55

In 1909, Picasso painted "The Maid of Avignon". The geometrized human body and the smoothed image represented a new painting language. Cubism was born. Not long after that, Picasso and Braque continued to invent new codes for people to decipher the world. This new school of painting, called "comprehensive cubism", applies wood and foil to the canvas from multiple perspectives of cubism to dissolve the world. Painting is redefined in the language of sculpture. Since then, the canvas has become an adventure playground for artists, giving full play to their imagination and creativity in the limited space stretched by four wooden bars. From the perspective of the development of painting itself, all painters after Picasso tried to pull, widen, add, subdue, fold, stretch... e.g. Pollock waving pigments (action painting), Rothenberg adding pillow and sheet on canvas (combined painting) and Frank Stella’s minimalist geometric shapes across the frame, etc... All these were defined as the outspread of painting’s "expanding territory" (extended field), and the painters continue their adventure on the canvas.

Yin Changzhi’s first solo exhibition titled "Wedge" at Gallery 55 in Shanghai could be seen as an embodiment of such a historic adventure in contemporary age. Here, the expectation of the audience to see the smooth and complete surface of a painting in accordance with the usual viewing habits was subverted from the very beginning of the exhibition. The work of "The Red Room" hanging next to the exhibition’s title does not conform to the rule of the quadrangle in the first place - the format of geometry of the white/red color piece is a irregular pentagon, as a corner to the top left of the main body of the picture was cut. In this area which is defined as the painting on the surface of the territory, the painting material of canvas and frame attaching to the picture once again become painting elements. Wood inlaid on the canvas, the folded canvas on the canvas, daub on their surface with intense red and white, constitutes the unparalled bold style of the original creator. The adventure of painting in this "The Red Room" seems to scream about the mania of the practitioner hitting the wall and the ecstasy of the sun bathing. Red in Barnett Newman’s works bring viewers dizziness of space loss with visual oppression. Strong physiological feeling is the highest state of art of the Sublime sense according to Newman. It is not hard to see that stimulating audience’s physiological reaction through color is another clue of Yin Changzhi’s experimentation and risk-taking in the painting.

Entering the exhibition space, more works challenge the habitual thinking of viewers from the points of construction of pictures and conflict of colors. "Multiple Layers of Light Green" superimposes green color on the unprocessed drawing board and the canvas with white background color, causing viewers feeling lost in the cognitive contradiction of what painting is and what expression is. "The Light Purple and the Frame" as shown in the title embedded batten in the centre of the canvas. The visual instability of purple shakes the fact that geometric abstract painting is easily fallen into the trap of visual pleasing candy. Upset and confused become Yin Changzhi’s declaration of painting.

As the exhibition title - "wedge", a piece inserted between two surfaces of wood, on one hand, it will loose objects closely link up, on the other hand, it can also insert new relationships into the object that was originally tight. Yin Changzhi’s front and back subverted painting could be regarded as a wedge to destroy the stability of traditional painting concepts.

"What you see is what you see" is a famous quote by Frank Stella on "what is a painting". Minimalism tries to refine the simplicity of abstract painting from the abstract expressionism spiritual experience and spiritual purification function. In the following painting adventure, abstract painting has been walking on the double track of reviewing and questioning history. Patterns and shapes in abstract paintings that cannot be explained in words reflect the anxiety of our age to find answers quickly. The limits of human knowledge and the grandeur of the world can be reduced to a simple picture metaphor. The visible surface and the invisible back of Yin Changzhi’s paintings are evidence of the unspeakable secret of reestablishing the relationship between painting and the world.