记忆中的园区风景
Ground Scenery in the Memory
自05年学院从东三环边的光华路搬到海淀的清华园以后，圆明园便是我常去的地方：并非因为一百多年前的荣耀与耻辱，事件毁灭的是皇家风景，遗址里依然苍翠欲滴，夕晖洒地。我倒是想寻找那些被荒草掩埋的小径，以及通向那些在圆明园中自发生长又被强力拆毁的村落残迹。十多年前我们这一代人中的不安分者在那里寻觅过乌托邦的理想，形成在权力话语之外的艺术群落。今天看来，他们在圆明园的短暂栖息竟然成为中国当代艺术史中浪漫而又苦涩的一页。据说现在的海淀官府是后悔的，后悔错过了最有“钱途”的文化产业。当时这些穷愁的艺术青年被逐出圆明园，他们向东寻觅，迎着朝霞，是潮白河畔的通州宋庄收留了他们。十年前我去宋庄拜访朋友，那里仍然是京郊最为普通的农村，艺术家的日子过得艰难，但他们从不抱怨，一边画画，一边打理田园生活，眼里总是透着希望。而今天的宋庄似乎已是当代神话的发源地，官员、农民、商人、艺术家各尽所能，各得所需，已形成蔚为壮观的艺术生态链。我在挂着“中国宋庄”四个大金字的村口巧遇几位学院刚毕业就投奔此地的同学，言谈之间让我感到这里已俨然成为艺术青年向往的“革命根据地”。杨卫、洪峰曾与我谈过“宋庄奇迹”，都感叹奇迹来得太突然，变化的速度让有圆明园经历的老艺术家们还一时难以适应。
Since the art institution moves from Guanghua Road near east of the 3rd ring of Beijing to Tsinghua Yuan in Haidian district in 2005, Yuanmingyuan Park became one of my favorite places to visit: not because the glory and shame over one hundred years ago, since what the event has destroyed is the scenery of the royal family, inside the site you can still find emerald green and the glow of sunset. What I am really interested in Yuanmingyuan are those trails buried in weeds and the vestiges of villages which came into being spontaneously and were destroyed by force. More than ten years ago, those feisty people in our generation have been looking for the ideal of Utopia there, and formed an art community outside the power circle. From today’s perspective, their short stays in Yuanmingyuan unexpectedly become one romantic and also painful page of the whole Chinese contemporary art history. It is said that today the Haidian government is very regret to miss the most “beneficial” culture industry. At that time, those misery young artists were banished from Yuanmingyuan, and they looked for their shelter towards east, toward the sunglow, and finally they found the Song Village in Tongzhou at the banks of Chaobai River. Ten years ago I went to the Village to visit friends; it was still just like the most common countryside in Beijing suburb and the artists had a very hard time, but they never complained about this: on one hand they drew, on the other hand they took care of their rural life. You could see hope in their eyes. While today the Village seems already being the cradle of a contemporary myth, there officers, farmers, businessmen, artists satisfy of one and all, and a spectacular artistic ecological-chain has formed. At the entrance of the village where hangs the bronzing words “China Song Village”, I encountered several students who just graduated from the institution and came here. During the conversation with them, I found here has already become the “base” where young artists desired. Yang Wei and Hong Feng have told me about “the miracle in Song Village” and both of them believed that the miracle came into being too sudden and too fast to accept for those elder artists who have experienced the Yuanmingyuan era.
尽管如此，从昔日的圆明园画家村到当下的中国宋庄，脐带没有断，那本是一种生活方式的存在，一种自由精神的存在。如今的我驻足圆明园，心系着宋庄，包括在那里创业的朋友，那远离皇家风水的潮白河畔。
From the art community in Yuanmingyuan to the Song Village nowadays, the umbilical cord of art is always there and never been cut off. That is a way of life, an existence of free spirit. Now although I walk in Yuanmingyuan, my heart is in the Village together with my friends who set up their business there; I am thinking about the banks of Chaobai River far away from the royal Fengshui.
宋庄有了气场，便引来各路好汉。我要说的是李铁军，北京当代艺术馆的主持人，一位精力充沛的艺术家。他上个世纪90年代初去了玻利维亚，那是切•格瓦拉战斗过的地方，然后又在西班牙求学，回国后便选择在宋庄安营扎寨。北京当代艺术馆坐落在宋庄的一片葱翠林场中，灰墙、高矮不一的旗杆、碎石路。在没有展览开幕式的日子里，这里更像一处私人会所。铁军引我到后院的天光工作室，有曲径通幽，伴着雨后的蝉鸣、雾霭和林间散布的雕塑，眼前的一切几乎完全抹杀了十年前宋庄给我的记忆。
Song Village has attracted many talented people from various fields with its unique charm. Here I am talking about Li Tiejun, the director of Beijing Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), an energetic artist. In 1990s, he went to Bolivia, where Che Guevara has strived in and then he went to Spain to study. He chooses Song Village to be his base after he came back to China. Beijing MOCA sits in verdant woods in the Village; grey walls, mast of different heights, gravel road make the place much more a private club than a museum if there is no exhibition opening ceremony. Tiejun lead me to Tianguang Studio in the backyard. The winding path, the sound of cicada after the rain, the fog and the sculptures scatter in woods, all these sceneries has almost wiped away my memory of the Village ten years ago.
这么宁静的环境本该享受，铁军却在宁静中画出了《园区风景》、《雾》、《大自然》、《花狗》等具有震撼力的系列作品。他的画均为大尺度的黑白灰单色处理，画面朦胧，似景非景，莫不是铁军在多年的闯荡中混淆了记忆的边界？而在完成的画面上，色浆的肆意挥洒和流淌又在割裂那些模糊的形象，莫不是铁军有意要用暴力来破坏风景的静谧？我无意追问艺术家在这些画中想说什么，但我关注他的言说方式，他对温文尔雅的山水画及书法传统有着一种缅怀式的日常操练，我想他从中汲取的养分也会影响到自身对园区风景的表达。
In such a peaceful environment, people originally should enjoy life, but Tiejun creates series of work which had great impact, such as The Ground Scenery, Fog, Nature, and Colored Dogs. All his paintings are in large size, with black, white or grey color. The vague frame makes the scenery not like scenery. Does he mix up the boundary of memory in his years of adventure? And in his finished works, the indulged use and flow of colours and inks tear up those vague images. Is he deliberately using violence to destroy the peace of the scenery? I do not intensively want to know what the artist want to review in his paintings, what I am more concerned is his way of speaking. Tiejun has a yearning daily practice of gentle landscape paintings and calligraphy, and I believe his benefit from that will affect his expression of ground sceneries.
如同我有着记忆中的宋庄，铁军也有着记忆中的园区风景。记忆是我们生命中最为重要的价值体验，它混淆时间和空间，甚至完全抛开了它们，让形象时而模糊时而清晰。人们大都借助摄影术来保留记忆，而铁军则是把记忆本身直接写在画面上，从造型语言的角度看，形象的不确定性可以有效阻止宏大叙事的编织，因而让艺术家所有想说的只能是暗示，这里没有再现，更没有教谕。
Like me keeping the memory of Song Village, in Tiejun’s memory, there is also unique ground scenery. Memory is the most important value experience in our life. It mixes the time and space, even put aside of them, making the image sometimes vague and sometimes clear. Most people use photographing to keep their memory, while Tiejun put it directly on his paintings. From the view of molding language, the non-determinacy of image could prevent massive narration effectively, thus makes all artist’s saying just a hint. There is no recurrence, no lecture.
一般而言，风景得以进入人的视野，是因为人的在场，因此场域不是宽泛的、抽象的自然空间，而是生命个体得以呈现的具体环境，在铁军这里“场域”被转化为具体的“园区”。可以说当代人的生存“园区”不仅充满着人与人之间的利益冲突或文化冲突，同时也充满着人与物之间，或人与存在之间的矛盾。心理学中所说的“风景失忆”往往是这种矛盾冲突的表现。如铁军作品中出现的公共汽车、铁轨、飞机等现代技术的产物虽让人司空见惯、习以为常，但其背后隐藏着对人的生存挤压和统摄力，一种人们无意识地自甘承受的理性规则。或许，李铁军的绘画只能以一种既朦胧又“暴力”的方式表达出个体生命在当代技术体系中脆弱的存在。
Generally speaking, people could see scenery because people are there, thus the ground is not a general and abstract natural space, but a specific environment where living individuals could express themselves. Tiejun change “space” into specific “ground”. We can say the “ground” where modern people live is not only full of beneficial conflicts and cultural conflicts between people and people, but also full of contradictions between people and thing, or people and being. “Scenery Amnesia” in psychology is usually an expression of such conflict and contradiction. Bus, railway and plane, all those modern technological items in Tiejun’s works are very common to people, but behind them are the living pressure of people, the reasonable rule which people would like to bear unconsciously. Maybe, Tiejun’s painting could only use a vague and “violent” way to express the weak existence of individual life in contemporary technology system.
人在“园区”中观看和画画，那么感悟在继续，记忆也在延续，而且是在巨大的不确定性中延续。从圆明园到宋庄，近二十年来中国城乡的巨大变化让那些记忆中的风景变得支零破碎，公共景观的建造一边在编织宏大叙事，一边在不断掏空我们生命记忆中鲜活的细节，从而也让个体之间的差异变得模糊。是的，我们现在已经习惯于权力镜头中气势恢宏的大风景，园区在一个个兴建，风景在一点点变幻，留给我们的只是观看的彷徨。
Inside the ground district, people see and paint, the understanding is continuing, so is the memory, continues in great non-determinacy. From Yuanmingyuan to Song Village, during 20 years, the great upheaval of the cities and countries in China has shattered the scenery in memory into pieces; the construction of public sight on one hand make up the great narration of the era, on the other hand clean up the fresh details in our living memory step by step, thus it also makes the discrepancy between individuals indistinct. For sure, we are used to those imposing large sights from the lens of power; the ground district is building one by one, the scenery is changing little by little, and what leave to us is only watch in wander.
可以说，从模糊的记忆到当下现实的园区风景，李铁军在画面上一再质疑形象的不确定性，用矛盾的语言表达来拒绝矫饰的写实主义。我以为他是一位既横向拓展自己的实验领域，又进行纵向思考的艺术家。所谓横向和纵向，亦即是对东方与西方，传统与当代的一种立场选择，这种选择决定着艺术家的视野和判断。我们看到与改革开放同步的中国当代艺术已不再提供美容功效，它只是一份在社会情景的剧烈变化中具有人文关怀的现实主义记录，一份预防失忆的档案。
From vague memory to the realistic ground scenery, Li Tiejun continually to question the non-determinacy of image in the frame of painting, using contradictive expression to refuse mannered realism. I think he is an artist who expand his own experiencing field horizontally and also think vertically. Speaking of horizontal and vertical, it is also a choice between east and west, tradition and contemporary. Such kind of choice determines the view and judgment of the artist. We see that Chinese contemporary art which is synchronous with the reforming and opening up could no more provide the beauty making effect. It is only a humanistic realism record in the dramatic change of social situation, a file to prevent amnesia.
从圆明园坎坷走来，或从欧美洗礼归来，今日的中国宋庄不问英雄出处，只是在不断聚积着能量，这里不仅是新时期农村包围城市的根据地，同时也是在时间和空间两条轴线上新一轮美学建构的交叉点，我相信李铁军这位充满激情、能量和智慧的艺术家已经确定了自己的价值抉择。
Either with the frustration in Yuanmingyuan or with the adventure of western world, the Village doesn’t care about where those people are from. Energy gathers continuously here. It is not only a base of “city bounded by countryside” in the new era, but also a new round aesthetic construction junction of time axis and space axis. I believe Li Tiejun, the artist full of energy, power and wisdom, has already determined his choice of value.
包林
清华园
2009-08-15
Bao Lin
Tsinghua Yuan
2009-08-15