Soft Memories of Objects

By Wang Min’an

Wang Yuping likes to draw things at hand. These things are there, placed there according to their customary ways, according to their own functions. They inevitably appeared within his sight. They are in the scope of Wang Yuping's daily activities, constituting his living environment and atmosphere, or in other words, shaping up the extension and configuration of his body. Wang Yuping can see them every day, or should we say, he cannot but see them every day. Even so, he’s still full of interest in these daily articles. He likes to paint them. These everyday objects did not deliberately emerge from an extraordinary background. They have neither mysterious historical legends nor special radiance of materials. These daily usable and edible things live in the ordinary, without any intentions or desires of being immortal. Some of them, such as the many cakes and pieces of bread and even half-eaten breakfast, will soon disappear. This is the last moment of their destiny. These things are just thrown into the world in a hurry like a passer-by. No one asks about their origins, and no one mourns their demise. They are within reach and not precious. They are too practical, too humble, and too mediocre that people rarely rest their eyes on them.

However, Wang Yuping can always find joy in these ordinary things. He doesn't push them to a distant opposite, nor does he treat them scientifically with an objective inspection. On the contrary, he regards them as "pet" objects. They are functional things, in the meanwhile playable. Once he treats them with the attitude of "petting", Wang Yuping eradicates the functional use of these objects. Hence cakes and bread are not for eating, shoes are not for wearing, chairs are not for sitting, cups are not for drinking water, and books are not even for reading. Instead, they are all appreciated as living stunners. For Wang Yuping, these objects possess a kind of ordinary surprise. They are imbued with ordinary emotions beyond their functions.

The emotion of an object is based on its ordinariness. It is because of the ordinariness that these emotions remain not agitated, that it is not a grand and profound memorial, nor is it a museum-like landscape; Wang Yuping does not attempt to give these objects a fetishistic glow, nor does he sanctify them; These objects are neither antiquities, nor holy relics, nor strange items; They are not something full of passion, unlike Van Gogh or Expressionists, which exposes the inner power of objects and allows them to undergo intense turbulence; These things are not exaggerated, not radical, not dazzling or irritable. Wang Yuping gives them a mild and introverted emotion. The object, the ripples of sentiment arise.

How to make these things get an emotional ripple? Wang Yuping paints them with blithe and vibrant colors. He hardly uses black and white, and rarely uses heavy and solid colors. He tries to remove any sense of dignity from the object. The colors he uses are rich and varied. These diverse colors are mixed with pink or red festive emotions. These colors happily jump on the paper, allowing objects to speak, giving them a sense of liveliness, a sense of joy, a sense of relaxation, and a sense of lightness. They are things without tragedy, or even without any sense of bitter fate. Such things have no harsh mythology, only lovely mythology. At the same time, it is precisely because of the diversity of colors that they look mottled and fluffy. There are a lot of gaps between the colors, as if there’s still space to fill, and you can breathe freely in this emptiness. In this way, the colors intersect each other and create empty space. These spaces are neither compressed and filled by strong density, nor firmly covered by rigorous thick exterior colors. Therefore, these things appear very soft, and it has various outlets.

Not only do they have an inner softness, but their outer edges are also blurred: the edges of objects in the paintings are sometimes swallowed by the background or extend into it and disappear naturally; Sometimes there is a kind of fuzzy ghost on the edge, or a kind of scattered irregular thick lines - Wang Yuping seldom draws clear contour lines, and seldom uses these lines to tightly wrap the objects so as to strictly distinguish them from the outside world. That is to say, he does not allow things to have a hard outline, or hard volume, or hard texture. Things are neither tough nor strong. On the contrary, he makes things slack and soft, makes things elastic and tender, and makes things not only jump, but also breathable. They seem to hide a heart. Wang Yuping doesn't paint hard objects, such as ironware and other metal utensils. He loves drawing hats, cakes, cigarette butts, sofas, picture books, and tablecloths. These objects are soft and can be rubbed, pressed, manipulated and torn. In other words, they can not only withstand the application of paintbrushes, but can also withstand the repeated strokes of body and hands. He also painted some tables, chairs and porcelain, some plates and cups. These tables and chairs are all wrapped in colorful mottled cloths, without any feeling of rigidity; and the arc shape of the cups and plates themselves weakens their rigidity. Wang Yuping also painted these cups and pans with vibrant colors, which not only concealed the hardness of the material, but also made them softer. In the same way, these tables, chairs, and cups and plates also obtain their elasticity and can rub against the body softly.

Thus, things painted by Wang Yuping have acquired unique qualities: He strives to draw the inner space of the object, not the actual space it occupies; he strives to paint the inner texture, not the outer material; he strives to paint the inner softness, not the outer outline; he strives to paint its self-feeling, not its posture and deployment. In other words, he strives to draw the heart of them, instead of the outer shell. He painted these objects not to let them be remembered forever because of the external light and external legends, but to capture their instantaneous state, that is, the unique moment when people’s eyes rest on them. It is at this moment, these things seem to glow with a miracle; it is also at this moment when things are destined to disappear and perish. This kind of feeling, this kind of soft feeling of the heart of these objects, this wonderful occasional moment have become the eternity of Wang Yuping's canvas. Wang Yuping tried to make the “instant” of these feelings eternal.

This is a brand-new attitude towards the everyday things. People have used various ways to distinguish them. In Chardin's paintings, we can see the utensils in the kitchen: pots, knives, stoves, etc. These old objects, like the space in which they are placed, seem to have lived through a long time, as if they could be passed on forever. These everyday objects are not only related to the space, but also entwined with the fate of the family. However, on the contrary, in the Dutch still-life paintings of the 17th century, the cups, plates and knives are spick-and-span, and the food seem to have just been baked. They are crowded on the table and have a strong sense of ostentation. They are shining brightly. Whether it is Chardin's objects or Dutch still-life paintings, the time traces of objects are reflected through the old and new of the materials. Things must be measured in the elapsed time.

However, these objects in Wang Yuping’s works are not measured by the old and the new; it doesn’t provide any sense of time, or in other words, its instantaneousness destroys its depth of time. The object itself is determined by a fluffy and breathable space. Similarly, his approach is different from Morandi's. In Morandi, things have their own infinite world and their own universe. They possess all the mysteries of the world in silence. However, in Wang Yuping, things have neither a rough fate nor the mystery of the world. They only have their tenderness, their cuteness, and the secularity of the moment. The concreteness of this moment completely occludes the way to the transcendental world. But such mundane objects are not like Andy Warhol's commodities. In Andy Warhol's case, things are standardized and are piled up, overlapped, and copied in large numbers. Andy Warhol has countless objects, but there is no specific thing with a personality. In Wang Yuping's case, although these objects are produced as commodities and enter his life through commodity consumption, he has an extraordinary ability to erase their standardized style. He eliminates their blunt industrialist characteristics. He even draws the geographical features of things. These things don’t seem to come from the factory but from the streets. All these things, including those cups and plates, have a peculiarly handmade style. You can even see the regionalist style of things here - if not nationalist. Wang Yuping's objects look like Old Beijing, or in other words, they only belong to Old Beijing. Even if they do come from the present, from all over the world, from standardized industrial production. But these things are still unbelievably marked by the region. Even the foreign books, even the bread and cakes that have the least sense of physical space, all seem to come from the same area, from the same cultural corner, and from the same person. Wang Yuping gives these objects a variety of colors, does it also mean that they carry his personal memories and his various experience of youth? In these paintings, we really have the question: If a person stays with an object all the time, will he really share his background, temperament, hobbies, and even experience and memories with it? In other words, do things really have a "heart"?The exhibition name”Salt-Roasted Ginkgo" originated from one of his sketch, it is Wang Yuping's favorite Japanese snack. The name connects the theme of the exhibition as a composite imagery. The “Salt” is refers to the daily life of ordinary people; “Roasted” means warmth and conveys the temperature of his heart and painting; “Ginkgo” is an edible fruit, a metaphor for the artist’s natural and fluent skill. In sum,”Salt-Roasted Ginkgo" shows Wang Yuping’s rejection of the grand theme, and his emphasis on the emotions and meanings within everyday, ordinary objects. Looking back at his creative clues, from the intense expressive painting in early days to the recent exquisite object sketching, there is a gap in aesthetic orientation between the two. During his more than 30 years of creative career, Wang Yuping conducted various experiments of painting methods, resulting in his variation of artistic styles during different periods. For case studies, the variations provide a wealth of comparative samples. For the painter himself, object sketching is much closer to his soul.

The works in the exhibition depict the touching warmth in Wang Yu Ping’s life, not only showing his daily expenses, but also revealing his interesting collection of objects. His works often have a relaxed and soft visual effect, expressing the painter's happy feelings. What is particularly remarkable is that the colors in Wang Yuping's works are bright but not frivolous, simplicity coexisting with a demonic charm, bringing a complex synesthetic experience, the visual perception seems to be able to affect the nerves of taste and touch to the audience. The colors intersect and blend into a phantom outline, glowing in a halo of memory.

Wang Yuping's paintings are born inwards, reflecting the cultural landscape of the modern world in a private and personal manner. These paintings are like a layer of soft gauze, filtering the dust and grimes of profanity, and distributing diverse cultural resources at will. Bread, cigarettes, Ukiyo-e, Dian Shizhai pictorial, American table lamps, Indian tin toys, Istanbul knitted hats... Wang Yuping created the "Natural History" of modern life with an intimate and intriguing perspective, in which viewers can see the objects and travel through the heart’s desires.