墨斋画廊荣幸地宣布：冰逸在墨斋的第二次个展 “冰逸：不可能的仙山” 于2018年10月13日开幕。画廊的一层展厅将呈现冰逸的浸入式装置艺术《峨眉飞瀑》，并首次公开展示她的全新水墨绘画《波相考古学》系列。在三楼展厅，墨斋还将首次展出冰逸的绢本水墨绘画《不可能的仙山》系列，揭示了冰逸著写的《山水论》中的基本美学和概念悖论。
2018年春天，冰逸在柳江完成了大地水墨项目《峨眉飞瀑》。在干涸的瀑布上，冰逸搭建了200米长的白色画布结构。墨的奔涌记录了它沿着天然垂直地质结构流淌而下的痕迹；在另一处，冰逸将巨幅宣纸铺满了一条无名山道，用水墨进行多次涂刷和渲染，并在以后的日子里，让宣纸和墨受到重力、风、湿度、气压、冷凝、雨水、阳光、地形等多重自然因素的随机影响，从而生长出天地之间的真切共鸣。
2015年至2017年，冰逸以日渐消失的北京胡同为主题，拍摄了电影三部曲《废墟》。这是目前能见到之最完整和清晰的水墨电影故事长片。《废墟》三部曲在复杂人物关系中，以现场激发和即兴方式进行创作。它通过前后十七次反复循环的现场拍摄，揭示出日常生活普遍蕴含的废墟属性。冰逸为电影写就了一部1600行的长诗剧本，名为：《废墟的十二种哲学》，发表于先锋文学杂志《花城》杂志2018年第二期。
在《波相考古学》系列作品中，冰逸用墨的暗光来探索“存在”这一动态系统中非线性或循环时间的科学概念。冰逸认为，艺术家将身体和神经系统的波动、循环圈或声音，与世界上无数嵌套及包含存在的声音产生共鸣。在这气韵、能量的共鸣之中，主体与客体之间的界限消失了。艺术家因此可以感知世界并被世界感知。
同时在展览中呈现的还有冰逸的古典绢本水墨新作《不可能的仙山》。她在这些作品中创造了这样一个似曾相识的朝代。并将其命名为“莲朝”。冰逸借《莲朝》系列手卷，创造了这个优美朝代“经、史、子、集”的各种形态。从皇帝诏书，到观星用经文，冰逸版本的“伪经”，是她通过绘画对诗文时空的完整制造。
在这套共九幅的手卷中，冰逸以精心绘制的写意山水和娟秀的小楷，或以诗歌的形式，阐述了《山水论》九章的内容。冰逸的《山水论》从本体论和未来学的角度，对中国山水画的历史和理论进行了全新阐释。冰逸在其中探讨了山水画理论的内在悖论和审美推演，展开了绘画创作、赏析和生活之间的关系。冰逸深信：山水是主观的投射，也是客观的现实；山水既是自然，又是文化的隐喻；而绘画既是创造又是消亡；山水是自觉的境界，也是无知觉的境界。冰逸笔下的山水是微观和宏观世界的互察，也阐释了人类跟山水之间注定的亲密又异化的关系。此外，在长达5米的绢上作品《一尘千山》中，冰逸从一粒尘埃中凝视万千宇宙，陈述了冰逸心中所见“无穷境”的世界，与2015年巡展的手卷作品《囙：千里江山》相互相应。
INK studio is honored to present Bingyi’s second solo exhibition at our Beijing gallery Bingyi: Impossible Landscapes. An artist, architectural designer, curator, cultural critic, and social activist, Bingyi (b. 1975, Beijing) has developed a multi-faceted practice that encompasses land and environmental art, site-specific architectural installation, musical and literary composition, ink painting, performance art, and filmmaking. Adopting a non-anthropocentric perspective and channeling nature’s creative agency, her work is centrally concerned with the themes of ecology, ruins, rebirth, and poetic imagination. After pursuing university-level studies in biomedical and electronic engineering in the United States, Bingyi earned a Ph.D. in Art History and Archeology from Yale University in 2005 with a dissertation on the art of the Han Dynasty.
The last three years have been an intensely productive and transformative period for the artist. During this time, Bingyi has written, directed and edited Ruins—a trilogy of art films on the destruction of the hutongs in Beijing—composed a film script for Ruins in the form of a 1600-line epic poem in Han rhapsody form which was published in Huacheng—China’s leading journal for experimental literature—authored a new theoretical treatise on the landscape painting discourse in China, Shanshuilun, completed Emei Waterfall, the fifth of her massive land-and-weather earth works at sacred mountain sites in China, and created two entirely new series of ink paintings entitled respectively the Archaeology of Waves and Impossible Landscapes.
Sacred Mountains
For her latest massive land-and-weather earthwork, Emei Waterfall, Bingyi’s moved her studio during the summer of 2018 to this sacred Buddhist mountain site in Sichuan Province. After studying the topology, temperature, humidity, rainfall and convection currents of various locations she selected two sites. One site, a dry cascade, she chose to investigate the movement of water. The other site, a mountain road, she used to engage the local terrain. In her first performance, she covered the dry cascade with roughly two-hundred meters of white canvas and used ink diluted with alcohol to record the path of water down the natural, vertical topology. In her second performance, Bingyi covered the mountain road with massive, bespoke sheets of xuan paper and then, over the course of several days, applied layers of ink, water, and an undisclosed third material.Factors such as gravity, wind direction, evaporation, humidity, air pressure, condensation, rain, sunlight, and the topography of the land together shaped the interaction of these natural materials.
Transformations: the Archaeology of Waves
In Bingyi’s Archaeology of Waves series, she uses ink’s “dark light” to explore notions of non-linear or cyclic time in the dynamic systems that constitute our new scientific understanding of being. In this new understanding, all existences that exhibit order are systems sustained by a positive influx of energy and matter characterized by constant (dynamic) change and (nonlinear) feedback both positive and negative. Such systems are typically nested networks—systems within systems or as Bingyi describes them “dreams within dreams”. Each embedded system operates in a cycle in what Bingyi calls a boxiang or “wave-image.” Each “wave-image” moves according to its own characteristic time signature or frequency giving rise to its own “sound.” According to this understanding, our physical bodies consist of nested physiological systems within systems, each system consisting of networks of cells, each cell sustained by auto-catalytic, metabolic chemical cycles all regulated by networks of gene “circuits.” The “sound” or signature time cycle of these systems we experience as our heartbeat and our breath. Even our thoughts, feelings, emotions, memories and imagination are the epiphenomena of neurological networks working in cycles of various frequencies. In this view, the world around us and the world within us, the world of matter and the world of consciousness are not separate things but in fact one set of interconnect, nested existences—wanwu—all cycling together in a symphony (or cacophony) of “sounds.”
Creating Realities: Impossible Landscapes
In her latest series of classical landscapes entitled Impossible Landscapes, Bingyi employs traditional brush and ink on silk or xuan paper. Bingyi explores the underlying paradoxes and dialectics that animate her interpretation of landscape painting such as the relationship between painting a painting, viewing a painting and living; landscape as subjective projection versus objective reality; landscape as metaphor both for nature and for culture; painting as both creation and death, self-awareness or absorption into the infinite, observing the macrocosm in the microcosm and the microcosm in the macrocosm, aesthetic experience as philosophical understanding, intimacy versus alienation as the basis for knowledge.
In her Shanshuilun or Landscape Treatise these ideas take the form of theoretical writings. In a series of nine handscrolls entitled Lianchao or “The Lotus Dynasty,”however, Bingyi’s theories are given literary and painterly form. The Lotus Dynasty is a figment of Bingyi’s imagination—a utopian society that exists in a slip of time after the Southern Song, where wars are fought not with weapons but with poetry, where rivers flow with fragrance instead of water and where the capital city contains no palace buildings but only mountains and streams filled with music. Each scroll transforms a poetic image from her fictional utopia—a gnarled prunus made up of the organs of the artist, a scholars rock in the form of a lingo jade, a mountain forest filled with music and fragrance—into a painted image, an Impossible Landscape. Assuming the voice of the emperor, a philosopher, a poet and a historian in her counterfactual utopia, Bingyi authored all of the texts—from the emperor’s edicts to the Kuangjing or “Sutra of Madness”—that are inscribed on the paintings. Painting for Bingyi is thus a unity of visual and literary arts. As in her Fairies series of poetic subjects painted in the fan format, Bingyi’s Lotus Dynasty handscrolls employ her fine-line xieyi or “calligraphically expressive” brushwork drawn from her dailyxiaokai or “small regular” sutra writing practice. Through her hypnotic, obsessive endurance and execution both painstaking and nuanced, one senses the original power of poetry, painting and calligraphy together to limn a utopian reality from the tip of a brush.
A Thousand Mountains in One Particle of Dust
Impossible Landscapes concludes with a monumental tour-de-force—a five meter horizontal scroll entitled Yichen Qianshan or “A Thousand Mountains in One Particle of Dust.” Comparable in scale and scope to to Bingyi’s monumental handscroll Apocalypse from 2015, Bingyi visually unpacks the “impossible” notion of the infinitude of all things and beings—wanwu—contained within a single, particular existence—a speck of dust.