The Golden Touch —— Cultural Rhetoric of Shen Ye

 

By  Pi Daojian

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Shen Ye is a cross-media contemporary artist. People often use different words to define his identity: lacquer artist, installation artist, conceptual artist, imaging artist and performance artist……But in Shen's view, all of them are shallow recognitions. The core of art relies on the transmission of concept. Therefore, Shen Ye refuses to confine himself to a certain identity, which keeps him boundless throughout the use of media. Various media such as lacquer, image, body, wood, hair and so on will appear in Shen Ye's different artworks according to the time and place. Specially fonding of lacquer, an Oriental art media, Shen Ye starts focusing on the effective transformation from tradition to present in his works. It is Shen Ye's never-ending pursuit to use lacquer media and its technology as an effective form of expression of concept, which is the artist's cultural rhetoric of social phenomena. Through the use of this rhetoric, the artist transforms signifiers and signified, forms and concepts, as well as the combination of material manifestations and social reality, etc. into formal language to evoke the audience's memory of hidden cultural imprints, and then trigger their deep association and thinking.

 

Saussure, the founder of linguistics, discarded the historical narrative of etymology in traditional linguistics and studied the consensus of language as a whole social phenomenon . He distinguishes the sociality and individuality of group language by holistic language/individual language, and analyses the meaning phenomenon in language through the horizontal combination and vertical aggregation of language, and divides the meaning into signifier (expression level) and signified (content level). Among them, the transverse-combination relation is a linear relation, which represents the fixed, repetitive and integral of language, i.e. the direct meaning; while the vertical-aggregation relation is a juxtaposition or contrast relation between meaning and form, which is a kind of implied meaning. Meaning in implied meaning implies direct meaning, which carries the inherent illusion of ideology, while signifier in implied meaning realizes the rhetoric of ideology by means of changing, deviating and distorting the meaning of words.

 

 

In Shen Ye's artistic creation, he often combines the philosophical implications in the titles with the ridicules in the form of his works. By transforming the fixed relationship between the signifier and the signified in the direct meaning into a structural relationship that can be replaced by each other, the original meaning and the transferred meaning in the semantic rhetoric are transformed, that is, such an ideological rhetoric.

 

The work "It's been Ended at the Beginning of Your Consciousness" is a lacquer board. By the treatment of lacquer process, the artist makes the surface of the lacquer board appear irregular folds. The fuzzification in form dispels the referential system of the work, while the indicative title makes the symbolic meaning of the work possible to be interpreted in a variety of ways. It can not only imply the erosion of time on objects in Eastern philosophy, but also symbolize the rapid consumption of cultural products in Chinese society. In "the Toy that will Eventually Be a Pet", the artist's expression is more direct and radical, performing the dog's excrement with the old craft of golden lacquer. The combination of this form and the title of the work exudes a bare satire on the current wave of pan-entertainment culture. In fact, the symbol of excrement is not uncommon in Western art history. Many artists have tried it: in 1961, Piero Manzoni encapsulated his excrement in small tin pots with a weight of 1 ounce each and sold it at the price of the same weight of gold; in 2007, Chinese artist Xu Hanwei （Terence Koh） gilded his excrement and sold it at the Basel Expo in Switzerland for $500,000. In 2008, Paul McCarthy erected a huge inflatable excrement on the central square of Cree in Bern, Switzerland... However, the use of excrement symbols by these artists is based on a set of narrative of Western art history. They criticize Western fetishism and consumerism through their own actions or installation works, and at the same time, they are also a kind of ridicule and Reflection on the western art market system. Shen Ye uses excreta symbols in the context of contemporary Chinese culture. Through the metaphor of the name and form of his works, Shen points directly to a large number of garbage information generated under the current mode of Internet attention economy in China.

In another series of works represented by Eternity and the Golden Touch, Shen Ye arouses the viewer's thinking through the transformation of Eastern philosophy and Chinese mythology. The artist let lacquer slip along a hair, indicating the time view in Oriental philosophy, while Yuan can be regarded as an extension of Eternity. By replacing works with the same form into a different space field, the time view in Eternity is replaced by the Oriental view of life. Shen Ye returns to the transformation of traditional Chinese culture narrative in The Golden Touch. As a collective representation (représentations collectives), mythology functions as "distorting things". In the case that the signifier of the direct meaning is unchanged, by distorting the signifier of the direct meaning, the same signifier loads different signified meanings and transforms the sign of the direct meaning into the implied meaning. Installation work "The Golden Touch" vividly imitates the stone that has been turned into gold by a touch by Lu Dongbing in the allusion of "the Golden Touch" with lacquer and gold foil. The crow standing on the wooden box symbolizes the search for the golden pointing finger. The use of the polysemous cultural symbol "crow" in this work is also interesting. For the black feathers and decaying habits, crows have become an ominous omen in Chinese culture. The images of "Over old trees wreathed with rotten vines fly evening crows" and "no more fireflies in rotten grass, but only evening crows in weeping willows" are all associated with desolation and decay. On the other hand, crow was first regarded as a Sunbird in ancient China, which was associated with the prosperity of sovereign and the sacrifice of ancestral temples. For example, in the Classic of Mountains and Seas：the book of the great chaos land, there is a expression that "one sun appears and another sun disappears, all of which are carried on the back of the crow". In addition, crow has been regarded as a kind of bird linked with "filial piety", in ancient times, "crow nurturing" is used to describe children's repaying their aged parents for the upbringing. Through the semantic deviation, transformation, transformation and substitution of the symbols of crow and golden stone, the rhetoric of the Golden Touch becomes extremely complicated: If the crow is regarded as the symbol of the sun bird, its search for the pointing golden finger is logical. On the contrary, if the crow is regarded as the symbol of decay and desolation, it seems abrupt to find the golden finger through it, which makes the work not only an irony of the fetishism which is referred to by the golden stone, but also a teasing on the golden stone itself.

 

In Criticism of Judgment, Kant regards the non-utilitarian aesthetics between reason and sensibility as important means to prevent people from being alienated by reason. With the development of the times, aesthetic activities are constantly related to ethical demands, sensory stimulation, class distinction and wealth acquisition. Therefore, Shen Ye used multiple cultural rhetoric techniques such as embezzlement, reorganization, rewriting, symbolization, metaphor and metonymy to integrate the concern of the problem and philosophical thinking into the traditional medium of lacquer and liberate the lacquer from the shackles of the conventional "lacquer technology". Through the semantic rhetoric of cultural symbols, the artist cancelled the explicit orientation in aesthetic narration in the present expression of lacquer, in order to make the relationship between its original meaning and the new semantic field more complex and rich. This ambiguity of semantics also gives the works a new aesthetic value of non-utility.

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Liang Project Co Space

Artist: Shen Ye

Duration: 2019.9.21 – 2019.11.12

Opening: 2019.9.21 15:00

Address: 102, Bldg 18, Moganshan Rd 50, Shanghai, China

 

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