蜂巢（北京）当代艺术中心将于2018年10月13日至11月25日在C、D、E三个展厅推出“重重叠叠：章森个展”。 本次展览由蜂巢青年策展人于非策划，将呈现艺术家章森自2008年以来直至最新的绘画创作。章森旅居纽约多年，先后在普拉特艺术学院(Pratt Institute)获得本科与硕士学位。正如章森在自述中所说，“宇宙的终极目标是无序，人的最高理想是寻找规律。其实，这些都没有任何意义。一切不过是重重叠叠、混乱的描述罢了。”章森正是以“记忆碎片”中的方式将自身获得的视觉经验转化拼贴在画面中，并以影像、现成物、文字等作为线索串联，最终形成一部空间意义上的艺术家书。

从章森多年前的一系列纸本作品中不难看出彼时他对于形式本身的极度热衷。身边的种种偶得之物被用来作为形象视觉联想转化的切口。它们有些似乎可以进行分形式的自我繁殖，有些形成了闭合的循环结构。其间的对应关系以及结构的合理性自然无需被事无巨细地推敲。毋庸置疑的是，在章森早期阶段的创作中，形式凌驾于色彩之上，塑造出如埃舍尔一般无法被轻易归类的，介于设计与绘画之间的，关于图形的描绘。不大的纸本上的寥寥数笔，却带有一种柯布西耶所说的，“形式的重量”。只是相比于建筑的庄重，章森笔下这些未竟的蓝图自有一份轻盈和欢快。

然而色彩难以穷尽的丰富度让章森不可能仅仅满足于形式上的游戏，此后对于绘画性的回归又将他的创作引向了另一个维度。主导其画面的横、竖、斜线结构依稀能从迪本科恩的《海洋公园》系列中找到范本，区隔画面的纯色硬边矩形又似乎能从纽曼那里找到参照。然而显然章森有意极为谨慎地让绘画在抵达极简前停驻，并如康定斯基所说“单纯为了色彩而寻找与之相宜的物体“。章森选择将绘画的形象落实到旅程中的风景，而色彩所依附的形状，亦即旅行的载体恰恰与他的个人经历与心境暗合。当然章森在画面古典而朴实的面貌之下暗藏了颇多对于色彩的私心。无论是山体的一角还是稻田的一隅，章森都可以解构出无数个色块，形成鳞次栉比的，调节着冲突与和谐的色阶，全情释放编辑色彩的快感。每一个色块既是颜料的实体，也是一个在相互勾连中的独立空间，携带着来自内部自身的奇异光源。当没有什么是真正从外部投射的，颜色在画面内部自成一体，也就不存在光与影的对立，只有光与光的对比，因为对于章森而言，颜色无疑是平等的。

也许是出于对偏好与惯性的警惕，章森偶尔也会从无休止不间断的旅程中抽身，建立拥有时间跨度的自我创作的接续，并展开对于不同阶段所面临问题的深入操练。他将2014年的一张小幅油画在2017年分别腾挪到布面和纸本上进行复演，最终形成《富士》、《柯达》、《Ilford1600》三幅相似而异的变体画。而他之后的创作例如《北漂》则是在此基础上有了更为复杂而叠加的空间关系。依旧强调剥离色彩之后的物质体积，画面中互为正负的黑白几何体一个浓缩了时空的纵深一个追溯了运动的轨迹。画面中所延续的透视法则让人误以为存在一个确凿的终点，然而不论是对于身体的旅途、生活的迁移，思维的转化还是创作的考古从来就没有抵达完全的究竟之地。能够略微抵御时间流逝的，也只有绘画的行为本身。

Hive Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing) is honored to pronounce that Memento: George Chang Solo Exhibition will be presented at Exhibition Hall C D and E from Oct 13 to Nov 25 2018.  The exhibition curated by Yu Fei,  and will present George Chang’s works since  2008. George Chang  has lived in New York for many years, and has received bachelor's and master's degrees at the Pratt Institute. As George Chang said in his statement, “There’s a saying that disorder is the ultimate goal of the universe, while the highest ideal of man is to find order. It’s actually meaningless at all. Overlapping, chaotic descriptions.”George Chang transforms and collages his own visual experience in the form of "memory fragments" into paintings, and connects them with movies, ready-made objects and words as clues, finally forming an artist's book in the sense of space.

The paper works of George Chang from many years ago betray his genuine enthusiasm for form at the time. Everything he owned by chance would be used as an image trigger for a conversion from vision to association. Some of them seem able to self-reproduce in sub-forms, while some have formed closed circulative structures. There is certainly no need for any thorough analysis of the correspondence and structural rationality in between. Undeniably, in the early stage of Chang’s art journey, form was above color, hence his graphic depictions which cannot be easily classified as mere designs or paintings, just like Escher’s work. A few strokes of him on a normal-size piece of paper can demonstrate what Le Corbusier mentioned as the “weight of form”. Compared with the stateliness of architecture, however, these unfulfilled blueprints of Chang can give us a lightsome and lively impression.

But the game of form couldn’t satisfy George Chang for long, considering the infinite richness of color, so his return to the painterly style has brought his art into another dimension. The structure of horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines that dominates his painting can perhaps remind one of the Ocean Park paintings by Richard Diebenkorn, while the single-color hard-edge rectangles that divide his painting Barnett Newman’s art. But, obviously, Chang knew the right timing for calling a halt to the evolvement of his painting and thus saving it from minimalism, and dove into what Wassily Kandinsky referred to as a “quest for agreeable objects for the mere sake of color”. Chang decided to paint from the scenery on his journeys, and the shapes of his colors or the carriers of his journeys happen to agree with his personal experiences and moods. It’s true that, since the age of 15 when he moved to New York for education and later for work, Chang has almost always been on the move. These paintings, or legacies of time, all strictly follow the laws of perspective, as if the artist’s been collecting landscapes one after another along with the growth of his experience. Behind the classicalness and simplicity of his work, we can also find many of his secret tricks on color. George Chang can deconstruct anything into innumerable lumps of color, be it the tip of a mountain or the corner of a rice field, and form a set of orderly levels that coordinates conflict and harmony – such is his way of liberating his passion for editing color. Every mass of color is both an entity of pigment and an independent space which is also interlinked with others and contains a peculiar inherent source of light. So as the journey goes on, everything is naturally pulled back by the speed, and, in the corresponding spatial distortion, the color is shaken off and then falls back on the canvas, ending up as new light spots. Nevertheless, speed is more a reasonable excuse for triggering the distortion than the direct cause for it. In George Chang’s eyes, colors must be equal to each other, so without any real projection from outside, the colors in the picture form a system of their own, hence no opposition between light and shadow but only contrast between different lights.

Alert to his own preference and habit, perhaps, George Chang would sometimes take a break from his nonstop, continuous journey to construct an extension of his own work that features a span of time and then dig deeper into the problems that faced different stages of his. Take for example a small oil-painting he made in 2014. He reproduced it on both canvas and paper in 2017, so now we can see three similar but different variant paintings – Fuji, Kodak and Ilford1600. From Fuji to Kodak, the perspective relation in the painting shifts from focus to scatter, and the representational images of buildings are replaced by abstract lines that point to the new mountains at the two sides of the picture; and from Kodak, color oil on canvas, to Ilford1600, charcoal on paper, the delicate brushwork and coloring have given way to enhanced work on three-dimensionality. There’s no doubt that this series can be taken as an example of George Chang’s thinking process in painting that varies in different stages. And based on this, his later works such as Beijing Drifter have more complex and overlapped spatial relations, and still highlight the material volume deprived of the color. For the black and white geometric shapes, like a positive and negative pair, in the painting, one has compressed the depth of time while the other has traced the trajectory of some movement. The laws of perspective still active in the paintings give us the illusion that a definite destination exists, but there has never been any complete ending for him, whether in terms of physical travels, shifts in life, conversions in thinking or archaeology for artistic creation. The very act of painting is the only way, slightly effective though, to protect time from fleeting.