北京艺术家刘鼎的创作具备了一种犹如病毒般的批判风格。无论是照片、雕塑、装置、绘画还是行为艺术，他都能游刃有余地运用这些媒介进行创作，并通过这些作品去质疑那些赋予艺术作品价值和涵义的各种符号和结构;像作品的定价、艺术家签名、制作方法、原创性、展示地点和方式。通过不断的变异，他的作品几乎经受住了任何环境的考验且愈发活力四射，并能感染它所触及的一切。在这一过程中，它也将艺术家的地位、艺术作品、偶尔参与制作作品的工人、展出其作品的画廊和美术馆、收藏家，以及能够为作品制造、强化或否定其不同涵义的观众所依赖的观念范畴和解读语境置于危险的境地。

　　作为艺术家系列作品《转型期的标本》中的一个组成部分，刘鼎为第二届广州三年展创作作品《产品》(2005)，为此，他从邻近城市的大芬村征募了十三位职业画家;大芬村被誉为“中国油画工厂”，每天出产上千幅油画来支撑当地巨大的油画出口产业。在这个所谓的中国最重要的国际艺术展的开幕式上，在刘鼎的安排下，大芬村的画家们在这里表演绘画流水作业的过程。画家们被安排在广东美术馆内临时搭建的金字塔形的平台上，他们从一块画布移动到另一块画布，为四十幅几乎一模一样的风景画添加各自的部分(一位画棵树，另一位画只鹳，以此类推)。画家们获得他们工作四个小时的工厂标准酬劳。完成的作品留在展场内展示直至三年展结束。

　　通过展示《产品》这一作品，刘鼎不仅挑战了三年展评价艺术家的标准，同时也质疑了艺术市场赋予艺术品价值的能力。毕竟，与三年展上其他作品不同的是大芬村制作的艺术品的品质和价值是透明的：质量检验人员将完全符合模板的油画验收为合格，对不符合模板的油画进行修改或者销毁。这些作品的价值也同样一目了然，就像一家名为EagerArt的公司在它的网站上向潜在客户解释的：“油画的价格是由绘画的难易程度决定的。

　　1.在《产品》中，刘鼎坚持将创作过程所需的劳动力(即劳动者)放到幕前，由此揭示并还原了油画作为一种商品的地位。他留给观众一个问题去思考：大芬村制作的油画与三年展上展出的其他作品有何不同，原因何在?

　　2.为继续讨论具体的语境(context)如何改变我们对艺术及其价值的理解，第二年，刘鼎在法兰克福展出了这些镶上金框的大芬村油画，把这些画以沙龙风格的展示方式挂在一个搭建起来的带有红色墙壁和成套古董家具的起居室里。

　　3.这些出身卑微、被装在鎏金画框中的油画，在“欧洲”奢华象征的氛围衬托下，身价彷佛扶摇直上;其中许多作品只是半成品，但这些“产品”虽假却又似乎能代表财富和品味。最近，在布里斯托的Arnolfini艺术中心，刘鼎展出了作品《刘鼎的商店—带回家实现你心中的无价》

　　4.(2008年)，从而启动了名为“刘鼎的商店”的全新项目。为了这个项目，艺术家再次回到油画村，订购了十种类似于在酒店客房内随处可见的那些平庸无奇，足以让客人安心入睡的油画，而与它们又有着重要的区别。刘鼎所定制的每幅画中只有符号般局部的图案浮于白色的背景上，其他部分似乎被人从画面上抹去了。例如，一幅画中，夺目的橙色落日悬于一片空白中，而另一作品是潺潺的瀑布凭空流动，蜿蜒于隐去的岩石之间。这些油画经艺术家签名，每幅标价仅100英镑。如同项目名称本身的提示：买家可以将油画带回家并自己(根据心中的“无价形象”)完成空白的部分，或者原封不动地收藏，期待作品的价值随着刘鼎的名声日渐显赫而稳步上升。毕竟，只消花上不足高档饭店的一顿饭钱就能收藏一个上升中的中国艺术家的作品，这样的机会不可多得。而且补全油画不就是对作品外观的一种破坏吗?刘鼎提醒我们，存在于我们心中的形象绝对不是无价的。他暗示买家盈利的可能是否会超越表达自我情感的渴望：你可以选择在画布上继续创作，但这样做无疑会破坏原作，降低油画的价值;你也可以把这幅买来的画当作是一种投资。

　　在将大芬村油画这一主题推向了极限后，2008年，刘鼎开始将他的注意力从艺术作品的商品地位转向了对于艺术和视觉文化涵义产生过程的广泛研究。语境，作为一件“物品”升华为“艺术品”的决定性因素，又一次成为了艺术家关注的焦点;但这次，艺术家更为谨慎地掂量历史和解读的框架，彼此权衡并加以测试。这也意味着作品在视觉上将产生变化。尽管刘鼎过去的创作中充斥着艳俗美学的特质(kitsch)—如大芬村的煽情的风景和《小人物的狂想》(2005年)中使用的塑料宝石—他的新作似乎尤显严肃。视觉享受即刻降为次要地位，甚至为零。在随后的作品《经验与意识》(2008年)中，艺术家借用一系列黑白风景照片，配以手写文字，并做出了如下论断：我们对风景的理解和脑海中的形象从来都不是中立的，而是被一股更深层的文化力量所左右。

　　刘鼎在麦勒画廊(卢森)的首次个展我写下我的一些想法—刘鼎中，基于由作品《经验与意识》所引发的一些关注及延伸，他将展出一组密切相关的作品来挑战我们赖以驾驭生活和艺术的认知体系。其中的一些作品依然是照片式的画面(快照及视觉素材)和仔细写下的文字的搭配，不禁令人回想起六、七十年代的观念艺术，那种反美学的态度，以及它所具有的被归类、认可和评价的需求。于是，那时表现为激进的却成为了现在的一种风格，借助一整套视觉性的手段来定位一组限定在特定历史条件下的新作，从而去营造一种带有哲学性思考的氛围。

　　但如果我们仅从展览题目的字面意义来理解，这个展览中刘鼎的作品只是由个人的思考而引发的轻松的表述(可能也无法超越个人思考的范畴)。的确，刘鼎是在与他在这一阶段之前的作品进行着对话。实际上，这个展览不仅仅是向公众展示精心准备的新作或一本日记体的素描簿;而更是一场经仔细构思的，为使我们重新审视我们用来划分世界的观念范畴的心理实验。

　　我写下我的一些想法—刘鼎这个展览中的创作并不代表刘鼎创作路线的完全偏离，而是他多年来不断深入探索而产生的结果，通过崭新的形式加以表现。因而，在作品《和马蒂斯的两次相遇》中(在这个展览中的作品均为2009年制作)，艺术家将其年少时曾见过的亨利·马蒂斯(HenriMatisse)的作品《报春花，蓝色与玫瑰红色织物》(1911年)的黑白印刷品与嘉士得2009年拍品目录中介绍伊夫·圣罗兰(YvesSaintLaurent)与皮埃尔?贝杰(PierreBerge)藏品的那页(或那页的图片)并置在一起。在拍品目录的这页图片中，藏品的主人圣罗兰身后恰恰挂着马蒂斯的同一幅作品。这两张图片被随意地粘贴在白色的背板上，衬以用来吸引观众视线的粉绿色的外框。(对于刘鼎而言，画框是一个重要的符号，能体现艺术家对于“视觉”和“可见性”的不同理解。前者是生理视觉上的，而后者则是在社会条件作用下的。)

　　正如大芬村的油画从工厂到三年展并最终进入一个奢华的(即便是人为搭建的)起居室内，刘鼎希望我们去思考《报春花，蓝色与玫瑰红色织物》是如何从一幅图画本身(没有画框，没有环境)变成了一件在著名设计师房中的奢华装饰品;还有，作品如何在与圣罗兰和其它那些组成他的趣味的藏品发生联系后变得价值连城?

　　在图片的下方，刘鼎写道：

　　1987年我见到了这幅马蒂斯作品的黑白印刷品，随意、幻想、平静和奔放把我迷住了，我希望自己去到这样一个没有拘束的世界和他一样任意，洒脱。

　　我不停地临摹，临摹。

　　2009年在拍卖的画册看到了这个作品，精致的外框，著名而优雅的拥有者，漂亮的居所，美丽的饰物，娇嫩的鲜花，一切是那么的雍容，稳重。

　　名誉，政治，公共认识度，金钱把这一切变得协调。

　　最近，在圣罗兰藏品拍卖会上标为第55号拍品的这件马蒂斯作品以35,905,000欧元(含佣金)的天价拍出可能只是偶然。这里有两方面值得注意：一方面，根据刘鼎所讲述的发生在1987年的令其“一时倾倒”的经历，艺术家安排了一幅没有语境，但又能使人意会的画，(诚然，“一遍又一遍地临摹”意指“说话人”在不知章法的情况下试图领会作品精髓却始终不得要领。);另一方面，则是刘鼎对于伊夫·圣罗兰目录照片的描述，其中充满了溢美之词(“精致的、著名的、优雅的、雍容的、美丽的、娇嫩的、高雅的、古典的”)，似乎他欣然接受这个财富、名誉和品位的结合体来改造他对艺术品的看法。然而，上述这两种猜测都无法令人满意，让我们不禁要质疑“说话者”的立场和真实性，对展览中的文本部分进行推敲。(请注意我在这里所使用的称谓的变化，从直呼艺术家的名字到较为疏远的称谓—“说话者”)。在阅读作品中的文字时，我们不仅仅在思考艺术家的想法，也同时面对着一种蓄意的挑衅和诡计。

　　另一件直接写在彩色照片上的文字作品《艺术无处不在》，也是说话者将装有零食的冰柜误认为艺术品后而得出的结论。冰柜默默地注视着观众，尽管作品的题目提升了它的地位，冰柜似乎知道因为自己不是艺术而令我们失望了，才特意提供所剩不多的饮料和零食来安慰我们。

　　经常参观美术馆的人都曾有过这样的经历。事实上，美术馆有这种能将任何进入其空间的事物变成艺术的能力，而这种令人迷惑的催化效果是刘鼎的展览作品中又一个值得注意的框架，它也是杜尚(Duchamp)曾提出过最著名的问题。正是杜尚的这些“现成品”成为那些步其后尘的观念艺术家的一个重要的起点。1969年，约瑟·柯淑思(JosephKosuth)主张：“不借助任何外部语境的‘现成品’的出现，标志着艺术的关注点从表述形式转向所表述的内容……这一从‘形式’到‘观念’的变化—是‘现代’艺术的开端，也是‘观念艺术’的开端。

　　5.因此，杜尚对于观念艺术的影响提供了解读这个展览的又一条线索，因为刘鼎正在重新演绎着现成品的故事，但所使用的视觉语言却来自于杜尚的后来者们。

　　然而，刘鼎所着眼的是另一个历史的上下文。作品《历史》是一件照片拼贴并饰以文字的作品，艺术家试图为展览中的另一幅作品《照片》设计一段异质的当代艺术史。《照片》本质上是一张经艺术家全面处理的未曝光的相纸，形状为30x40cm的长方形，被固定在较大的、镶黑框的白色背景上(135x125cm)。作品玩笑式的空洞名称，使观众可以从不同的视角观看《照片》。我认为作品所探讨的是照相媒介的物质性(而不是号称作为打开另一个世界的窗口)以及它与“持久性”的指向性关系，这种关系在DinhQ.Lê使用未曝光的胶片制作的各类编织作品中经常能够见到，其反映的是尚未发生的却可能发生的历史;杉本博司拍摄的电影屏幕的长曝光照片也具有相同的特质。每位观众都会对此作品产生不同的联想。

　　但是，刘鼎希望观众在理解《照片》时能将其与三幅特定的作品联系起来：伊夫·克莱因(YvesKlein)的《空》(1985年)，克莱因在个展“在原始的状态下将感觉凝滞在图像性的敏感中”中展出清空的画廊和其中空无一物的玻璃柜;汤姆·弗雷德曼(TomFriedman)通过“凝视着纸”而制作的《1000小时的凝视》(1992-1997年)，以及IgnasiAballi2001年使用修正液将一面镜子涂成白色的作品。把一台冰箱放入泰特美术馆里，它是否就成为了一件艺术品?让一张空白的相纸与当代作品进行对话，它是否也成为了一件艺术品呢?答案正如刘鼎对于冰箱问题的回答：“这很难说。”

　　刘鼎一直在强调作品的语境和我们对作品的判断的关系。你可能认为，这些被刘鼎介定为《照片》的先例的作品充其量只是虚假的形态，他们之间也只是表面的形似而已。然而，“空”(或空白)的概念是整个展览的核心，因为展出的许多作品保留了很多空白，我们可以在上面投射任何我们想要的涵义。通过运用文字和并置的方法，刘鼎利用了我们的可暗示性，鼓励我们在试图理解眼前的作品时尝试使用不同的概念框架。早在二十世纪六十年代初，美国艺术家罗伯特·莫里斯(RobertMorris)也简明扼要地阐述了此类问题：

　　从主观的角度来看，不存在真正的“空无一物”—空白形式(BlankForm)或任何其他的缺失情形都说明了这一点。

　　只要“形式”(或最为宽泛地讲：情形)尚能被理解，只要它能够永久地在受众的理解范围内作为一个物体存在，那么当我把它称之为艺术时，受众就能以许多不同的方式对它做出反应。当然，如果我并不称之为艺术，那么受众的反应方式将截然不同。艺术在本质上是一种情形，人在艺术中根据自己对艺术的感知度而做出反应。

　　6.在这整个展览中的作品与观念艺术的精神有很多地呼应。刘鼎试图在这里诠释的许多问题其实并不新鲜。尽管展览的作品借用了那个时期特有的视觉语言，艺术家可能并没有意识到，四十多年前的艺术家们在努力重新定义艺术的过程中，早有此类作品的原形。正如我在前文中提到的，刘鼎此次展览的作品植根于对当代中国城市价值观的批判。顺着自己的创作轨迹，他发现了关于艺术作品地位、价值和涵义的问题，或者更宽泛地讲，发现了关于我们划分“现实”的本体论价值观的问题。陷于刘鼎编织的网中，我不得不承认，将刘鼎的探索与六、七十年代以欧美艺术家为主体的创作之间的比较，也揭示了塑造我自身艺术修养的历史和文化力量。更重要的问题是，在思考和比较处于截然不同的语境中艺术家的创作时，我们如何能不断地重塑“当代性”(contemporaneity)。

　　在刘鼎的展览中，艺术史在作品《历史》中被援引，而又在作品《忽略》中被彻底颠覆—一块大理石上放着一部超级完整虚构的艺术史集(名为：《中国当代艺术史：19XX—2050》)，大理石上写着“忽略是编撰历史的开始。”它所表达的是：(艺术)历史，虽然声称客观中立，实际上是基于排他性和个人偏好的，是不可靠的。这种对历史的不完整性、偏颇性和排他性的看法已被学术界所认识，但刘鼎的作品进一步激活、体现并令观众体验到了这一观点，并即刻令我们质疑自己刚刚才对展览中的其它作品做出的判断。这个展览利用这种方式不断地给我们抛出理解其中作品的线索，又提醒我们去抛弃它们。

　　《我们常常为制造出来的命题投入感情》是一个半开半掩的黑色铁盒，上面写着：“假设这是一个讨论的开始。”这一作品寓意一种扭曲了的极简主义姿态，如同被抽离的罗伯特·莫里斯(RobertMorris)或索丽·莱维特(SolLeWitt)。铁盒的神秘和磁性吸引着你去发现其中可能藏有的殷实内容，只是匆匆一瞥，却发现其中空无一物。如果这真是讨论的开始，我们必须得找到一些讨论的话题。然而，评价这件作品，或仅仅描述它在展览环境中的形式特征或语义功能，都能证实艺术家的观点：任何事物，无论是独断的或具有普遍意义的，都能成为一个空白的屏幕，任由我们投射不同的涵义。这一作品并不“关于”任何事物，它是一个故意的留白，指向观众，着力于表现观者的思考框架和对内容的期望。刘鼎告诉我，他意图将《我们常常为制造出来的命题投入感情》用作展览的开场白。它“事实上并不代表任何事物，只是我虚构的主题。但因为作品被置于展览的环境中，观众将开始思考它的意义并投入情感。

　　7.展览中最为出色的作品《描写、叙述、描写、叙述》将两个中式花架叠摞在一起，用以表现我们的世界观如何深刻影响我们观察与想象的方式。如同凝结在物质文化中的思想一般，每个花架作为展示家养植物的场所，都体现了有关自然的特定理念，而非寻求中立。下面的花架由根茎状的轮生树根制成，其扭曲盘旋的外形让人不禁联想到蛇形的肌肉、卷曲的触角和未被发掘的地下世界。制作方式是具有数百年历史的中国传统根雕技艺，通过雕刻、着色、抛光等步骤使大自然的“现成品”更令人叫绝。在这个颤颤巍巍的花架上方，是另一个略小一些的用高温瓷烧制成的花架，一件难以置信、有着蓝、白色相间的山水图案的瓷器;在这个图案的上方，绘有一位渔夫端坐于小舟之上。在当代艺术的世界里，平台和作品支架通常总是方形和白色的，似乎每每在我们仔细端详它所托举的艺术作品或珍贵物件时它就消失了。在这个作品中，平台本身被赋予了文化的涵义—就像承载知识的平台—展现的是不同的表达方式和观察方式，而非植物、物品或其它艺术作品。

　　观看我写下我的一些想法—刘鼎这个展览时，你最终会开始质疑我们赖以体验并划分视觉景观的根本假设，就像我们在调试一架老万花筒的视角时，先朝向光亮处举起，再旋转一下它，去体会它所产生的不同效果。通过他的创作，刘鼎让我们更清楚地意识到，观看绝不是纯视觉的。他让我们重新思考我们固有的习惯，无论对艺术或生活都应尝试新的解读方式。Liu Ding: Frameworks Framed

　　by David Spalding

　　The critique waged by the work of Beijing-based artist Liu Ding is best characterized as viral. Through his practice, which crosses genres fluidly and includes photography, sculpture, installation, painting and performance, the artist questions the various signs and structures used to confer value and meaning onto artworks. These include pricing schemes, the artist’s signature, methods of production, notions of originality, and sites and modes of display. By continually mutating, his work endures and even thrives in nearly any context, threatening to infect all it touches. In the process, it jeopardizes the status of the artist, his artwork, the workers who sometimes fabricate it, the galleries and museums that present it to the public, the collectors who buy it, and, increasingly, the conceptual categories and interpretive frameworks used by viewers who produce, privilege and deny its various meanings.

　　For Products (2005), commissioned for the Second Guangzhou Triennial as an installment of the artist’s multi-part series Samples from the Transition, Liu Ding enlisted the participation of thirteen professional artists from the nearby city of Dafencun, China’s “painting factory” village, where workers produce thousands of paintings daily to fuel a giant export business. Under Liu Ding’s direction, the artists performed their assembly-line painting process during the opening of what is arguably China’s most important international art exhibition. Working in an ancillary site temporarily annexed by the Guangdong Museum of Art, the painters were positioned on a pyramid of platforms, where they moved from canvas to canvas as they added their contributions (one artists paints only a tree, another a stork, and so on) to forty nearly identical landscape paintings. The painters were paid their standard factory wage for their four hours of work. The resulting paintings remained on view for the duration of the exhibition.

　　Through his staging of Products, Liu Ding challenged the criteria that the Triennial uses to confer merit upon artists, and the ability of the art market to bestow value on works of art. After all, unlike the other works in the Triennial, the quality and value of the artworks made in Dafencun is transparent: paintings that accurately resemble their models are approved by quality control agents; those that do not are revised or destroyed. The value of the works is equally clear-cut, as one company, called Eager Art, explains to potential customers on their website, “The price of paintings is decided [by] whether they are easy or hard to paint.1” In Products, the paintings’ status as commodities is both revealed and undone by Liu’s insistence that the labor (indeed, the laborers) required for their production are visible. Audiences were left to consider how the paintings made in the Dafencun factories differ from the other works on view in the Triennial, and why.2

　　Continuing his exploration of how context can shift our perception of art and its value, in Frankfurt the following year, Liu Ding presented the Dafencun paintings in gold frames, hung salon-style in a staged sitting room, complete with red damask wallpaper and a suite of carved wood furniture.3 In their gilded frames, surrounded by symbols of “European” luxury, the paintings were clearly adept at social climbing, given their humble origins; even though many were in a state of partial completion, these Products were both over the top and somehow plausible markers of wealth and taste. More recently, at Arnolfini in Bristol, Liu Ding offered Liu Ding’s Store - Take Home and Create Whatever is the Priceless Image in Your Heart4 (2008), initiating a new, ongoing project called Liu Ding’s Store. The artist again returned to the painting village, commissioning ten banal paintings of the type one encounters in hotel rooms—those anonymous creations that promise to soothe guests into pharmaceutical sleep—but with important differences. Each painting offers up only a single, iconic image floating in a field of white. Everything else appears to have been erased, so that in one work, a glowing orange sunset hovers over emptiness, while in another, a saccharine waterfall floats in space as it curls around invisible rocks. The paintings were signed by the artist and sold for a mere ￡100 each. The project’s title is an invitation: buyers can either take home the paintings and complete them (relying on those “priceless images” in their hearts) or they can hang onto the work in hopes that Liu Ding’s reputation will continue to grow and that the work’s value will steadily increase. After all, how often does one have the chance to collect a work by a rising Chinese artist for less than the cost of a good meal? And wouldn’t completing the painting be an act of defacement? The images in our hearts, Liu Ding reminds us, are never priceless. The buyer is implicated whether or not the possibility of profit surpasses the desire for personal expression: one can either add to the canvas, eroding its value by undermining is authorship, or recognize the purchase as an investment.

　　Having pushed the Dafencun paintings to their limits, in 2008 Liu Ding began to shift his focus away from the artwork’s status as a commodity and began a broader investigation of the production of meaning in art and visual culture. Again, the emphasis was on context as a decisive factor in the elevation of object to artwork, but here historical and interpretive frameworks are more carefully considered, weighed against one another and tested. This signaled a change in the way the work looked. While kitsch had been the ruling aesthetic in much of Liu Ding’s prior practice—the sentimental landscapes of Dafencun and the plastic gemstones used in Fantasies for Small Potatoes (2005), to name just two examples—the new work seemed to blanch in its seriousness. Suddenly, visual pleasure was secondary, even relegated. Experience and Ideology (2008) followed: a series of appropriated, black and white nature photographs paired with hand-written texts that made assertions about how our perceptions and images of the landscape are never neutral, but instead encoded by larger cultural forces.

　　For I WROTE DOWN SOME OF MY THOUGHTS - LIU DING, Liu Ding’s first solo exhibition at Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne, the artist both focuses and extends the concerns raised by Experience and Ideology, bringing together a body of closely related works in order to challenge the epistemological systems we use to navigate both life and art. With several works again pairing photographic images (snapshots, found visual material) with careful, hand-written texts, one is immediately reminded of the conceptual art of the 60s and 70s, with its anti-aesthetic stance and its need to catalogue, count and comment. But what was radical then has become a style, a series of visual tropes used to situate this new artwork within a particular history and lend it an air of detached philosophical contemplation. Indeed, Liu Ding’s exhibition is in dialogue with the artwork of this earlier period, but if we are to take the exhibition’s title at face value, it suggests a casual conversation, sparked by (and perhaps not moving beyond) personal reflection. This would be a mistake. The exhibition is not simply a display of recent works or a diaristic sketchbook, elaborated and made public; rather, it is a carefully engineered psychological experiment that asks us to reconsider the conceptual categories into which we’ve divided our worlds.

　　The work in I WROTE DOWN… is not a complete departure for Liu Ding, but rather the result of a deepening exploration of ideas he has been working through for several years, presented in a new way. Hence Encountering Matisse Twice (all works in the show are dated 2009), which unites a black and white reproduction of Henri Matisse’s Les Coucous, tapis bleu et rose [The Cowslips, Blue and Rose Fabric] (1911) that the artist had seen as a teenager with a page (or picture of a page) from Christie’s 2009 auction catalogue for the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge Collection, which shows the same work hanging behind its owner, Saint Laurent, in his home. These images are taped casually to a large white background and placed in a pale green frame, which is meant to catch the viewer’s eye. (Frames are important to Liu Ding, another obvious but potent symbol of his interest in the difference between vision, which is optical, and visuality, which is socially conditioned.)

　　As with the Dafencun paintings, which went from the factory to a Triennial and finally to a sumptuous (if artificial) living room, Liu Ding wants us to think about how the reception of Les Coucous, tapis bleu et rose changes as it goes from being strictly an image (no frame, no context) to one element in the luxe interior of a famous designer’s home. How is the work’s value increased through its association with Saint Laurent and the other elements in his taste-making collection?

　　Below the pictures, Liu Ding writes:

　　In 1987, I saw this black and white print of Matisse’s work, casual, inventive, peaceful, uninhibited. I was enchanted. I was hoping to reach a world as carefree as his. All I could do was copying and copying his work.

　　In 2009, I saw this work again in color in an auction catalogue, with a very refined frame, a famous and sophisticated owner, in a handsome house, with beautiful decorations and delicate flowers. Everything was so graceful and classic. Fame, politics, public recognition, and money has unified everything under one roof.

　　It may be incidental that Matisse’s work, labeled Lot 55 at the Saint Laurent auction, was recently sold for a staggering € 35,905,000, including buyer’s premium. Two more things are of interest here: the positing of an unmediated image with which one could commune, as suggested by the “enchanted” experience in 1987 (indeed, the “copying and copying” implies the speaker has no interpretive rubric as he tries, unsuccessfully to make the work his own); and the celebratory description of the YSL catalogue photo, which floridly overflows with adjectives (“refined, famous, sophisticated, handsome, beautiful, delicate, graceful, classic”) as it seems to uncritically embrace the conflation of wealth, fame and taste that have reshaped the artist’s perception of the artwork. Neither of these possibilities is satisfying, but instead calls into question the position and authenticity of the speaker (notice my slippage here, between the artist’s name and the more distanced “speaker”), which is constructed through our engagement with the exhibition’s textual component. In reading the works’ inscriptions, we are not merely reflecting on the artist’s thoughts, but are confronted by something else—a deliberate provocation, a ruse.

　　Art is Everywhere, the title of another work pairing a color photograph with text, is also the conclusion drawn by the speaker after mistaking a refrigeration unit containing snacks for an artwork. With its strangely anthropomorphic proportions, the refrigerator stares out at viewers dumbly, offering its last few soft drinks and snacks as if in consolation for having disappointed us for not being art, despite the title that graces it.

　　Everyone who frequents contemporary art galleries has had an experience like this one. In fact, the institution has the power to transform anything that enters it into art, and this sometimes disorienting catalytic effect is yet another framework to be considered in the context of Liu Ding’s exhibition. It’s an issue most famously introduced by Duchamp, whose readymades were a central point of departure for the generation of conceptual artists that followed. In 1969 Joseph Kosuth argued: “With the unassisted readymade, art changed its focus from the form of the language to what was being said….This change—one from ‘appearance’ to ‘conception’—was the beginning of ‘modern’ art and the beginning of ‘conceptual’ art.”5 Thus, Duchamp’s impact on conceptual art provides another interpretive clue in the exhibition, for Liu Ding is rehearsing the story of the readymade, but deploying the visual language of Duchamp’s successors to do so.

　　Liu Ding, however, has another genealogy in mind. With History, a casually assembled photo-collage embellished with text, the artist plays with the possibility of locating another work in the exhibition, Photograph, within an idiosyncratic history of contemporary art. Photograph, essentially a piece of unexposed photo paper that the artist has fully processed, is a 30 x 40 cm white rectangle mounted on a relatively large (135 x 125 cm) white background, inside a black frame. With its teasingly empty title, Photograph can be engaged from any number of directions, suggesting to me discussions of the photographic medium’s materiality (rather than purporting to be a clear window onto other worlds) and its indexical relationship to duration, seen in works as varied as Dinh Q. Lê’s weavings made from unexposed film, which are meant to reflect potential histories that have yet to happen, and Hiroshi Sugimoto’s long-exposure photographs of movie screens, respectively. Every viewer will have different associations.

　　However, Liu Ding invites viewers to understand Photograph in relation to three specific artworks: Yves Klein’s La Vide [The Void], 1958, an empty vitrine in an empty gallery presented in his solo exhibition “The Specialization of Sensibility in the State of Raw Materials into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility”; Tom Friedman’s 1,000 Hours of Staring (1992-1997), which is made of “Stare on Paper”; and a 2001 work by Ignasi Aballí in which the artist painted a mirror white by covering it with correction fluid. Does putting a refrigerator in the Tate make it art? Does putting a blank piece of photo paper in dialogue with works of contemporary make it art? As Liu Ding says of the refrigerator: “It’s hard to tell.”

　　Of course, Liu Ding is again highlighting the relationship between a work’s context and the judgments we make about it. One could easily argue that the works chosen by Liu Ding as precedents for Photograph are nothing more than false-morphologies, whose relationships to one another run no deeper than formal similarities. However, the notion of the void (or that which is blank) is central to the entire exhibition, because many of the works in the show are nothing more or less than blank screens onto which we can project whatever meanings we like. Through his use of text and juxtaposition, Liu Ding plays on our suggestibility, encouraging us to test a variety of conceptual frameworks as we try to make sense of what we’re seeing. American artist Robert Morris succinctly described this exact same set of issues with concision and clarity in the beginning of the 1960s:

　　From the subjective point of view, there is no such thing as nothing—Blank Form shows this, as well as might any other situation of deprivation.

　　So long as the form (in the broadest sense: situation) is not reduced beyond perception, so long as it perpetuates and upholds itself as being an object in the subject’s field of perception, the subject reacts to it in many particular ways when I call it art. He reacts in other ways when I do not call it art. Art is primarily a situation in which one assumes an attitude of reacting to some of one’s awareness to art.6

　　Throughout the exhibition, one finds consonances with the cannon of conceptual art; many of the issues addressed by Liu Ding here are not new per se. Though the show relies on the period’s visual language, the artist may not be aware of the historical precedents that were set by artists working over forty years ago as they struggled to re-define art. As I have indicated above, Liu Ding has arrived at the questions raised by this exhibition—about the status, value and meaning of an artwork, and, more broadly, regarding the ontological categories into which we sort “reality”—by following the logic of his own practice, which is rooted in a critique of values in contemporary urban China. Trapped in Liu Ding’s web, I must admit that my comparison between Liu Ding’s investigation and the work of primarily American and European artists of the 1960s and 70s reveals as well the historical and cultural forces that have shaped of my own academic training. More importantly, it also raises questions about how contemporaneity must be continually reformulated when we consider and compare artists working in radically different contexts.

　　In Liu Ding’s exhibition, art history is invoked by History and then turned on its head with Omission, a marble stone supporting an invented, impossibly complete art history book (A History of Chinese Contemporary Art: 19XX to 2050) and bearing the inscription “Omission is the beginning of the writing of history.” Here (art) history is presented as unreliable, based on exclusions and personal preferences, despite claims to objectivity and neutrality. While the notion that history is always partial, biased and based on the logic of exclusion is now commonly accepted within the academy, in Liu Ding’s exhibition, the concept is activated, embodied and experienced, as it poses a real-time challenge to the conclusions we may have just drawn about other works in the show. In this way, the exhibition constantly offers frameworks through which to understand the works, only to smash them.

　　We tend to become emotionally involved in subject matters that were invented is a partially opened, black iron box, upon which is written, “Let’s suppose this is the beginning of a discussion.” The work suggests a deformed minimalist gesture, a defiled Robert Morris or an orphaned Sol LeWitt. Mysterious and magnetic, the box lures you with the promise of its plenum, but a quick look inside verifies that it is indeed empty. If this is, in fact, the beginning of a discussion, we’re going to need to invent something to talk about. And yet to write about this work, even if only to describe its formal qualities or semantic function within the context of the exhibition, validates the artist’s point: anything, however arbitrary or generic, can become a blank screen onto which we readily project meanings. Instead of being “about” anything, the work is a deliberate cipher, pointing back toward the viewer and highlighting our own frames of reference and desires for content. We tend…, Liu Ding told me, is meant to be the “opening line” of the exhibition. It “actually doesn’t represent anything, it’s a subject matter I have invented. But because it’s placed in the exhibition, people will begin to develop their thoughts around it and invest certain emotions into it.7”

　　One of the strongest works in the exhibition, Descriptive, Narrative, Descriptive, Narrative, pairs two Chinese plant stands to show how our worldviews profoundly shape the way we see and imagine. Like ideas congealed into material culture, each stand—a platform for the display of domesticated nature—embodies particular conceptions of nature, rather than purporting neutrality. The base pedestal, made from a rhizomatic whorl of roots, whose twisting forms simultaneously suggest snaking muscles, curling tentacles and an untapped, subterranean world, is part of a centuries-old Chinese tradition of root carving that “assists” nature’s readymades through carving, staining and polishing to make them more fantastical. On top of this tremulous creature rests another, smaller stand, this one fashioned out of molten porcelain, an impossible ceramic landscape of melting blue and white mountains; on top, a painted scene depicts a fisherman perched on his boat within the same landscape. In the world of contemporary art, platforms and stands are usually rectilinear and white, pretending to disappear as the offer up artworks or precious objects for our scrutiny. Here the platforms themselves are culturally coded—like the platforms on which all our knowledge rests—displaying modes of representation, ways of seeing, rather than plants, objects or other artworks.

　　Viewing the show I WROTE DOWN SOME OF MY THOUGHTS - LIU DING, one finally begins to question the most fundamental assumptions about how we experience and categorize our visual landscape. Moving between the works in the show, it’s as if we are testing the different lenses and filters of an antique kaleidoscope, turning it again and again as we hold it toward the light. Through the exhibition, Liu Ding heightens our awareness of the fact that seeing is never purely optical, inviting us to rethink old habits and make new interpretive choices both within and beyond the gallery’s walls.

　　翻译：黄一