Propaganda messages are everywhere in China. Out in the countryside, the white writing on blue or red backgrounds congratulate villages on their low birth rates, promote growth targets or even promote gender equality. The message in a small alleyway in Wu Jiang, a suburb outside Suzhou, is a typical example: readers are commanded to ‘love your country and obey the law’. The entire message spans about three storeys. Yet in the strange logic of China, it doesn’t seem to stand out: years of accumulated dirt have transformed the words into something of a timepiece, just part of the daily semiotic pollution that comprises daily life.
When I pointed out the propaganda to Zhonghao Chen, the Kiwi-Chinese painter, he laughed. He’d never bothered to read the message before—or indeed even noticed it—even though he’d walked past it every day for the last few months on the way into his painting studio.
Following the death of his grandmother, Zhonghao cleared out his childhood home and transformed it into his personal art space, albeit one heavily suffused with the past. This is not a white box/New York Loft, filled with phantasms of metropolitan chic, but a very personal journey back into childhood and a very different China. Every morning, after walking up the stairs that he ran down as a child, he lights incense to pay his respects to his departed family members, drinks tea, and contemplates the state of his work. The bottom line of the message he never bothered to read, 敬业奉献 (‘hardworking and selfless’), sits just centimetres away from his paints, brushes, turpentine and air compressor.
There is a certain serenity up in the studio. The two main rooms are now dedicated entirely to Zhonghao’s practice, with canvases in various stages of completion lining the walls. He tells me that since his return he has been working twelve hour days or longer in the studio. He has abandoned regular mealtimes, instead keeping himself going with a diet of nuts and tea.
I personally wonder if he has been working off nothing but the smell of incense, turpentine and paint.
Yet for all the action of the studio, the conservatory overlooking the alley and the Suzhou skyline is an island of calm. After the grand tour, Zhonghao invited me to sit down, boiled the jug and set up two pots, two small drinking bowls and two narrow cups (‘just for smelling’). The smell of Tie Guan Yin, so familiar for those who have had it, washed over me and drifted out the window; taking the first sip of his tea, he explained that the conservatory is an antidote to the artistic frenzy that lay behind us.
Looking out over the alley I notice a few restaurants selling Suzhou style food, soupy dumplings, pork dumplings and fried bread sticks. Directly opposite are a few clothes shops and light construction stores. The nearby apartment blocks are poorly whitewashed if they are painted at all, and advertisements for ‘办证’ services (counterfeit certificates, diplomas and permits) are stencilled onto any available space. Private cars swerve around the old men selling fruit off the back of their tricycles, while the women who years ago would have failed to sell boot cleaning services now fail to sell cellphone accessories.
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For me, the work Zhonghao displayed in Uncanny Valley, Phobia Phobic, was the high-point of the work he completed prior to his return to China. The painting represented an indistinct body in the moment of mortality; it was a work of abjection, in both senses. Yet I felt that the work shared more with the grand scale of representations of Greek myth than with the Chinese tradition of Shanshui (山水). Perhaps Zhonghao felt then that the scale of struggle and mortality is unrepresentable in the strictly Chinese tradition, which is aimed more broadly at freezing beauty and stabilizing it.
The work that currently lines the walls from floor to ceiling in his studio, however, seems to connect contemporary Chinese environments to Shanshui, its technology of representation. The works are more Chinese somehow, as water, mountains, and modern technology creep back into focus, sometimes in absurd and unexpected ways. One seems to feature an electronic box (television? DVD player?) sitting atop a river; another a bright, multicoloured swirling plastic object lauding over the landscape in flux. The Chinese sublime here meets the New Zealand cultural nationalist aesthetic—the Romantic sublime, perhaps—to construct a frightening, empty landscape that is at once a point of origin and a nightmare.
Design elements seem higher on his agenda here. They invade the work, setting up an antinomy between the finely crafted, high-brow painterly textures and the interpretive vacuum of designed blank canvas. Perhaps we are to shade the gaps with the accoutrement of consumer culture; promotional stickers, logos, price tags, packaging and so on.
Yet his new work is no formal game: these different artistic traditions are subject to the Zhonghao’s individual artistic consciousness, as he refuses to play simple intellectual or political games. Again, there is nothing to just get, it’s all there, awaiting our interpretive shading, refusing to simply resolve.
Zhonghao’s new work continues and updates those we have seen recently in New Zealand: again, he is again experimenting with bold colours alongside darker atmospherics, textures, blank canvas, and sometimes grotesque, indistinct figures. Yet he seems to have rediscovered the most paradigmatically Chinese aesthetic, but not as we know it. In his new art he seems to have found China anew just as he has returned the past; this is the work of a man who has spent much of his adult life in New Zealand, but is now beginning to more obviously re-engage with his artistic inheritance. He has found a country in the midst of another very different cultural revolution—explosive economic growth—that was only just beginning to take hold when he was first tall enough to see out the apartment window into the alley below.
Andrew Dean
Independent Critic
政治宣传海报和标语在中国到处可见。在乡村，白色的字体书写在一般红色或者蓝色的版面来祝贺村庄的少生优生业绩，鼓励发展目标或者甚至性别质量。在吴江这个苏州地级市的小巷中的政治标语就是个非常典型的例子：民众们被要求热爱祖国和遵守法律。这些标语横跨整个三层楼面。但即使这种怪异的中国逻辑，在这样的环境却并没有表现得突出显眼：多年沉积的尘土已经将行行文字转变成了时间的某种特殊产物，只是构成日常生活中某种符号象征性污染的一部分。
当我对钟昊指出这些标语的时候，这位旅新西兰中国画家笑了。他从来都是懒得去理睬这些标语，甚至是都没有注意到它们，即使从前几个月开始他每天都会从这里经过去到他的画室。
自从他外婆去世后，钟昊整理了他的儿时故居，将她转变成了个人艺术工作室，尽管她弥漫着个人过去的点点滴滴。这并不是一个纽约艺术白盒子，到处充满了大都市中国人的幻想，而是一个非常个人的回归到童年和一个非常不同的中国旅途。每天早晨，在走上了儿时经常攀爬的楼梯后，他会点上三之香来祭拜家中的去世成员，然后饮茶、思索他的作品。窗口楼外那些他从来都懒得去审视的政治标语的最后一行“敬业奉献”，离他的颜料，笔刷与松节油只有几步之遥。
画室中有某种宁静的气氛。两间主要的屋子现在都被奉献给了钟昊的绘画练习，所有的墙面都挂满了处在不同阶段的油画。他告诉我，自从他回到中国后，每天都会在画室度过十二个小时或者更长。他已经放弃了正常的饮食，取而代之的是茶水和坚果。
我个人则认为他一直存活于在香，松节油和颜料的气味中。
除了画室里的所有创作活动外，远望楼底小巷和市区摩天大楼的阳台则是一座宁静的小岛。在参观画室后，钟昊邀请我坐下，烧起了水并且开始准备茶具，两个小茶杯和两个闻香杯。铁观音的香味对于那些熟悉她的人来说是亲切的，她穿透了我的身体飘过了窗户。在喝第一口茶时，他解释到阳台是所有我们身后的那些艺术狂热的一种解药。
一眼望去，我注意到在小巷中有几家买苏州小吃，汤包，饺子和油条的餐馆。直接在对面的是几家服装店。附近的公寓楼被很潦草地几乎是没有效果地粉刷过。墙上任何空余的地方都被“办证”等民间广告所占据。当几年前没有做成生意的擦皮鞋的妇女如今在体验着手机装饰品买卖的失败时，成群的私人车在自行车后水果摊位上买不出水果的老人身边擦过。
对于我来说，钟昊在基督城国家美术馆的展览Uncanny Valley中的作品Phobia Phobic是他在回中国前所创造的作品中的一个新高度。绘画描述了一个在死亡时刻中无法确认的身体；从各方面来说，她都是一张充满悲剧的作品。同时，相比起中国的传统山水，我觉得这张作品更多地传递了古希腊神话中的悲伤和崇高的美。可能，这是钟昊对更加侧重于捕捉和稳定住静态美的中国山水作品中对表现存在的针扎与死亡痛苦的忽略和不足而感到的不满。
目前在他画室里的作品，感觉上，似乎更深的与当代中国的环境与山水，和她所再表现的科技产生了关联。从某种角度来讲，这些绘画更加的中国化，像流水，山峰和现代科技都被重新恢复了关注，很多时候是荒诞的和令人惊奇的。一张画面似乎在描述这一个电器盒子（电视？微波炉？）坐立在一条河面上；另外一张中一个亮丽的，多种色彩的塑胶物体在流过下方的风景。
中国的崇高在这里与新西兰的文化国家主义美学崇高相遇：一种浪漫的崇高，可能 – 去构建一种恐怖的，曾经是初始点和噩梦的空洞山水
设计的因素在他的这些作品中有很重要的地位。她们在侵略着作品，在精美制作的厚重的绘画肌理和互动性的经过预先计划所流露出的空白画布而形成的设计性空无中建立了一种民主和辩论。可能我们需要带着物质文化穿着的空缺去失色；促销的贴图，标志，价码标签，包装等等。
可是他的新作品并不是单纯艺术形式与构成主义的游戏：这些不同的艺术传统都是钟昊个体艺术意识的实验对象，就像他拒绝去玩弄简单的政治或者智力游戏。同样的，这里没有任何可以只是轻松就能得到的东西，她们确实都在那里，等待着我们的互动理解，拒绝着简单的解决。
钟昊的新作品是那些我们已经在新西兰所看到的作品的延续和发展。理所当然，他再次在阴暗气氛，肌理，空白的画布和有时候恶心的东西，难以分辨的物体边上带着大胆的色彩进行着实验。至今，他似乎已经重新发现了最典范的中国美学，但又并不是像我们熟悉的那样。在他的新艺术中，他似乎又重新找到了一个崭新的中国：这些是一个在新西兰度过了大部分成年人生活的年轻人的作品，但是现在正在明显地重新与他的传统文化背景啮合。他找到了一个处在不同的文化革命之中的国家-爆炸式的经济增长-那个在他的身高只有足以通过窗口看到外面小巷时候才开始的革命。
Andrew Dean
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