by Fang Zhiling
A scared, wide eye was hidden in almost complete darkness below the center of the painting; at the upper left, a severely deformed human calf that is painted red appears to be restlessly stretching; near the bottom, an orange-colored, well-ironed pant seems to be spreading in dark shadow towards the lower right side where a black shoe is virtually going beyond the picture; next to the right side is a blue horn at a slant, on the top of which lies a monster with a proboscis and a pair of wide-apart eyes; at the bottom left there is a couple of mysterious branches in the form of human leg joints... All of this constitutes a paranormal waste pile, in the middle of the weird, mystic wastes there emerges a couple of equally other-worldly masculine faces. With such robustly theatrical lighting in the Baroque style, the wastes seem to be piling up, squeezing, rolling, struggling, and avidly producing an absurd drama on the stage. Several massive brushstrokes and lines in red, white, yellow, and green look to be flying and rotating among the ghostly pile of wastes, which seems like a blast of mystifying air that is about to bring out many phantasmic things; the white brushstroke is creating a half-legged, half-tree-branched monster while the massive yellow stroke turns into a piece of waterproof cloth that covers the pile. A wicked smiling face emerges from the cloth as if it is cheerfully watching the uncanny absurd drama on the stage.
Zhou Wenzhong named the above-mentioned painting Fitzini’s Temptation, which is easily reminiscent of Hieronymus Bosch’s well-known Triptych of Temptation of St. Anthony. As a matter of fact, Zhou Wenzhong’s painting bears considerable similarity to The Triptych of Temptation of St. Anthony: depictions of demonic monsters, intense shadows, and the magic world where human beings and monsters coexist, in addition to characteristics of absurd drama. Other than a real person’s name, Fitzini was fabricated by the artist by combining the Cantonese idiom fai3 si6 choi2 nei5 (费事睬你, meaning “couldn’t care less about you”) and the last syllable of “Anthony”. This fabricated word, which sounds “foreign” and “elegant” and looks “earthly” and “mundane”, highlights the irony of the wicked, smiling face. Simultaneously, it adds another dimension of sensibility of cynicism and humor shared by the “grass-roots elite” artists— including George Condo, John Currin, and Dana Schutz — to the magical drama that is avidly staged and influenced by Bosch.
Born in the 1970s, Zhou Wenzhong is acutely sensitive to “the pain of our times”. As a member and a peer of the “Cartoon Generation” artists — as early as in 2004, the artist won the gold award for his paintings characterized by a manifestation of maturity, calmness, and darkness at the exhibition Ideal of New Generation held at the He Xiangning Art Museum — his initial focus was on the pain of our times, which evoked bitter, disturbing memories from the past. At the same time, he established himself as an emerging artist and his own fame and status because of a series of avant-garde paintings that depicted a young person being forced to dunk their upper body in the messy flush toilet and being violently abused. However, Zhou Wenzhong has built a visual vocabulary that is more restricted and acute, which is deeply influenced by Francis Bacon’s painterly style characterized by nightmare and violence. After the 2007 solo exhibition Morning Glow, Zhou Wenzhong gradually shifted from the early experience that was unsettling, absurd, and nerve-wracking to enthusiastic attention to the disadvantaged group of people like the pain of our times in the rapid process of modernization. During this period, influenced by the German artists Neo Rauch and Francis Bacon, he created many paintings being divided by sharp diagonal lines — such as architectural lines, highways, pipes, power poles, tree branches, falling passers-by being twisted and curled, wanderers, ragpickers, amateur singers, and kinslayers — all of which created an appalling spectacle of society.
Recently, however, Zhou Wenzhong’s paintings have shifted from a clear-cut “societal narrative” to a series of more obscure and mystifying metaphors for society. Even though retaining properly complete images and scenes, social identities of the figures have been eradicated in the works created in 2019, including The Farmer and the Snake, Double Happiness, Dream Eater, and Flickering Candle. Meanwhile, the scenes appeared to be distorted and deformed in a magic manner, which seemingly constructed a surreal, absurd spectacle beyond description. After 2000, profound figures and scenes gave way to the hustle and bustle of the absurd wasteland that brought together twisted and rotated abstract brushstrokes, fragmented figures, and ghostly monsters, as manifested in Fitzini’s Temptation, Moon/Preacher/Beast, Earthworm, and Rice Monkey. Such a shift doesn’t mean that the artist has no longer paid attention to the pain of our times hidden in the advancement of modernization — as a matter of fact, there is always a realistic entry point noticeable in his magical and monstrous theatrical scenes — instead, it suggests that “the pain of our times” has transformed from a social issue into a spiritual issue of human, that being said, in his viewpoint, reality ends with poetry, the end of sensibility is an absurdity, and “the pain of our times” is the pain of humanity in the end. As a result, Zhou Wenzhong’s artistic language has been freed from the influences of Neo Rauch’s societal narrative and Francis Bacon’s violence in art and has rebuilt a system of Expressionist language that is uniquely grotesque and cryptic. It stemmed from Hieronymus Bosch, Francis Bacon, and Francisco Goya’s constantly inspirational sequence of dark artistic ideas and was based on severe and acute experiences in society in addition to intense feelings and random thoughts.
October 29, 2021
