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Text by Wang Min’an

 

Pictures play a critical role in Liang Wei’s creations. Her archival collection of existing images allows her to pave a path of her own–not replicating them in the form of paintings, nor blurring them in a seemingly prevalent conformity, nor resurrecting them in a field of abstraction–but simply letting them serve as her muse, or rather, an opportunity. Liang Wei perceives pictures to be a starting line, a turning point to blend in strokes and colors that ultimately annihilates the pictures’ initial formality; their existence an ambiguous source in her paintings, so thin and indistinct that the pictorial roots in her creations are often erased and submersed within her brushstrokes.

Nonetheless, what are the reasons behind her seemingly contradictory process of pictorial initiation and annihilation? Liang Wei’s collection of images ranges from a variety of sources: including images pertaining to art history, as well as images focusing on cities and contemporary life – an urbanity packed with material and tall buildings. Nowadays, all this has become pictorialized. The world has become image, and this era is one of image saturation, where images are collaged and stacked to form skyscrapers of their own, constructing a dense accumulation of multiplicity. It was such density that grasped Liang Wei’s interest. For her, density is exemplified by the material, visual, and spiritual aspects of contemporary life. Presuming that we have indeed embarked on Guy Debord’s society of spectacle, the strongest feature of this society is not its visualization, but its density. It is the spectacle of image and density,where the accumulation of material and commodities is everywhere, as well as the accumulation of visuals, information, people, and even conceptions. For Liang Wei, this piled up density is omnipresent. She needs to process the density of her times – a unique, perceptual touch that links an artist in resonance with her era.

How does she process such density? Liang Wei takes the density of modern life and spectacle and transforms it into densely layered lines.

The density of her compositions refers directly to the density of contemporaneity. Liang Wei is not abstracting spectacle but echoing it. Abstraction refers to simplification, refinements, and distortion, none of which align with Liang Wei’s intentions. Indeed, Liang Wei is not interested with concrete images or source material, instead it is the internal density of images, their interconnections, and sheer quantity that she thrives on. Liang Wei believes that the essence of creation is ‘density’, for it is the same density that echoes through images, urbanity, and images, paralleling them in a reciprocal correlation, forming resonance. In other words, the density of Liang Wei’s paintings reflects the density of urbanity, and the density of urbanity reflects the density of images, which in turn reflects the density of life and thereby her era. Her paintings are direct representations of urbanity and life, even though all trace of specific details have been erased from her compositions.

To convey a sense of density, the painted surface needs to rely on dense lines that lean into, wrap around, connect, and entangle with each other. Similarly, to emphasize this density, these lines must be thin, short, winding, and spinning. These lines have no rules. They are sometimes curved or straight, parallel or entangled. They are full of contingency and drama – only in this way can they be sufficiently complex, saturated, and finally dense – such lines are also the chaotic lines of the present, the tangled lines of life, and the elusive lines of the spirit.

Patience is the key to drawing so many lines. Liang Wei’s hands must tirelessly work, painting stroke by stroke to fill the canvas. It is hard image her using a brush or applying swathes of color on the canvas. The more fragmented the lines, the more it represents density. Once used to drawing dense, short and crowded lines, the fundamental artistic functions of the hands are liberated: no longer conforming to rational modeling, nor submitting to the requirements of images. The hand is even unchained from the brain; guided solely by instinct, its childhood and automatism abilities are restored. We have already seen this sense of automatism in Surrealism — picking up a pen and writing, needless of any plans or goals. Similarly, for Liang Wei, there is only the pure drawing of lines, one by one – this is the liberation, operation and play of the hand, and this requires a sense of concentration.

When the result of such focus fills the work, you can even feel the joy of painting in the picture, a joy of immersion, a joy of consuming time. Here, painting is not a path to transcendental meaning, nor is it a path to images outside the picture, but rather a cyclical game with oneself.

This is a game of feeling. If this feeling cannot be extended indefinitely, it is because there is a limited canvas. The canvas provides a necessary framework for this feeling and this game, allowing this infinite feeling game to be repeated in a finite way time and time again. Painting here becomes a game of time and practice.

However, despite the denseness of these images, they are not suffocating. These fine curves always leave gaps, which is the difference between curves and blocks of color. Curves do not cover everything like color blocks. On the contrary, knitting chaotic crevices among this continual cycle. The denser it is, the more openings it has. It can breathe. This is the dialectic of density and transparency. Therefore, we can still breathe in such a dense painting – this is the difference between the density of painting and the density of life.

We always feel suffocated in the latter, but painting, while showing density, also allows people to feel free. Painting makes people aware of the moment of suffocation, but still gives people hope that they can still exist even in the moment of suffocation. The density of painting reversely emphasizes the necessity of ventilation. In this way, the density of Liang Wei’s paintings comes from life, but the effect it produces breaks free from life. In this sense, the painting is not life itself.

Or to put it the other way around, for Liang Wei, the act of painting itself is life. Painting has gained autonomy. In another sense, Liang Wei’s dense painting, just as it does not lead to closure and dullness, does not lead to heaviness and oppression. It is dense but also appears light. This is a light density. This sense of lightness comes from the tiny lines – although they are chaotic, they are not oppressive, and do not have terrible weight. Some curves dance and laugh. Other lines disappear, to the void, and to silence.

This lightness also comes from rich colors. Liang Wei does not use extreme colors, her colors always tend to be diluted: light red, light blue, light green, and even black and white are not pure. These different but gentle neutral colors are also arranged together in a gentle way. There is a natural but accidental transition between them. Therefore, there is no fierce color confrontation, and the picture does not have a dramatic tension or a violent collision of force.

In this way, painting does not produce a sense of rupture and the resulting sense of heaviness – this is why it is neither heavy nor sharp. On the contrary, it reveals an elegance and calmness completely different from the abrupt and violent nature of expressionism. There is a pure fullness, a neutral richness, a simple diversity, a quiet movement and a light density in Liang Wei’s paintings. Her paintings have achieved an incredible balance, a sense of balance full of paradoxes.

That is why they seem to have the temperament of traditional Chinese landscape painting. They have similar balance, dilution, sense of escape and intangibility. However, they are also fundamentally different. Chinese landscape painting gives nature a fundamental status, and nature is an endless comfort to people. However, Liang Wei does not construct nature in his paintings. She only looks close to a certain type of landscape painting in terms of composition. Liang Wei starts from various picture materials, but she refuses any image construction. The composition is the result of her automatic painting process. However, because she never leads this final picture to an anti-image extreme – just as she always tries to achieve a kind of neutralization and balance – her works also inspire the audience’s active construction: people will autonomously imagine various images for her works: these pictures sometimes look like the world of dreams, sometimes like the world of myths, sometimes like the world of ephemera, and sometimes like the world of natural landscapes – for Liang Wei, it doesn’t matter. The unique sense of balance in Chinese landscape painting comes from the balance between nature and human imagination. However, Liang Wei’s sense of balance comes from the imbalance between human beings and urban reality. She tries to achieve an artistic balance in this unbalanced reality: the noisy reality leads to dense lines, but these lines are trying to calm the noise. A dense painting surprisingly eliminates density. This is why she uses neutral colors, why she uses oil, acrylic, and water-based paints in turn, why she uses a variety of different brushes, why she erases the separation between different images, and why she allows herself to paint freely and relaxedly. This is the neutral balance that Liang Wei is committed to. She is committed to the balance between art and reality.

Therefore, in this dense painting, there is no focus, theme, image or color that occupies a dominant position. Only a soothing rhythm, infinite patience, a transparent breath, a calm game, and the infinite silence of the brush speaking on the canvas.