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By Wang Yamin

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As a painter, Tang Yongxiang adheres to the process of “overpainting” his own works: each day, he enters his studio and, through a set of prescribed repertoire of brushwork gestures and coloring decisions, returns to canvases that were “paused” in their making from the previous workday. This cycle repeats daily, accumulating across years, until a certain painting is formally declared—in gaming parlance—”Painting Over.” “Painting Over” means the painting has arrived at a rather permanent pause and is prepared to release from his studio into the broader moments of display, viewing, and critique. Yet the artist maintains that these finished paintings can be restarted, while the overpainting of his works can go on indefinitely. I have also had the privilege to discuss with him and together visualize these paintings being countlessly paused in the darkness of a nocturnal studio and displayed in solitude. This pause, whether manifesting as daily routine or a quasi-permanent indication of a painting’s completion, seems to exist in a state of self-perpetuated release, intrinsic to painting itself and autonomous from the painter’s control. Here, I believe, lies the key to interpret Tang Yongxiang’s entire body of work to date. The pause, or what I term the “automated” ambient effect, that is ever-present and ubiquitous in his paintings offers the most immediately palpable entry point into his practice. For these reasons above, his paintings and their effects are linked to the painter’s prescribed gestures of overpainting—both the physical “act” and the phenomenal act of its effect, which perhaps constitute the most viable text-objects through which to interpret Tang Yongxiang’s paintings.

(1) Excerpt from Allegories of Painting of Control.

 

1_1. (2)

Formatted Overpainting

If we approach painting as text, what literal meanings can we register in Tang Yongxiang’s paintings? Taking his latest solo exhibition for instance, the most immediately perceivable elements reveal themselves clearly: here at TANK Shanghai, over a dozen oil-on-canvas paintings gravitate toward neutral grays, each varying in aspect ratio, dimensions, and scale. The imagery inhabits a mix and match of constant flux between differing degrees of identifiable specificity and unidentifiable abstraction, yet at a minimum, at its most fundamental core, viewers can still discern an underlying figurative structure at the most elemental level. The exhibition labels offer deliberately sparse explanation, nothing more than ultimately raw transcriptions of these aforementioned literal observations. However, each painting hangs in the most independent and isolated arrangement possible, positioned to invite deeper contemplation into each literal aspect, encouraging spectatorship that preferably moves beyond or toward the inside of the literal exegeses. This intention applies equally to the dozen or so “painting-objects” here and now at TANK Shanghai.

Tang Yongxiang entered Beijing’s contemporary art scene through painting in 2007 and soon abandoned a certain realist style. But the fundamentally literal level—the most immediately comprehensible “painting as text” as mentioned above—was not fully crystalize and persist until his solo exhibition Tang Yongxiang in 2014. Ever since then, the most primary critical discourse in his works has, first and foremost, revolved around certain ambient descriptions: Skin, ground-figure relationship, Shape, color, contour, space, theme, viewing, and so on.(3) Undoubtedly, these elements simultaneously bring a tensile harmony demonstrating painterly elements, including surface, color, space, and others. These elements operate through both visual and haptic registers of the perception of a painting, yet they also uphold an openness that allows for further development and modulation of their transformative iterations.

We can virtually select any work from his historical oeuvre for close examination. These paintings present themselves as perceptually flat, or as possessing a painterly flatness; they embody a certain “skin-like” quality—the shapes and colors of human figures and objects, their ground counterparts (which at certain junctures reverse into figural elements themselves), and the still hybridizing, mutating, and mutually erasing shapes and hues that appear fortuitous and inexplicable in the act of viewing. Together, these create a shallow illusion of dynamic equilibrium. Yet, this surface, recalling the plane that Foucault observes as possessing both the flatness of representation and the three-dimensional thickness of a wall, reveals itself as “a pigment wall” where mutual materialization and interpenetration continue to occur within the flat contours and across stratified depths.

Does this constitute an aesthetic imagery reminiscent of modernist painting? Does it belong to the current wave of historical style revival? Might it represent a return of repressed modernist painting? The answer is simultaneously yes and no. What we see here might merely be a certain effect, yet one whose dynamics of emergence differ fundamentally from its historical precedents. Has this “innocent” new-modernist painting been cast into today’s art world and its contemporary conditions of existence? Is it an after effect of total historicization? The artist’s studio always holds several paintings paused at their early stages, which are based on a certain realism derived from photographic images. Additionally, a few pieces portraying sculptures, paintings, and even buckets—if we also count a few canvases depicting backs or thighs, plus some grids and all the ears—these could be considered as the effects of painting-objecthood, or theatricality that emerge after the aforementioned seemingly modernist effect.

Secondly, there appears to be a certain “formatted” gestural control that, to some extent, functions as a quasi-interpretive key to the works—one that pertains to the painter’s seemingly calculable and near-uncompromising operational actions: the “nearby,” his direct use of raw pigments, his unified cross-hatched brushstrokes, and so on. This encompasses what might be understood similarly in the sense of a metempsychosis as an overarching painterly gesture that simultaneously incorporates both “exclusion” and “preservation,” maintaining an uninterrupted torque of “collision” and “process”—Tang Yongxiang’s symbolic general painting action: “overpainting.”

In this context, “nearby” refers to Tang Yongxiang’s contentment with sourcing materials from within an ordinary five-meter radius, and his satisfaction in pacing back and forth within the confined locale of his easel. (4)Snapshots captured with his mobile phone are usually enlarged onto canvas via “grid”—a realist form he once learned but resolutely renounced. Extending, as it were, the grid-making action, his chromatic choices must remain unadulterated: pigments applied directly from industrially standardized tubes rather than custom-mixed on a palette. His brushwork, too, must be in form of crosses that are devoid of personalized conceits. These actions constitute the basic morphemes of his painterly grammar, operative across both realist and abstract registers, whether depicting determinate or indeterminate shapes. It could be characterized as “cross overpainting,” a methodology that simultaneously reveals and conceals, breaks down and builds up, advances and retreats in perpetual oscillation.(5)

Therefore, “formatted overpainting” serves as an apt term to summarize the current “interpretation” of his paintings. This, of course, also includes the dozen or so oil-on-canvas works in the artist’s latest solo exhibition—varying in dimensions and size, intricate and subtle in shape and color. These elements constitute the most immediate and legible textual layer of Tang Yongxiang’s realized paintings.

(2) Interpretation begins, first and foremost, with the selection of its object: the text. Let us start with “the text as painting.”

(3) Skin and Shape were the titles of the artist’s two solo exhibitions, respectively.

(4) Referring to what Xiang Biao describes as the tangible, perceptible surrounding world of the ”first 500

meters,” which in Emmanuel Levinas’ notion becomes the more ”visceral” concept of ”the proximity.”

(5) Thus, in effect, this is almost a multidimensional version of what Rosalind E. Krauss termed the grid’s tremulous operation in modern painting. Simultaneously, this combinatory operational gesture inevitably invites comparisons to what might be called computable and uncomputable weaving/network (see Alexander R. Galloway’s The Uncomputable).

 

1_2.(6)

The Four Act-Moments of Painting

The term “formatted” carries a digital-affective charge that exerts an irresistible pull. It

appears to be an aperture, opening to the entrance of an allegorical or even mystical interpretation. This seems to be the rhetoric of computer operations, the languages of gaming, particularly of video game mechanics.

Meanwhile, Alexander R. Galloway, a scholar of computer media studies and cultural critique, a gamer and programmer, and an artist, theorized video game culture, which increasingly epitomizes the reality of today’s technoculture, as an allegory operating through four action moments distributed across four quadrants: 1. Diegetic(7) machine act as “pure process,” such as ambient animation or cinematic engine; 2. Nondiegetic operator act as subjective algorithm/play, such as pausing, cheating, and hacking; 3. Diegetic operator act as ritual act (dromenon), such as moving, selecting, shooting, and expressing emotes; 4. Nondiegetic machine act as play of (gaming system and industrial) structures, such as software crashes, temporary lag due to low polygon count, server shutdowns, network latency, and, most symbolically, the “Game Over.”

Evidently, “formatted overpainting” can immediately map onto Galloway’s Quadrant 3: “The painting-operator, acting within the painting-diegetic realm, performs ritual acts.”One can draw analogy simply by conceiving the material system of studio easel painting as a painting-machine. If we provisionally regard the optical physics governing color and form in a pictorial plane, the conventions and transgressions of painterly media, the so-called mechanisms of painting aesthetics, and the painting mechanisms existing within the institutionalized art world, etc., as constituent elements of a unified system—a “painting-machine” executing specific painting-game software—and if you are interested in carrying on the decryption game, you could even extrapolate solutions in different levels and dimensions for “the four act-moments of painting.” In this quadrant system of decryption, the paired coordinates, operator vs. machine and diegetic vs. non-diegetic, respectively establish two intersecting axes that demarcate four fields, generating a system of constantly shifting correspondences across four quadrants. These four categories of actions, in turn, constitute a system of operations that are both successive/historical and parallel/synchronic.

Let us temporarily return to fragment of “painting as text” with which we began—the dozen or so oil-on-canvas works of varying dimensions and sizes. After the artist pauses the input of “formatted overpainting”—during the studio’s nocturnal inactivity, or ultimately, throughout day and night here in the exhibition hall—what remains is effectively the painting-machine acting autonomously: a series of ambient images from a painting-game. It parallels the endlessly looping ambience act sequences or cinematic cutscenes that still continue after a video game player has pressed pause and stepped away—influenced somewhat by prior operator interventions but primarily running automatically on the machine’s own protocols. The wind continues its howl. Your farmers (on a side note, even your global “Chinese gold farmers”)(8), remain industrious. The overarching territorial war persists. Even the slow-motion dodge from an earlier gunshot continues its trajectory. This is the here-and-now moment of the painting exhibition: the moment of ambience act of painting. This is Quadrant 1: Painting-diegetic—painting-machine—act moment as “pure process.”

Consider another fragment of “painting as text”: Tang Yongxiang’s struggle and hesitation with concluding a painting. The painter has been known to even leap onto art logistics truck to continue his “formatted overpainting” in transition, until he ultimately terminates his own recursive “pauses,” and declares “Painting Over.” By his own account, he could, should, and would continue acting indefinitely without a conclusion (in which case, this declaration of “over” would still essentially come from the painting-operator’s “pause” of the painting). In Tang Yongxiang’s practice, “Painting Over” manifests as highly theatrical, even unsparing in its “performative” dramatization of “over” or conclusion. “Painting Over” belongs to Quadrant 4: “Game Over”— a nondiegetic machine act, where the machine pauses the operator, rendering them powerless. Is the painter, then, striving to seize this very moment of act? What if the “machine” actions of the gaming industry (which is, in essence, the culture industry, and even social production and life itself) takes the form of network firewalls, surveillance, or even political system collapse? Allow me to make a realistically brutal joke: what if that art logistics truck transporting the painting absconded or got involved in a sudden accident?

Beyond these action-moments, let us finally return to Tang Yongxiang’s daily act of “pausing” the painting process. Evidently, for us here, and especially for Tang Yongxiang himself, this second category may be the most crucial part: the nondiegetic operator act of painting as subjective algorithm/play. This is the act-moment of subjective, agential play—the moment in which painting operates as hack and critique! This is why, when viewed through the broader system of four act-moments involving the art-operator and the institutional machine across diegetic and non-diegetic fields, Tang Yongxiang’s act to press “pause” upon entering Beijing’s contemporary art scene—halting his own specific game of realist painting, and especially his several-year suspension of painting, artistic creation, and the game itself—this super-“pause” action assumes such profound significance. It represents the operator’s act-moment of subjective, agential algorithmic play—the act-moment of artistic hacking and critique. This critical act-moment surely cannot offer a permanent solution. So, moving forward, how does one operate the subjective algorithm? This will become the recurring moment of anti-painting painting.(9)

(6) What, then, of the level of textual decryption? The aforementioned acts of formatted overpainting and their effects as painting-objects in situ do not constitute a decrypting interpretation themselves. We must uncover the true, interpretive key layer that lies behind the text.

(7) “Diegesis” is a term Galloway borrowed from literary and film theories; here, we may simply understand it as a kind of narrative field/apparatus.

(8) Additionally—if we consider the gaming industry holistically as the machine, this could even include the continued, busy labor of global “Chinese gold farmers.” In fact, Galloway suggested that we, living in the society of control, may all have our “Chinese gold farmer” moments. Can this also be applied to the “Chinese gold painter” moment?

(9) How, then, do we continually select textual fragments, set quadrants, match, and decrypt the other various action-moments of the painting-operator? Pushing further, this single allegorical pair of text-interpretation seems insufficient; merely repeating, varying, and multiplying this one allegory appears simplistic and ineffective. To move beyond this layer of decryption allegory seems far from straightforward. How can we avoid merely replicating and multiplying the aforementioned allegorical pair of text-decryption? Must we scan and reconfigure to uncover another textual-allegorical layer that appears incommensurable with this existing pair?

 

1_3.

Global Molecular Affective Tribulation (Jie)

For if the allegory of act-moments—embodying control and counter-control, the computable and the uncomputable, execution and counter-gaming, the “painting-operator” and the “painting-machine” within and beyond painting-diegetic—and if this is indeed the genuine layer of allegorical key for interpreting Tang Yongxiang’s dozen or so paused, high-quality, quasi-abstract paintings in varying dimensions gravitating toward grayness—then this allegorical pair alone proves insufficient to represent the schism between painting and our time.

Let’s once again return to the most immediate textual layer of Tang Yongxiang’s painting. Another stratum of critical discourse seems to emerge, disclosing a third layer of its allegory. A visceral matrix of “inactivity”—comprising sensations like “meaninglessness” and “powerlessness”—repeatedly confronts another emotional matrix, one still deeply saturated in everything from the act of painting to daily life and social aspiration, and one which insists it “cannot be complete nihilism” and aims for an “action of non-action” (wuwei zhi wei). Of course, this constitutive paradox of the individual ethical imperative manifests here as a productive affective cadence. It surges from the aforementioned allegorical framework of painting vs. act, and joins the interpretation as a third allegorical layer.

This continuous effect of affective turmoil is infinitely extensible, resisting any definitive nomenclature. It cannot be corralled into something like the traditional categories of Seven Emotions and Six Desires (qiqing liuyu), nor can it even be represented by a new set of common affective signifiers such as “ordinary,” “indifferent,” “nearby,” “the new reactionary,” “no one cares,” “smoothness,” “stay-at-home otaku-ness,” or “giving a like.” In Tang Yongxiang’s universe, for instance, a broad spectrum of affect concerning the “process”(10) of painting and social existence itself—ranging from contradiction to frustration to apathy—floods into act and action.

These familiar-yet-defamiliarized affects—pertaining to meaning, action, experience, and many more—constitute a kind of unadorned entanglement. Drawing from the ambient dialogue between Tang Yongxiang and his peer He An on “skin,” perhaps “unformed” (sheng) serves, for now, a relatively apt analogy for Tang Yongxiang’s individual affective tribulation (jie). (11)Do we seek to feel within this individualized “unformed”(sheng) the contemporary collective affect in its own “unformed”(sheng) or “settled”(shu) state? Is any one of us truly articulating our own individual affect?

As social individuals, we are precisely not interested in the transparent individual desires of others—especially not those of cultural or artistic producers. Is “giving a like” on social media ultimately a showcase of apathy? We are only interested in our own desires; the tremors of desire must be smuggled obliquely and weighted with public issues. The reason why the individual-ethical layer emerges in a work of cultural expression is likely that cultural representation must always appeal to participants. It is difficult to imagine a creator of cultural or artistic products—especially in an age where video game (i.e., computational mediation) acts as a dominant vehicle of cultural execution—making creations without envisioning their viewers, participants, and indeed, a vast operatic network of operators. If a work falters at this level of appeal, interpretation must intervene. Thus, from the individual “Karl Marx” to the “Sigmund Freud–Jacques Lacan” lineage of individual psyche/the unconscious—arriving here at its contemporary hyper-mechanistic materialist incarnation via Baruch de Spinoza’s theory of affect—what is ultimately invoked remains a collective utopian interpretation.

However, if we engage the textual layer of the individual psyche/unconscious, then, within the reality of a global actants-network comprising three billion “mad” actors and their affect—what I term the “Global Molecular Affective Tribulation (Jie)”—the problem of painting as cultural, and even ultimate, existential action—as “an ethical painting”—begins to reveal itself.(12)

(10)The concept of “process” is paradoxical in Tang Yongxiang’s practice. On one hand, the artist emphasizes its significance; on the other, he insists it must not be teleologized.

(11)See relevant materials on WeChat.

(12)This issue demands a rectification of our very concept of ethics and its context within the present socio-historical totality—a task that remains subjected to decryption and debate.

 

1_4.(13)

The Society of Control as a Utopia

This is not merely an act-moment of individual affective tribulation for artists like Tang Yongxiang, but also an act-moment of disclosure for the truth of the collective utopia. Considering the universal individual condition, we have in fact just entered a planetary gaming-control regime. Alexander Galloway’s gaming-moments and control allegories seek to represent a society of control—one that extends from the mediated, representational disciplinary society defined by Michel Foucault, which late-capitalist cultural critic Fredric Jameson sought to capture with his “allegorical machine”—yet this emergent formation is a reality of social control enabled through immediate code execution and direct operation, known as the reality of the information society.(14)

Galloway offers a canonical formulation concerning the radical shift in how the world is mediated after the transition from disciplinary society to the society of control: if cinema is ontology, then the computer is an ethic. Cinema of the disciplinary society re/presents/anlogizes the world, whereas the computer is the mode of mediation for the society of control; the latter no longer re/presents, or even simulates the world. It is no longer a vertical allegory with depths—it directly calculates/executes a world, so it is a horizontal allegory. Thus, the computer—here, for instance, the video game of acts—as a mediating medium differs from the cinema and painting of spectatorship, which bring the world closer while effacing the self; computer-mediated forms are the very act and execution, as they efface the world. The computer instantiates a practice, not an (ontological) presence; an effect, not an object. It is precisely in this sense that it founds itself as an ethic, not an ontology. As an ethic, “the computer is an allegory of itself. Its representation is contingent on its execution.” (15,16)

In this sense, if the foregoing analysis precisely employs the various act-and-execution moments of the computer-as-video-game to decrypt Tang Yongxiang’s painting and its manifold acts and actions, then, at the level of the social totality, does this count as an individual allegory of the current calculative/executive mode of the society of control—an allegory that still employs painting, the representational mode of the pre-control, modern disciplinary society or even pre-modern society, yet one that has been hollowed out by the current computational mode? Or, does Tang Yongxiang’s painting, functioning as “painting as ontology,” re/presents/analogizes a world, or is it “painting as an ethic”? This determination will shape our judgment and imagination of the collective utopian undercurrent within Tang Yongxiang’s painting, both within the current temporal frame and toward the future. (17,18)

I do not believe that the traditional collective utopian symbols/allegories of the once so-called Second-and-a-Half World, China, or even the Eastern world, can be simply substituted for our contemporary imagination of a collective utopia for a global population of three billion “maddened” people beyond nation-state and class formations. If historical social-realist imaginaries have long been abandoned, and various Western modern and contemporary experiments and avant-gardes—even once radical visions—are now met with widespread suspicion, then a collective utopian imagination that simply appeals to a return to tradition undoubtedly points to a prevalent, passive nihilism. Collective utopian imaginaries in painting, such as those evoked by so-called “non-action” (wu wei instead of action through non-action) or “Prayer Beads and Brushstrokes,”(19) if they are to participate in the new construction of a global “Utopia of Society of Control” today, must first actively bring these traditional painting-utopias down to earth and into the concrete reality of the current society of control—to arise stained from the mud, in the Chinese saying—in order to reconstitute and imagine a new allegory called for by the planetary population—indeed, by the planetary population of objects. (20)

(13) This will lead us into the collective allegorical layer of utopia in Tang Yongxiang’s painting.

(14) The term “information society” suffers from a lack of transparency. The society of control, derived from the work of Gilles Deleuze, underwent a nirvana-like rebirth from the preceding disciplinary society. It is almost a hyper-mechanistic materialist iteration of the neoliberal Michel Foucault’s disciplinary society. In reality, the society of control is one that professes not to control—a society of control through non-control, a management or discipline based on fluidity. Deleuze once compared this potentially controlled yet highly free society with the modulating control of a highway system; today, it is the information superhighway society. In its overall ambient tone, one might say, if not excessively overgeneralizing, the society of control is run by the automations of information theory and cybernetics. It is not merely a computational society, but a calculus reality that incorporates the incomputable into its very computation—a kalpa (jie) of incomputable computation.

(15) Regarding the computer as control society’s medium replacing cinema as disciplinary society’s medium: The video game—or, in reality, the computer, and alternatively the most candid and unabashed executive agent of the software-machine—constitutes the medium of the society of control. It differs from the generalized “cinema” (encompassing non-cinematic and non-moving images, including painting) and writing (including literature), etc., which are the imagistic agents of disciplinary society. Beyond deploying imagistic examples from the medium of the society of control and social production/life itself—such as the observation that World of Warcraft exemplifies the “We Are All Chinese Gold Farmers” reality—Galloway often draws analogies with how pre-control-society media—such as film and television—have refashioned themselves to adapt to today’s society of control. Take, for instance, a pseudo-reality show like 24, which purports to narrate events happening within one hour per episode, totaling 24 hours per season. Yet, each episode’s actual broadcast duration falls over ten minutes short; the ostensibly missing hours collectively amount to advertising time within each episode and, more significantly, the time television audiences spend on their phones during that slot—watching the show is the show itself. Countless examples prove less overtly cultural: the platform as a leasehold, gaming as labor, etc.—control, even automated execution itself, infiltrates through freedom and flow, and even through the backdoor of ”representation.”

(16) Concerning the allegory of control in the society of control, one might consult the critical thread Galloway develops in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture through the lens of video games as representative computational control: ”playing the algorithm–the inefficacy of traditional ideological criticism on the transparency and ostentation of information-calculus and execution logic—’making people act’ as ‘make-believe’ theory.” The final implementation of action seems equally suggestive as an interpretive allegory for the act-ness of Tang Yongxiang’s painting.

(17) Thus, trapped within the operation/existence of this society of control, the collective utopia today must become an imagination of the future, of new possibilities, arising precisely from this condition. This is profoundly difficult. Where this was once a matter of imagination, it is now a case where act/execution is imagination itself. Let us try to situate painting—which belongs to the pre-control society, or even to the more primitive pre-modern era—within the context described above. I often recount a somewhat tragic anecdote about Jackson Pollock’s lack of comparable contextual imagination: as the socially sanctioned paradigm of action painting, his consciousness saturated with painting’s ontological myth (which itself becomes a pre-myth for our own society of control), Pollock found himself, after countlessly catering to the public’s and even professional media’s (in film and television documentaries) voyeuristic fascination with his ”act,” feeling reduced to a circus clown. This descent into depression and alcoholism ultimately led to the car crash that claimed his life.

(18) In his work Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, Alexander R. Galloway contends that the video game, as a large-scale integrated medium (a machinery of game mechanics), is fundamentally an action itself. As he posits, ”if photography is the still image, and film is the moving image, then the video game is the action image.” Simultaneously, the author cautions against reductively equating gamic action with theories of ”interactivity” or with theories of the ”active audience.” Instead, he advocates for ”a perspective rooted in cybernetics and information theory: that of an active medium whose very materiality is in motion and constant self-reorganization—the flickering of pixels, the shifting of bits in hardware registers, the spinning and stopping of disks.”

(19) Regarding Prayer Beads and Brushstrokes, please refer to the eponymous series of exhibitions, including

subsequent series and discussions that extend similar traditional perspectives on process and ethics.

(20) Furthermore, various discourses in current Chinese art, including those promoting an ”Object-Oriented Painting Ontology,” are no exception and must be subjected to quality inspection of this control society reality. As McKenzie Wark contends, what is often absent from the Speculative and New Materialist theories (like OOO) underlying this philosophy is a genuine engagement with the in-human—understood as a practical apparatus of inter-mediation—rather than a poetically inclined hyper-object ontology (of painting). More specifically, and quite intriguingly, Wark draws a direct analogy between the philosophical stance of ”Object-Oriented X” and the technical logic of ”Object-Oriented Programming.”

 

2. Painting as Allegorical Machine

For now, let us temporarily consolidate and place the aforementioned four levels of interpretation (1_1.-1_4.) side by side. They constitute an allegorical machine:

1.1: The selection of “formatted overpainting” and its painting(-object) effects as the point of entry into the literal aspect, or the text of Tang Yongxiang’s painting.

1.2: The unlocking of the allegory of the four act-moments within the aforementioned text:

(1) A pure processual and diegetic ambience act initiated by painting and art mechanisms as “painting-machine”: “the painting(-object)’s self-sustaining, cyclical presentation after the painter’s daily pause or a symbolic long-term pause.”(2) The painter’s nondiegetic acts out of his subjective play and critique: pausing, temporarily forsaking painting itself, etc.

(3) The painter’s diegetic ritual act (dromenon): formatted overpainting, etc.

(4) The painting-machine’s nondiegetic act that exists as a play of overarching structures covering painting, art, the culture industry, and even society: “Painting Over,” etc.

1.3: The “affective tribulation (qingjie)” of painter Tang Yongxiang as an individual within the society of control.

1.4: The collective utopian imagination of painting in the society of control: painting as an ontology, or painting as an ethic?

These four registers, mutually incommensurable and arranged in contradictory constellation, can be regarded as a dynamic allegorical machine for interpreting Tang Yongxiang’s painting.(21)

Beginning from the most phenomenological stratum—the “moment of ambience act of painting” as effect—the author attempts, through the four interpretive leaps elaborated above, to allegorize the operation of Tang Yongxiang’s painting as an allegorical-machine.

How does the painting-operator, standing beside the painting—this “painting as allegorical machine” in the society of control—act and take action? How does the general actant of an actant-network society—or what I prefer to call the general social molecule or the general artist—who stands beside the allegorical machine of their own station on the social assembly line, act?

(21)This constitutes an interpretive allegorical system in the Jameson sense of cognitive mapping. The problem, as Galloway states, is that we need to upgrade this depth-revealing/vertical allegorical machine, designed for the disciplinary society, into a horizontal allegorical machine for the contemporary society of control. This is a demand placed upon cultural and painting interpretation, a demand placed upon culture—and even upon social production in general—as an allegorical machine, and a demand placed upon painting itself as an allegorical machine. To leap historically from the diegesis of representation or expression into the diegesis of control today—is this painting’s impossible mission, a task that cannot be accomplished from a position outside ”control”?

 

Appendix:(22)

3.

The Painting-Intraface

Legend has it that Alexander the Great slept with a copy of the Iliad beneath his head—a text that, to his own contemporaries, was perhaps modern, even pre-modern. Likewise, within the critical narrative of Tang Yongxiang, specifically during his complete abandonment of painting on his “woodpath,” his most cherished text was Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. (23)From city-republics to Eastern and Western empires, from the global resurgence of bourgeois nation-states to the planetary cybernetic utopia, all texts are perhaps only prefigurations. In the disjointed eras that follow, they demand to be re-read and re-interpreted, to forge new, contemporary allegorical machines. This necessity extends to the textual level of this very allegorical machine, which here, for us, in this time and place—despite our divergences—is painting we all unconsciously persist in.(24)

To select painting as a renewed form of text is to revisit a pivotal case lineage concerning painting as an interface problem. We shall be reminded of Foucault’s archaeological inquiry into the disciplinary knowledge of Las Meninas, and Deleuze’s lines of flight—acts escaping the control logic in Francis Bacon. For Diego Velázquez, the problem was one of the opaque knowledge in representation; for Bacon, it is the direct, visceral expulsion of a dirty, concrete matter of escape. But what of the stratum of escape in the society of control? It seems that within Tang Yongxiang’s pictures during their ambience act-moments, there is no escape whatsoever?

What is the principal contradiction? Drawing from Galloway’s discussion of interface problems, which itself references Roland Barthes’ concept of the punctum in photography, there seem to exist analogous punctums in Tang Yongxiang’s pictures: the indexical photographic image-contour of the external everyday world. It must be acknowledged that, viewed from within the interface of his pictures during their “ambience act-moments,” the obstinate persistence of such images in these paintings becomes one of their punctums—a disclosure of a certain incoherence. Furthermore, the series of paintings centered around A Painting Placed in an Arc (2014-2024, oil on canvas), along with perhaps other series that retain more complete vestiges of their originating imagery, also constitute a kind of punctum within Tang Yongxiang’s entire oeuvre. These series seem to present instances where Tang Yongxiang allows a certain “process” to be presented in parallel; several “pauses” within the overall serial process approximately preserve and constitute one continuous process. Simultaneously, this series constantly points back to the initial pause of his “realist” painting, acting as a lasting index within his body of work.(25,26)  Conversely, does there exist an “innocent” remainder of studium and coherence?

The texture of this interface is precisely Galloway’s conception of the “interface.” Beginning with “protocol” and proceeding through “gaming,” the final volume of Galloway’s trilogy on the new media of computer in the society of control addresses the “interface” effects.(27) Or, more specifically, it concerns the texture of coherence or its absence within the interface—the interface within the interface, the “intraface.” The intrafacial modes of the “Aesthetico-Political” (this very distinction-in-unity is itself (intrafacial) can be, in his view, fourfold:

1. the ideological mode (aesthetically coherent + politically coherent);
2. the ethical mode (aesthetically incoherent + politically coherent);
3. the poetic mode (aesthetically coherent + politically incoherent);
4. the nihilist or truth mode (aesthetically incoherent + politically incoherent).

The Martin Heidegger–Gilles Deleuze lineage belongs to mode 3, its apolitical nature residing in the fact that its “politics” is “open source”—even the Israeli military-industrial complex can adopt Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories for training and operational guidance. McKenzie Wark contests Galloway’s(28) inclination towards the fourth mode, finding it too “opt-out” and devoid of hope for emancipation (though, of course, she contends that the current neo-reactionaries likewise inhabit mode 4).

We may still need to step back to assess the Jameson’s aesthetic-political intraface mode—which Galloway seeks to upgrade, with its emphasis on cognitive mapping and representation of late capitalism—as well as the aesthetic-political intraface tendency of Wark herself which underscores low-theoretical “in-human” practice. Simultaneously, we must ground this in concrete inclinations, including that of painting’s very own “painting-intraface,” and the tendency of my own act of writing here.

To this end, analogous to Tang Yongxiang’s pausing act, each of us may need to perform an operation of forsaking the ready-to-hand acts before us. This pausing operation is not a once-and-for-all solution, but it must be perpetually revisited. (29)

(22) Following the first cycle of the fourfold interpretation—”textual level – decryption – individual ethic – collective-utopian imagination”—we may need to reconsider two issues: 1. Fredric Jameson, who recently passed away, consistently focused on the cultural logic of late capitalism and its subsequent phases, even up to the current ”too-late capitalism.” He continually upgraded his “allegorical machine.” This includes an acknowledgment that the “textual level” would increasingly become fluid and possess what Félix Guattari termed a transversal quality. 2. Galloway further proposes that this allegorical machine must be further computerized, emphasizing the contemporary ethical nature of writing itself. Therefore, an ”Appendix” can be one kind of attempt: a supplement recording new texts.

(23) Tang Yongxiang recounts that upon arriving in Beijing, he abandoned painting and creative work entirely for several years. His days were devoted to extensive reading and wandering the forested paths near his studio.

(24) Its other, outdated Aristotelian-materialist name that needs to be overcome is: those so-called ”contemporary art” objects, or ”contemporary painting” objects.

(25) Galloway: ”Today all media are a question of synecdoche (scaling a part for the whole), not indexicality (pointing from here to there).”

(26) Is it a matter of the “index” or of “metonymy” versus “synecdoche”? It should be noted that the examples

given above differ from the author’s previous method of arbitrarily “extracting” any single work from the

artist’s entire oeuvre—an act which itself carried a “synecdochic” nature. Are these new examples instead

“indexical” acts more closely linked to “metonymy”?

(27) Translating “intraface” as “界质” (jie zhi), the author has consulted the following Chinese translation in: McKenzie Wark, 21 Thinkers for the 21st Century, Shanghai Literature & Art Publishing House, 2023.

(28) I contend that a critical engagement with Galloway must first be situated within the intellectual context of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. The conceptual relationship between this pair of thinkers—which McKenzie Wark characterizes as being fundamentally entangled in the mutual differentiation of the digital and the analog—is of crucial importance. This comparative framework will enable us to assess with greater objectivity and comprehensiveness what Galloway terms the “computerized upgrade” of the allegorical machine: namely, the shift from an apparatus designed to interpret the disciplinary society toward one recalibrated for allegorical interpretation under the society of control.

(29) And I, here too, as an operator of art critique and painting interpretation, type out: “Writing Over.”

 

Selected Primary References:

1. All introductory texts, critical reviews, and visual materials regarding Tang Yongxiang’s paintings retrievable via onlinesources up to September 2025.
2. Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect, Polity Press, 2012.
3. Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithm Culture, University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
4. Alexander R. Galloway, Uncomputable: Play and Politics In the Long Digital Age, Verso, 2021.
5. Fredric Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, Verso, 2020.
6. McKenzie Wark, General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the 21st Century, Verso, 2017.
7. Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithm Culture, China International Radio Press, 2025.
8. McKenzie Wark, General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the 21st Century, Shanghai Literature & Art PublishingHouse, 2023.