The Absent Gaze: on Xu Shun’s Recent Artwork
Fu Xiaodong

Everybody has his own way to establish links with the reality, but the actual world in Xu Shun’s work totally originates from the “secondhand reality” conveyed by media. In Xu Shun’s eyes, the truth presented by images and plots of media has turned ambiguous and uncertain. By short, abrupt and sticky touches, these obscure and dim images form a fiction of reality or an entity shown in fiction.
The images Xu Shun has chosen are mainly the fictional entities rather than the imaginary nonentities. In his paintings, we can find some odd hole in city street or space vehicle on farmland. Those nonlinear scenes without context lay bare the fraudulent nature of reality in an instant. Unlike “unicorn” or “gold mountain”, such absurdity is by no means made up by imagination. He suddenly drags some familiar but irrelative everyday scenes together so as to produce awkward situations. Indeed, he attempts to seek for such absurd and alien territories which have ever existed though contrary to our daily and habitual common sense. To what we can merely meet in language, he has provided a kind of explanation according with specific ideological background, which is more like a sort of critical thinking and exposure.
The formation of such thought is unavoidably related to Xu Shun’s experience of life in Yuanmingyuan. In 1993, Xu Shun came to Beijing from his hometown Suzhou, a picturesque city with rivers and lakes scattering everywhere. Just like the other artists living in Yuanmingyuan, he led an idealistic and utopian life. At that time, he was engaged in painting all night long and went fishing at Fuhai in the morning day after day. Then, the waves of vulgar art and pop art surged forward but his painting style mainly expressed his own mood. Painted by his left hand deprived of technique and intelligence, his free and disordered black canvas were full of passiveness, decadence, poverty, and self-exile.
In the same period, Xu Shun carried on his attempt at multimedia. In the “Perseverance” exhibition in 1998, he joined together the accidentally dislocated captions and images of a pornographic movie, resulting in the jammed disk by mechanical breakdown, and then transformed them into a light box, a funny and interesting reading effect finally obtained. In his work Liberalism made in 1999, he had his hair cut in the style of peasant worker and was barebacked with four bloody characters “Liberalism” cut on his breast in blade. This is the first composite photograph he spent one month producing in then clumsy computer and software. Since he foresaw that a new taste and aesthetics would befall, he got married and had a child in order to change his lifestyle. Everything was formalized again but he could never forget Baudrillard’s instinctive aesthetic and exposure of illusions.
As the art media and methods gradually became complicated and prevalent, Xu Shun returned to his studio and reveled in daily quiet and procedural manual work. It is perhaps the atmosphere of picture as such or the unexpected absurd sense of reality that impels him to solidify and perpetuate in his own painting language the cheapest and overflowing but most easily neglected and forgotten scenes from network.
Although in a perfectly justified appearance, the irrationality of reality is sometimes even rather fantastic and soul-stirring. Facing these existing situations, Xu Shun is more like an “absent author”. Since the author is not present, the world has to run blindly around empty space in its own logic. He does nothing for pictorial narrative but gazes at his own world in an identity of appreciator. Akin to the onlookers frequently appearing in Wild Boar, Crushing Disks, Catching a thief, he has nothing obtained and nothing lacking. This is blind and mechanical presence from which people need nothing but excessive pleasure, a fortunate pleasant sensation. Similarly, he designs in advance the view cast from the onlookers outside picture area. The figures in picture are staring at some mystic and legendary scene which seems so moving for it puts the audience in a hopeless muddle. We are confronted with a sort of carefully chosen, hollow and transcendental gaze that can never be fixed as an established fact. The onlooker in picture is staring at some empty blind spot so that his viewing is reflected back and he can merely see himself in a calm and cautious image. Excluded from the picture plane, the reality only leaves an empty transitional spot boundlessly prolonged. We feel as if we find ourselves seeing and our gazing sight refracted. As the figures in picture watch the reality, we watch the painting with the same emptiness, distance and estrangement, indifferently and thoughtfully. Even if we watch death, the piracy disks crushed, the models for Olympic Games, or the crocodiles hunted, all of them are excuses for seeing.
Xu Shun has never intended to regard the figures in picture as victims but as easy and unconscious living people. Even in such accidents as torrents, floods, and conflagrations, the residents are far from being enlightened, humanistic and spiritually rebellious. The figures in picture are radical nihilists, innocent and simple, turning deaf ears to ideology. As we know from the essay Mr. Fujino, the indifferent onlookers watching a convict executed did serve as a significant moment in Lu Xun’s awakening while under Xu Shun’s painting brush, they not only refuse to be enlightened but also seem self-satisfied. The theory of conspiracy is just for the enlightened audience outside picture but within picture there seems to be a concealed power which demonstrates a mystic wish, a guess at the ideology of centralized society. Everything remains unchanged and even exposure is of no use. Never take everything as truth but as necessity to accept.
Enjoying family happiness, Xu Shun with his unchanged nature said, “I feel terribly disappointed and powerless in this world.” Then, what kind of mood has been controlled under these gloomy, orderly, calm, and empty touches?

Translated by Cao Leiyu