「Touch of Wind」 tells a story of artists competing with the language of painting, and their enemies are the language and methods they are accustomed to. Pan Jian, Ren Zhao and Song Tao, with high academic experience and aesthetic sense, abandoned their long-acquainted "craft" and use relatively "violent acts" to "destroy" their paintings to varying degrees. The tools changed from brushes to homemade “sharp tools”. Rinsing, burning, cutting, and other forms of their own creating language became the methods to remove the inherent aesthetic consciousness and formal framework. However, the three artists are distinctly different from each other in terms of materials and concerns. In this exhibition, all three different working logics are used as an index of narration, describing their intertwined perspectives of similarities and differences.
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Ren Zhao's Chinese ink paintings have strong contemporary attributes with delicate texture brushwork and ink expression. The visualized information and images of real life fragments are projected onto the canvas, and the original depicted objects are destroyed through methods such as depicting, transferring, burning, and washing, resulting in a “intimacy” on the multi-lingual form of the picture. The surface has been destroyed in many places, creating a void of "lost". The broken areas are left underneath, forming a contrasted mirror-image and reflection with the faint mirror effect of the back aluminum panel sealing, constructing a new language relationship. The flat painting is reconstituted as a three-dimensional composition through the reflections of translucency, with the relationship between the viewer and the picture being collected, reshaped and related by the hazy reflections of the broken space.
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Song Tao's works are in a state of "semi-painting", in which the oil depiction is only a single element of the finished creation. Using tools and plants, he wanders between methods of drawing, topography, cutting, oil washing, covering and masking. The images are divided into different narrative areas by geometric abstract compositions, and the jungle presented in each area has a different color hue, technique and sense of form. The whole composition is filled with the tonality of images, while expressing ambiguous textures between the figurative and the non-figurative, allowing the painting to produce a multidimensional linguistic structure in the real and non-real scenarios, and adding a rhythmic color space. The initial compositional relationship is re-infused with psychedelic colors through Song Tao's process of depiction and destruction.
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In recent years, Pan Jian's creation has entered a stage of "non-painting". He has withdrawn from his skillful and habitual way of landscape sketching, and transformed sketching into the concept of depicting "reality" by abandoning the inherit sense of traditional academic skills and the instinct safe zone.He discarded the brushes and the depicted objects to choose a photographic expression like cyanotype and platinum, replacing the real landscape and the woods which he has been depicting for a long time, with artificially created fake leaves to block the picture, and spraying them from multiple angles. When the artwork is half-dried, a special tool, "fake grass", is used to cut through the leaves, revealing both the underlying and the residual color on the upper layer of striped texture, allowing the creative consciousness to detach itself from the basic form and logic of painting yet maintaining the entangled emotions.
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From Ren Zhao's "painting", Song Tao's "semi-painting" and Pan Jian's " non-painting", the three artists create the narrative and logic with three different expression in this exhibition . Like three laborers “competing” with themselves and painting, they are searching for a "new-ego” in the path of "deviating from past-ego. Perhaps, like the wind blowing in three lyrical ways, it will swirl up the fragments of light branches and leaves, lingering with layers of tumbling sentiments, blowing up soothingly inside everyone.