Wu Jian’an’s work visually creates a heightened tension between physiology and culture, science and mythology. In his Infinite Paintings series, such a tension projects itself onto the visual sensory dimension represented by stimulating colors, odd shapes, elevated density and rhythm, catching the audiences’ eyes with its infinite details and holding their attention for a while. In terms of optical nerve, the paintings bear a resemblance to scientific images, such as color blindness test charts or Google’s DeepMind image generation. From the perspective of traditional aesthetics, the separated details that go beyond the whole structure appear to be fragmented, inorganic, inconsistent, non-structural, and as if in a state of existence having no end. All of his, perhaps, explains the reason for the naming of Infinite Paintings.
At the same time, the tension projects itself onto myths and psychological archetypes where monsters, heroes, killings, and fights take shape. Once these images coming into view, the audiences seek to sustain a balance between the nuances and the integrated whole, moving constantly between the visual nervous system and the visual thinking strategies and thus allowing their senses and sensibilities to challenge and confront each other. In this sense, Wu Jian’an’s work has opened up a place for debate, which enables the audiences to perceive the infinity of “eyes” and “hearts” in the process of constantly switching between vision and illusion.
If Wu Jian’an served as the initiator who sparked off the debate in his Infinite Painting series, he performed the role of a defender of the other party in the 500 Brushstrokes series. By cutting out and assembling the brushstrokes made by different individuals into many “harmonious-looking” abstract paintings, the artist has somewhat shaken off a part of the conceptual foundations of impressionism. That being said, the premises of the so-called subject matter, mentality, motivation that are defined by modernity have been undone. This is approximately equivalent to the amount of influence in the way machines and artificial intelligence have had an impact on humanity, just like “the removal of the ladder after your ascent”; however, throughout the process, the artist’s artistic taste remains.
Wu Jian’an is such an artist whose aesthetics is generated from methods. With this, aesthetics functions as a result other than a goal; in other words, what is behind Wu’s visual works is argumentation. Furthermore, vision only serves as the deduction and induction that make an argument, the process of which is far from an easy one; sometimes it shows no traces of effort, just like “an antelope hangs its horn during sleep”, or it turns out to be on the horns of a dilemma, just like “a ram butts a fence”. At the same time, it could be a process of automatic generation or a miraculous recovery from a desperate situation. Simultaneously, such a way of working brought about the Incarnation series and evolved into the Infinite Paintings series.
Wu Jian’an’s most recent artistic creations can be understood as theoretical writing on the theme of visual research, in which vision is applied to discuss the issues of vision and visuals. Such a methodology appears to suggest an awareness of meta-image and meta-art. Discussions like this, however, are nowhere near obscure and tedious; these discussions can be fascinatingly lively. Akin to the Buddhist concept of images in disguised forms (vikurvaṇa-ṛddhi), which has double layers of meaning: one is the “change of sutra”, which uses images to decipher passages of the Buddhism scriptures; and the other is the “the power to work wonders”, which interprets the scriptures through exceptionally brilliant means. The fact that the two dimensions strengthen one another both internally and externally is where the theme of the present exhibition came from. At this point, we may view Wu Jian’an’s paintings as a scene of perception based on all the aspects that may constitute many visual elements of art — including physiology, technology, culture, history, and even politics— to be able to directly observe the impermanence of all notions and forms.
