporary art viewers to cool down the hot images on their mobile phone screens, the hot media, to cool down their skin installations, to make a calm contemplation for a short period of time during the visit, to restore their bodies’ sovereignty before the images. Thus, VARIATIONS is also used as a subjectivity exercise for viewers, training them to become calm, sophisticated subjects of the Anthropocene, assisting them to calmly face their fate in the midst of climate change and on the cloud computing platform.

 

5.
Visitors to the He Art Museum for VARIATIONS, a solo exhibition by artist Wang Jianwei, will first be entangled in Tadao Ando’s architecture. However, the museum as a work of art is infinitely retractable, so visitors cannot grab it by the hand. Even if they go straight up to the rooftop with the lift or spiral staircase, audiences will not be able to capture the entirety of the museum. This building cannot be exhausted, because it is also a work, living in symbiosis flatly and democratically with the viewers and artists in it, and being exhibited equally in front of the viewers, which allows each viewer weaves the building into his or her own network of actors in a different way. The museum is waiting for every audience’s assembling, living symbiotically, and forming an allot with them.

In fact, the museum provides concrete, granite, steel columns, and glass as props for the audience’s memories, which forms better way to get close to the audience than sculptures and paintings. In the exhibition, Wang’s sculptures retreat deeper than the museum, while his paintings retreat deeper than his sculptures. After entering the museum, viewers are finally confronted with the Anthropocene landscape in the depth of time in Wang’s series paintings, as well as a kind of non-humanist landscape. VARIATIONS brilliantly demonstrates us the relationship among today’s art museums, viewers, artworks, and the rest of the non-human objects.

It is, as if the viewer ends up wrapping Wang’s sculptures with his paintings, and further wrapping the museum, picking up the handful of pleats left behind by the architect Tadao Ando, and wrapping everything from the Greater Bay Area, to the Chinese contemporary art world and this Anthropocene, into his or her own monolithic window. This is a very thorough use of the openness of Ando’s architecture.

Indeed, Wang Jianwei used white cubes as screens to partition off the space designed by Ando, which increases the exhibition’s mystery for the audience, and at the same time, cleverly wrapped Ando’s iconic concrete columns in these abstract screens, repairing the inherent flaws left by architectural design for art exhibition spaces, and hospitably allowing intentions of Ando’s design to be implemented in the friendliest way possible for the audience. In terms of Ando’s treatment of light, VARIATIONS takes advantage of the symbiotic relationship between sculptures and paintings to allow light to sweep in from the grille without any obstruction, allowing the light to make decisive changes to the luminosity of the exhibition at every hour of the day, so that the exhibition and the viewer’s footsteps maximizes the fulfillment of the sacred Luminism of Ando.

According to the author’s two-day experience with the museum, the deep structure of its architectural intention is that Ando wants to pay homage to the Hakka huts of South China, a unique posture of human architecture, and to discover the topological power of the building itself by returning to the most basic geometries of circles and arcs: to seek assistance from the future by using the internal spiral structure, and to display the bare handmade workmanship required in the application of cement and the basic materials of our industrial age, while at the same time to use the basic materials of our industrial age and the bare hand applied to the concrete, to show human honor in our contemporary era, and to ask future generations not to dislike us too much. It can be said that the He Art Museum is a temple of the future built by Ando in the Greater Bay Area, and it is a task submitted by our age to the future. The exhibition VARIATIONS further fulfills Ando’s profound intention in an extremely appropriate way.

 

6.
In Architecture and Objects, the philosopher Harman says that a building must be seen as an object, not too much as a machine (Le Corbusier), and not too much as a sculpture (Eisenman). A building is a non-human object. A building is always an alloy, a new object, which is formed in an ineffable way with each viewer; the He Art Museum is a work woven by each viewer himself or herself, and is needed to be completed by the next arriving viewer. Therefore, each viewer is an indispensable ingredient of the museum, as well as a kernel or a seed of the museum, just as the role of enzyme to wine. One visitor’s use of the museum cannot influence another visitor’s use of the museum. The use of the museum by all the audiences is superimposed on the use of the museum by all the audiences.

According to Wang’s methodology of creation, the museum is an object equal to a sculpture or a painting, and equal to every viewer as an object. Moreover, the viewer who comes to the He Art Museum is also an individual object and a non-human object like the museum, which is equal to the works exhibited in the museum. The relationship between the viewers and the works, and the museum , is the relationship between a non-human object and another non-human object. The audience can’t feel the museum thoroughly, just as the museum can’t see the audience comprehensively either. Thus, they make each other mysterious because they are non-human objects that can only banter with each other, scanning each other like radar from a distance. The situation is the same as the one that we are unable to understand what Global Warming is, but find ourselves in the midst of it, encountering it all the time. In fact, architecture and contemporary art today have fallen into this relationship of mystery. Architecture and contemporary art must go hand in hand to support a post-humanist or Anthropocene aesthetic for the viewer, to invent an aesthetic of planetary space or the biosphere. It should be invention, not resistance or care.

Therefore, Wang’s sculptures and paintings, as well as the museum, are inexhaustible and mysterious objects with variable contours. The various substances and their residuals are hidden behind these objects, which cannot be seen through but withdraw and retreat, leaving only their emotions in front of us and making us follow and speculate them all the way. They do not want to be identified and printed by us (Harman, Architecture and Objects, p. 39).

Ideas weave the museum and artworks exhibited together, making them into a network of Anthropocene actors. Thus, each visitor’s relationship with the museum is the same as the one between a user and a download site. Visitors to the museum are attempting to download the museum into their own folders. Therefore, the museum has to do everything it can to make itself available for more existing and coming visitors. The museum makes itself more accessible to future generations of viewers through many contemporary art exhibitions (ibid., p. 47). Visitors to the VARIATIONS have downloaded the He Art Museum once again, but with a novel way. The ultimate goal of architectural design is to make a building downloadable by audiences of as many generations as possible.

 

7.
Thus, for each viewer or user, and art museum is oxygen. Its viewers or users are hydrogen. When a visitor enters the He Art Museum, the two (the museum and the visitor) rapidly form a third object—— water. The result of any audience’s encounter with the museum is the formation of water in the same way as the encounter between oxygen and hydrogen. Therefore, each viewer’s own museum is water. Architect Tadao Ando seems to have foreseen this synthesis of ‘water’.

Water itself is also an object, which exists on the same level as the He Art Museum. According to Harman, water, as a real object, has its real qualities, and as a sensual object, it has sensual qualities. Physics treats it as a real object, while poetry treats it as a sensual object. Every visitor to the museum performs this ‘water’ with his or her own body. The ‘water’ is the same, but each of the audiences performs it with his or her own body in a very different way.

The He Art Museum itself, as a source of oxygen, has a large number of unknown and unfamiliar qualities of the source of oxygen. In fact, visiting audiences have to act it out like new actors trained in the Stanislavsky’s system, immediately forming the chemical reaction with the museum and becoming water, playing out the ‘water’ themselves, and finally succeeding in performing their own version of the museum. Indeed, VARIATIONS provides each visitor with a script to play the He Art Museum out.

The museum is thus an existence of a plurality. It is established by the viewers who come to the exhibition and perform it themselves again and again. The He Art Museum is not singular, but a bundle, a cluster, a mass, and a cloud.

 

8.
A new He Art Museum is formed between the He Art Museum and each visitor arrived. This is because the relationship between the viewer and the museum also constitutes a new object, an artwork being exhibited, and a certain version of the art museum that arrives in parallel with Ando’s version of the museum. Thus, the He Art Museum is exhibiting each visitor’s visiting experience.

Each visitor who enters the He Art Museum performs the museum differently from time to time. The museum is a metaphor when it is seen externally, and is an artwork while being seen from the interior. The museum is a work of art that can exhibit other works of art: it is so interesting to look at that no matter how people use it. Such beautiful cases include the Guggenheim Art Museum in Bilbao in 1997, and the LV Foundation Building in 2014. They are just symbols while being seen in the front, but as long as the audience going up along the spiral staircase, no one wants to leave from them: they found that the museum is their own work. The spiral staircase in the He Art Museum takes viewers to small and fascinating spaces, which makes them so obsessed with this experience that they can’t get enough of it, and thus, unable to leave this newly formed work of their own.

 

9.
An object-oriented ontology and discursive positivism have made Wang Jianwei’s contemporary art creations more disciplined. This is firstly demonstrated by an ontological self-consciousness that he maintains in his artistic creations: an ontology of paintings and sculptures that strictly determines what can be accessed and what must be excluded, as well as what to exhibit and what to cover up. This has led to a strict reductionism in his work. The most surprising part of his current work comes from the rigorous filtering of his methodology through this reductionism: what then, is deliberately left over? Did his refusal to make so much stuff make him do the rest of it in a more thunderous, hands-off way? In fact, this reductionism is part of the tradition of abstraction in general terms. We know that abstractionism should be translated into Chinese as subtraction, because abstraction here is not the opposite of figuration, but refers to abstraction and subtraction, to take away or reduce the content, to make the medium itself more of a content. The artist has to come to use the new medium in a refined way to demonstrate to people, which makes them not be mired in the clichés of the content. Wang’s reductionism in his methodology of creation represents this ‘subtraction’, the one that overpowers ‘extraction’.

He has subtracted contemporary art installations and returned to sculpture. However, he also subtracted the standard items of sculpture such as gravity, monumentality, texture, halo and emptiness, and went towards the flow and mimetic space, as well as the sense of the black hole of the form, so that the sculpture becomes a coaching machine that trains the audience to deal with the non-human objects in a sophisticated way, to be eye-to-eye with the audience, and to be tuned to the audience. These subtractions result in a kind of non-associationism, the relationship between the non-human object and the other non-human object. The viewer stumbles in front of them again and again, and they shyly postpone showing their faces in front of the viewer. What the viewer has gained is a black-hole experience, with the latter being a human experience of dealing with other non-human objects by treating oneself as a non-human object as well.

At the same time, in his paintings, Wang subtracts subjective gestures such as theme, method, sociality, identity, and body. Although he also employs all the ways applicable to painting, he does so only in order to achieve the ultimate goal of liberating the colors and the lines, to make the colors more independent and free, the lines more nomadic, to enable them leave the contours of the picture and move towards an entanglement with the various forces further out. No matter how complex the painting is, the final goal is to release the handmade colors and lines he created during the painting process, to let them fly out of the paint pots and picture, and to be as free as the sunlight and molecule——both colors and lines are brought by light. Wang tried to return the status of light to the colors and line by applying reductionism to his paintings, to give them a complete vindication.

The paintings in VARIATIONS are not only the cleanest paintings in contemporary paintings, they are also the most progressive paintings in terms of painting itself, representing the artist’s highest self-awareness of painting itself to date.

This is the terrible consequence of Wang’s reductionism. Quantum mechanics and object-oriented ontology have forced the artist to accept this harsher discipline on his own artistic creation. However, under this strict discipline, his creations are also more direct and targeted.

10.
What, then, is the object-orientated ontology that serves as Wang’s discipline of creation?

The American art theorist Timothy Morton positioned it as follows: ‘ According to Heisenberg, to measure at the quantum level is to use one quantum to change another. In the measurement, I have used one quantum to change the kinetic energy and position of another quantum. Therefore, this kind of measurement is impossible. The philosopher Harman then argued that his object-oriented ontology adhered to this principle of indeterminacy theory. Measurement is not possible, so causality can only be aesthetic (Morton, Magical Positivity, p. 96)’. Objects are abstracted from each other on a profoundly physical level. Thus, there is a fit between object-oriented ontology and the most profound, precise, and testable theory of physical reality today, which is quantum theory. Quantum theory is viable also because it is object-orientated (Morton, Hyperobjects, p. 42). This leads to a quantum aesthetic and an Anthropocene aesthetic: art and philosophy are better aesthetic means of understanding the Anthropocene than science.

If, as has been argued, Eco-politics and Eco-culture are about the demystification of the world, then an object-oriented ontological or discursive-positivist aesthetics has much to offer. But if, as Maillassoux argues, the only way to enter the object, to unearth it, is through the white glove of mathematics, then we are being too self-absorbed. Even if we were to follow Meyassoux’s demand to deal with objects on a mathesis, a non-associative basis, it would only turn out to be the case of “I measure, but I am also measured.” As Morton pointed out, ‘the Anthropocentric copyrighted control of Connectionism, that is, the denial of fish access to the realm of the object-self, is not necessarily a higher way of evaluating the object (Morton, Ecology of Darkness, p. 298)’. Kantian Connectionism clarifies the relationship between human beings and objects, but it also assumes that human beings can only recognize objects that are associated with human beings, which in other words, the non-human objects are excluded. This old Kantian standpoint prevents us from recognizing the non-human objects in the Anthropocene, the non-human objects existing in the biosphere of the Cloud Computing Platform. This prevention makes us loose a large part of human aesthetic territory. The non-human landscapes in Wang’s paintings and sculptures should have been part of human aesthetics. In fact, the non-human aesthetics of Wang’s exhibition should be the means that we survive in the planetary space of climate change.

An object-oriented ontology is a weak holism: climate is ontologically smaller than weather; when we talk about things like Global Warming and the Anthropocene, we can no longer be anthropocentric, but rather we take climate and humans as objects, and look at the destiny of the human from the perspective of climate. This is why an object-oriented ontology is indispensable: it is only through an object-oriented ontological vision that we can talk effectively about climate change and the Anthropocene. ‘Weather is a symptom of climate, but weather is more than climate. The showers are the birds‘ bath time and the toads’ pond festivities. The rain on my arms reminded me that I had to write these sentences (Morton, Anthropocene, p. 157)’. An object-orientated ontology should be the basis of our thinking about
the software that underpins our contemplations and discussions of climate change and Artificial Intelligence.

Harman says, ‘My encounters with the creeks and bridges of my hometown are not that they are them and I am me, but that each time they form a compound, a piece of alloy (Harman, Introduction to Discursive Positivism, p. 92)’. According to the object-oriented ontology, when the viewer enters the museum and walks up the spiral of the He Art Museum, he or she forms a new object together with the museum. A new object is also formed between the viewer and each artwork in VARIATIONS. The museum and a painting are non-human objects, and the viewer is also a non-human object when he or she is viewed from the perspective of the work and the museum. When the viewer enters the museum, he or she, being in the identity of non-human object, encounters the art pieces, which are also non-human objects. VARIATIONS is thus a pile of compost: a new object is composed through the synthesis of colors, lines, paintings, sculptures, viewers, concepts, desires, tools, materials, curations, light, electricity, perfume, etc.

 

11.
According to Harman, the essence of technology is symbiosis. McLuhan’s statement that technology is an extension of man seems to be wrong. In fact, this statement should be said the other way round: technology is a series of endosymbiosis made by human beings; a cell lives symbiotically with a virus, which leads to human beings; it is human beings who finally internalize ChatGPT and Sora, making them a part of the functional system of human organs; CAD and CGI used in architectural design eventually become the necessary skills of every architect, while also being taken part in symbiosis by humans systematically and internally . Newly arrived technologies have been in symbiosis with humans over and over again. A huge capacity for symbiosis is rooted in the cell membrane, making human life unable to stop it from conducting a symbiosis.

The ability of life to actively turn external limitations into its own internal limitations can only be explained by symbiosis.

Only with the exploration of symbiosis can people understand the essence of a social object; symbiosis is the true biography. Symbiosis occurs at the
a relatively early stage of an object’s life. However, later on, this symbiosis will cause a dependence on the path in this object, resulting in an early death. Once the character of an object is established, symbiosis is no longer infinitely flexible.

Once the symbiosis of a social object reaches the point of no return, its possible courses of action are severely narrowed, as in the case of today’s globalization process, or of US-China relations. Symbiosis is a weak association that has matured into a strong association. A strong association is one that exists from the birth of the object. What starts out as a risky, experimental symbiosis ends up as a highly dependent bond that poses great risks to the object. The English taste for tea and the Chinese pursuit of opium addiction ended up in one of the collisions of world history: the Opium Wars (Harman, Immaterialism, p. 117).

 

12.
What is Wang’s painting itself? It is the hand-made colors and lines that he lays down in his paintings.

To pursue a unique painting that can no longer be replicated, the artiest has to make this image finally be presented, allowing colors and lines left by the artist on the canvas free and existing independently.

The pictorial space is a non-connected space, and the painter must cause the parts of it to be reconnected in countless ways (Deleuze, Film, Truth, and Time, Discussion Class 7).
Therefore, the picture is the presence of the image that the painter wants, not the presence of the object. Painting is about the presence of an entirely new image, which results in the emergence of an object. What we see in the picture is the birth of an object. This is Wang’s ontology of paintings. His work is to make a non-human landscape emerge from the picture, and at the same time to give us free access to his handmade colors and handmade lines, with the latter being the entry point for the viewer to step into his paintings and make them their own. Everything that he has done in his paintings is to make these handmade colors and lines come to the viewer freely like molecules. The freedom of the colors and the nomadic nature of the lines in VARIATIONS give his paintings a strong hallucinogenic effect on the viewer, being presented to the viewer like a machine drug.

Wang’s painting practice in VARIATIONS also tells us that the arrival of painting software and chatbots, on the contrary, makes us realize that brushstrokes (lines) – color dots (colors) are the fundamentals of human handmade paintings. It is the widespread use of Computer Vision in drawing that makes us see the ultimate goal of drawing more clearly. This is an issue that must be seriously explored and discussed by the contemporary painting world.

Formal drawing is preceded by piling up the data, removing the clichés from the picture. Then we sketch out the chart, which is the beginning of the painting. Then a few facts about the painting are finalized. Things happen on the canvas: the previous visual world is pulled into the chart by the painter. It is the real painting, the painting itself, that is being enlarged by the painter from the chart.

In his Discourse on Painting, Deleuze positions painting itself in general terms, stating that a pictorial fact is imposed on the painting, and that the picture is a rough space for presenting this pictorial fact. The process of drawing goes through three steps: the listing of the visual knowledge, the exploration of the possibilities of a pictorial fact, and the establishment of the pictorial fact on the screen. By installing a chart on the screen and creating a disaster, the visual knowledge (visual data) on the screen is dismantled and tormented in order to finally realize a pictorial fact that has to arrive on the screen. A line that can change direction at every point is a stroke and can become a pictorial fact. A brushstroke is a nomadic line; a Matisse line is a very thick and long brushstroke. The arrangement of dots can also be a fact of paintings. Colors and lines are the final objects of paintings.

 

13.
The symbiosis between paintings and sculptures.

From Always, Not All (Long March Space, 2021), Wang has experimented with the symbiosis between paintings and sculptures, and with VARIATIONS he has achieved a complete symbiosis between the two in his studio and exhibitions. According to his object-oriented ontology, a new object is formed between them. In turn, his paintings and sculptures are in turn a symbiosis with Global Warming and Artificial Intelligence.

 

14.
Boris Groys, in ‘ Comrades in Time,’ points out that contemporary art exhibitions are a cold medium. Wang’s exhibition on the symbiosis between painting and sculptures is a cool (cold, cool) site that is meant to lead the audience to become cool. What is our coolness under the aesthetics dominated by the short videos in 2024? It is: to use the exhibition to cool our graphic experience, to restore our body’s sovereignty, to put it at the point where it can start its own music, dance, paintings, sculptures, poetries at any time, and to bring it back to its full potential (Giorgio Agembeñ). Why should we go to see the paintings of VARIATIONS? It is because we need to make our bodies ‘cool’ again.

The white box is a cold space, a cold medium to convert text, music, single images and all other hot media into a cold medium to make the contemporary audience ‘cool’. Indeed, this is the main reason for today’s offline exhibitions. Visitors enter the offline exhibition to cool down the media in their hands and their skin installations, which are parts of the short videos.
They make cool contemplations in the white box, not so much to make an aesthetic judgement or choice, but, through their repeated viewing, to realize that they do not have enough time to make a thoughtful judgement through a more comprehensive contemplation. They are current audiences with mobile phones in their hands, who just look, walk away, and then come back a little later to look again, never seeing the whole, never seeing it all, and in the end, this repeated looking is put into a loop by themselves, and even the original contemplative viewing of the classical era is also put into this loop.

 

15.
The media of the VARIATIONS exhibition are paintings and sculptures. The content is the landscape in geological time: non-human landscapes. This content is a development of Wang’s work on the in-depth time series that began with his own exhibitions Temple of Time and Cambrian.

VARIATIONS presents us with a landscape in deep time that invites the viewer to confront the non-human landscape of the 530 million years since the Cambrian and the 530 million years to come, or a landscape that is not centered on humans, a landscape of which humans are only a component.
These landscapes of geological time or deep time that emerge in Wang’s paintings and sculptures are a leap forward from the tradition of painting a living nature in the midst of a dead nature, as represented by Cézanne.

Henri Maldiney, in Art and Being, points out that the constitutive moment of Cézanne’s painting is an event that emerges from the depths of the world. These events exist in parallel and in the same rhythm, expressing a fundamental homogeneity in the depths of time. These events are called Apeiron by the philosophers Anaximander and Heidegger. This Apeiron is the fuzzy mass from which everything we witness emerges, bubbles up, and is knocked back (ibid., p. 26). Maldiney says that each of Cézanne’s landscapes opens us up to the whole world and becomes in itself a sensory event for the viewer. Cézanne’s religion of landscape still requires us that subjects of landscape paintings can not be things currently seen by people, but must be a non-preferential space that is not counted as a neutral one. It must be aperspective, offering no particular entrance, excluding all paths to it, excluding all gazes. It is a collection in which each part has the potential to suddenly open up infinite dimensions to us. In today’s terms, it is an inhuman landscape.

Cézanne’s landscapes emanate from the light of the world (raysons de monde). Each element in the painting blossoms through all the elements (the emergence of a time in the apeiron, like the emergence of bubbles on the surface of a volcano’s lava). Each element participates in the ubiquity of the unique occurrence of all elements (participate de l’ubiquite de l’unique avoid lieu de tous.) (ibid., p. 28). A Cézanne landscape is a presentation of all things large and small in one occurrence (event). It is the ‘being there’ of a world event. Cézanne’s landscapes want to prove to us that art in paintings parallels with the nature in nature. It is only in the feeling of the depths of nature in artistic activity that we can be born again with the world.

So we should understand Cézanne’s landscapes in this way: a minute of the world passes in front of the painter, and he paints it as it really is. There is no more nature outside the painting, and nature can only be created inside the painting. Painting is to turn artificial nature into artistic nature, while also making Artificial Intelligence into human intelligence. You will find that Cézanne’s landscapes do not contain a trace of information. Cézanne pulls us into his paintings to see the presence of the most primitive and concrete nature. It is the ‘being there’ of a new and tender world. What presented in the painting is the most tender moment of the arrival of a newly born world, but not the beauty of a recorded landscape. We do not go to Cézanne’s landscapes to see the beauty of the landscape, but to be born together with the event-arrival (evenement-avenement) in it.
This event of the world passing before us for a minute is unrepeatable.It is a work, a new object. A Cézanne painting is another attempt to bring the depths of the world into existence.

Wang’s landscapes in geological time or deep time are a development of post-Cézanneanist painting. The VARIATIONS takes us into the greater depth of nature and the world. The exhibition is the latest post-Cézanneanist response to the aesthetics of the Anthropocene.

16.
Drawing and Artificial Intelligence.

Painting is the creation an image that we have never seen before, displaying it on the canvas.What Computer Vision generation software, such as DALL-E, Tensor F

low, and Midjourney, can provide us, are the result of a deep learning of lines, colors, and compositional effects from the strokes and touches of more than 60,000 painters. Computer vision is just printing, not painting.

Therefore, the question is not whether painting robots can paint better than humans, but how painters today can make use of the Artificial Intelligence of these 60,000 painters, treating them as their own trainers, and make their own paintings more conscious, more awake, and more effective.

Wang has given a wonderful answer to the above question in VARIATIONS.

 

17.
Why are Wang’s artworks being painted brighter and brighter?

There are two reasons: (1) his own experience with the the digital screen media led him to ask for a higher chromaticity; (2) the computational vision or Artificial Intelligence painting software was constantly suggesting a brighter chromaticity to him. The viewer, feeling the same as Wang, demands a brighter shade each time, just like some one addicted to drugs must take additional doses over and over again. In his own symbiosis with digital screens, Wang has become increasingly greedy for chromaticity, and so has his audience. The viewer of VARIATIONS comes to take ‘that sip,’ but that sip is handmade by the artist.

Wang’s chroma is created after the acceptance of the challenge of artificial intelligence, and the screen is filled with his handmade colors, using industrial pigments available on the market to produce the colors that AIs suggested, as well as that the audience is eagerly awaiting to quench their thirst for. Indeed, our experience of short videos on our mobile screens has left us addicted to chroma without restraint.

And Wang makes these handmade lines to complete the forms that the AI suggests, to make them human paintings, because the seams of Computer-Vision-generated forms on paintings are violent to our eyes, and we want to use the painter to liberate these lines for us. Therefore, Wang’s paintings represent, first and foremost, a conquest of the painting of our time over the images that can be produced by artificially intelligent painting software, and these handmade colors and handmade threads are his trophies. We are presenting in this exhibition the concrete results of his conquest of Artificial Intelligence with human intelligence.

Wang’s use of Computer Vision is, on the one hand, to produce the brightest, the freest, handmade colors, to offer them molecular freedom. On the other hand, he creates lines on the screen that are charming at every turn. These are nomadic lines that run between contours, planes and backgrounds, unprotected by contours, with planes of their own, and therefore, it is also a cosmic line.

It is the movement of these colors and lines that the viewer catches with his eyes and body on the screen. According to Deleuze, the artist wanted to help these colors and lines return to the movement of the universe, to return them to the light of the sun, from which they all derive. Returning colors and lines to the state of light was, for Deleuze, the ultimate task of the painter. We can judge by this criterion
Wang’s treatment of colors and lines in VARIATIONS.

In short, we can say that VARIATIONS represents the latest conquest of the painterly intelligence of our time over the colors and lines provided by Artificial Intelligence; it wants to liberate the colors and lines so that they can transcend the capture of the chemical industry, the paint box and the Artificial Intelligence, and pop up in front of us again as freely as the oxygen atom and the hydrogen atom, and move towards a new symbiosis in defiance of everything.

18.
Wang’s pedagogy of contemporary art.

In the Anthropocene, in the midst of this set of climate change’s uncertainties, contemporary artists and their viewers must learn to engage with non-human objects, to find the destiny of the human race in the face of climate change in order to ultimately survive the biosphere. The exhibition of paintings and sculptures in VARIATIONS presents aesthetic chains of cause and effect that constitute an Anthropocene theatre, inviting the viewer to come up with a real work of self-evidence and self-motivation. After art has slipped from art history into a new geological history, the audience’s own works will play a leading role in the exhibition. The audience is reconstructing their own work in front of the artist’s work.

To see and to inherit is to be reborn. The audience’s struggles and battles around the old work are their new artworks. This is their self-sculpture.

Wang’s pedagogy of contemporary art is that the work should at all time be the viewer’s own life preserver. The author becomes an author because she learns from what she writes, and she continues to learn in front of her own work, continuing her own evolution of incarnation. The viewer learns by following her learning. Coming to an exhibition is to learn from the contemporary artist’s learning, a kind of deep learning that everyone in the human world must enter into. Contemporary art must be a territory of learning that contemporary artists use together with their audience (Toynbee).

The viewer is also ‘reproduced’ by the works they create in the exhibition; the viewer must be a do-gooder, pestering the works to regenerate more gossip and ambiguity, the more the better. They activate the works in the exhibition in a thousand ways, all for their own sake and to their own delight. In contemporary art exhibitions, they always further work out the works on display.

Latour argues that we should adopt the same attitude towards works of art, as well as towards political and social institutions that are the work of their predecessors, in order to further understand, appropriate, and transform them: to download them. To see an exhibition of contemporary art is to download the work of the exhibiting artists, but it is also necessary to make the work that the viewers themselves produce from the exhibition downloadable. In a contemporary art exhibition, we have to produce a different version of ourselves by treating other people’s art products as if they were our own, by first producing a work about ourselves. As Morton says, contemporary art is important because it helps us to understand our relationship with the non-human, and to adopt an object-oriented attitude towards our own existence as well: to come to terms with the dilemmas that we face, rather than shrugging them off and making glamorous excuses to keep our heads above water. The work of art itself is a non-human being, forcing the viewer to stand with it rather than admire it from a distance. What the work of art wants us to do with it is not exactly what we all do with the work of art. Isn’t that the attitude we should all  have towards Global Warming and the cloud computing platforms that are leading us into madness?

To engage in ecology in the midst of Global Warming is to make a work of art in the midst of a larger work of art. We know that engaging in ecology is the same as poking a hornet’s nest since when we become ecologically aware, the scenarios we facing will explode in front of us. By creating contemporary artworks in the midst of Global Warming, we are trying to poke the hornet’s nest of artworks. In VARIATIONS, Wang creates one work after another, stroke by stroke, within the work of Global Warming or Computer Vision generation, and in the process, he also re-creates the work of Global Warming or Artificial Intelligence vision generation with his paintbrush and knives. As we look around us, we realize that contemporary art is also the best way to deal with Global Warming or AI visions, i.e., to re-create them.

We have always been phenomenologically glued to the biosphere, to live it ourselves, to paint it like Cézanne to face it. and even re-create it.

Wang is doing contemporary art in the midst of Global Warming, continuing to create Global Warming as a piece of work, and making it into a new work of his own. This is the correct way for us to deal with Global Warming or Artificial Intelligence.

 

19. Conclusion

Along with Global Warming comes Computer Vision generation or Artificial Intelligence vision. The author is very concerned about how to build a critical language for describing paintings and sculptures under challenges of Computer Vision.

Regarding how to use painting software and Artificial Intelligence vision generation, Wang’s paintings and sculptures provide us with a very good entry point.

Paintings and sculptures are ways of deep learning for the artist himself.

The main points of the VARIATIONS exhibition are:

(1) The molecular freedom of handmade colors and the nomadic nature of handmade threads;

(2) The formation of an Anthropocene Teaching Theatre before paintings and sculptures: painting the non-human landscapes since 560 million years and after 560 million years, as well as looking for new elements of Anthropocene aesthetics;

(3) A high degree of self-awareness of the medium: responding positively to the challenges posed to contemporary paintings formed by robotic painting software and Artificial Intelligence, and defining a new boundary of contemporary paintings;

(4) Wang’s paintings and sculptures are the most highly influenced by the contemporary art. In fact, he works on two fronts: the exploration of the Chinese path of contemporary art, and the metamorphosis of contemporary paintings in the visual generation of Artificial Intelligence.

 

20. Interpretation of the Title

Global Warming and Artificial Intelligence are both objects and our works, but they are not good works. The best way to deal with them is to re-create them. Wang, as a  sculptor who works as a painter, re-creates the two works of Global Warming and Artificial Intelligence by generating art pieces in his studio.

Contemporary art is the best way of deep learning. Wang uses contemporary art to recreate the works Global Warming and Artificial Intelligence. Indeed, we should all do the same.