生产之性--吕青艺术的直觉与秩序

Productive Sex —Lyu Qing’s Artistic Intuition and Order

李邦耀/LiBangyao

约三年前，吕青邀我去她的工作室看她的作品。

About three years ago, Lyu Qing invited me to herstudio to watch her works.

在工作室的一隅，我忽然眼前一亮，发现被套织在亚麻布上的拉链，由大到小、由里到外、色层渐递地层层叠加，犹如一个巨大的女性性器！光线洒在一层层弯曲的拉链金属齿上来回跳跃、闪烁，一眨一眨的，甚是神秘和奇异。我感觉我的视网膜和内心因此有些许震荡，在一个图像堵塞、视觉疲劳的时代、有这样的视觉遭遇毕竟并不多。

In the corner of thestudio, my eyes lit up when I found the zippers were woven on linen from big tosmall and inside to outside with the progressive color and layers, just like a giantfemale genitals! The light shone on the layers of curve metal zipper teeth,jumping back and forth, flashing and blinking, which is mysterious and bizarre.I felt my retina and heart quivering slightly since such a visual experiencewas not that much after all in an image-blocked and vision-tired era.

“这作品与性别有关？”我含蓄的问道，“是、也不是!”“做作品的时候我其实没想那么多”她有点害羞的说。但对我来说，我宁愿相信这是一件与身份认同、女性主义相关话题的作品，这样，当我们面对这些作品时就很好解释作者的动机了。我不由自主地想起了弗洛伊德先生。

“This work isgender-related?” I asked implicitly. “Yes and no, I actually didn’t think somuch when I did this work,” she said a little shyly. But for me, I preferred tobelieve that was a work related to identity and feminism so that we couldexplain well the author’s motives facing these kind of works. I could not helpto think of Mr. Freud.

这是吕青最初关于使用拉链材料的作品。之后，她陆陆续续地做了一系列的变体作品，她不断地尝试着：拉链色彩的变化、拉链的长度、拉链的弯曲程度，拉链在木材上拼接、拉链在布上拼接、拉链和金属拼接；材质的厚度、高度、四维性的视觉选择、色感的悉心安排……还有，她作品的题目！

That was Lyu Qing’sfirst work about using the zipper material. Later, she continually did a seriesof variant works, continually trying: the changeable color of zipper, thelength of zipper, the curving degree of zipper, zipper on wood, zipper on clothand zipper on metal, the thickness and heightof material, the four-dimensional visual selection, the arrangement of colorsense, etc., also the title of her works!

虽然这些似乎和技术相关，但我并不是一个技术控。让我真正感兴趣是她为什么要这么做？她仅仅是对形式与材料的喜爱？抑或是因材料而释放的内心压抑？我们不得不又回到开始的问题，关于“性”的话题是绕不过去的！作品中的潜意识、下意识和无意识，以及利比多的性意识作用，精神分析；在过去的几十年里，弗洛依德式的思维习惯一直影响着我们观看艺术作品的途径，尤其是女性艺术家的作品。同样，当我们一阅读奥基芙、辛迪.雪曼、布尔乔亚的作品就容易联想到二十世纪七十年代发端于西方的女权主义运动。

Although these seem related to techniques,I am not a technique fan. What I am really interested in is why she did that,only for the love of form and material or for the inner repression released bymaterial? We have to return to the original question. The topic about “sex” isunavoidable, the subconsciousness and unconsciousness of works, the influenceand psychoanalysis of sex consciousness from libido. In the past a few decades,the thought of Freud has been influenced the way we look at the artistic works,especially the works of female artists. Similarly when we read the works of O’Keeffe,Cindy Sherman and Bourgeois, we can easily think of the first feminism movementin the west in the 1970s.

随着吕青作品的进展，我们之间的交谈逐渐增多。吕青文静、矜持，她的文雅和作品形成极大的反差。当谈到作品中的性意识，她始终既不肯定也不否定。她说：你可以把它看做伤口，可以把它看做洞穴，也可以把它看做女人的性器官。--- 也许最终的结果和表象不同。而我渐渐发现她作品中的性别身份不是生理学意义上的，她似乎敏感的触碰到在社会变迁中无法言说的“性”的某些不确定的特质。

Along with theprogress of Lyu Qing’s work, our conversation gradually increased. Lyu Qing isquiet, reserved and gentle, which becomes a strong contrast with her works. Shenever affirmed or denied when we talked about the sex consciousness in her works.She said, “you can regard it as a wound, a cave or a female genitals. Perhapsthe final result is different from the appearance”. And I gradually found thegender identity in her works is not physiologically related. She seemed totouch sensitively some uncertain nature of the inexplicable “sex” in socialchange.

该是我们重新调整角度来思考这个问题了。的确，看似简单的作品当置放在特殊的语境中情形却大不一样。这并不是谈色色变的20世纪80年代前的中国，在经济改革三十多年的过程中，社会语境发生了根本的变化。吕青生于八十年代，在她们的成长期间，社会显现了它极大包容的态度，它暗自接纳了色情行业（早期是理发店）、A片、包二奶、小三、变性者、同性恋，这些大众生产的符号化词汇成为人们茶前饭后调侃的谈资而稀释了道德的评判。没有什么事情不能发生。因此，她们并不曾遭遇曾经困惑了我们几代人的“性”的禁忌问题，也没有感受到封建社会男权权力关系。从中国具体的社会特征来看，有关性别身份问题的观念正在悄然地改变。面对几十年的经济改革，西方女权主义问题在中国显然失去了上下文的关系，它在中国的演绎于是变成了一种时髦，女权主义成为个人的甜点而并不构成公共的问题。究其原因，皆因经济的力量展现了他无与伦比的魔力，经济无情地割断了传统的伦理概念，消解了禁欲主义思想，屏蔽了所有关于道德的争论。代之而起的是消费与时尚：琳琅满目的化妆品、五花八门的新潮服装、超大幅超尺度的女性广告、电脑中植入式的性广告、电子性游戏等等。鲍德里亚在《象征的交换与死亡》中说：“时尚得到普及，越来越不是某个性别或某个年龄段的特权。相同的逻辑总在起作用：时尚得到普及，离开女人的特殊载体，向所有人开放，这是因为关于身体的禁忌也得到普及，而且形式比清教派镇压更微妙：它采用的是普遍无性化的形式。因为身体只在压抑中才有很强的性潜力---在时尚中，性作为差异消失，但作为参照（作为仿真）却普及了”。当“性”不再成为禁忌的社会公共话题时，性别身份就慢慢开始褪色。这时经济资本运用产品、营销模式、代码、时尚，象征性地交换了对身体的言说。

It is time we readjust the angle tothink about this problem. Indeed, the seemingly simple work looks much differentwhen it is placed in a special context. This is not the China before 1980swhere we were afraid of talking about sex. In over thirty years of economicreform process, the social context has gone through the fundamental change. LyuQing was born in the 1980s. During the growth of her generation, the societyshowed its great tolerant attitude, secretly embracing the sex industry (earlyas the barber shop), porn videos, mistresses, transgender and gay. These wordsproduced by the public became their daily joking material so that the moraljudgment was weakened. Everything is possible. Therefore, they haven’t experiencedthe “sex” taboo confusing our generations and haven’t felt the feudalpatriarchal power. From the perspective of specific social characteristic inChina, ideology about gender identity has been changed quietly. With thedecades of economic reform, the western feminism obviously lost its logical contextin China. As a result, it was interpreted as a kind of fashion in China andbecame a personal dessert instead of public issue. That was because the economyhas demonstrated its unparalleled magic. Economy ruthlessly cut off thetraditional ethical concepts, decomposed the asceticism ideology and blockedall the debates about morality, replaced with the consumption and fashion:eye-dazzling cosmetics, a wide variety of trendy clothes, large sexy femaleadvertising, implantable advertising in computer, electronic games and so on.Baudrillard says in Symbolic Exchange andDeath, “fashion is more and more not popularized as the privilege of acertain gender or age. The same logic always works: fashion gains popularitywithout the woman as special carrier and opens to everyone. That is because thetaboo about body is also popularized with a more subtle form than therepression of Protestantism: it uses the common non-sexual form. As only bodyunder repression has the strong sexual potential, in fashion, sex as adifference is disappeared but popularized as a reference (simulation).” When “sex”no longer becomes the taboo of social topic, gender identity will begin to fadeout gradually. At this time, the economic capital will symbolically replace thetalk about body with the products, marketing mode, code and fashion.

其实，吕青作品中正透露了这个信息。在她2014年的《答案》作品中，她凭着直觉已经开始接触到问题的答案，产生于2015-16年这组作品的命名是很有讲究的，它直接追随着《答案》：《梦想的和现实的》、《一念之间》、《于意云何》、《隐藏的秘密》--- 在《隐藏的秘密》中，金属花瓣被极其夸张地设计成卷草般的图案，鲜艳夺目的色彩拉链在有序的安排下形成花浪。这些精心设计构成了作品的生产性与时尚的特色，娇艳欲滴的金属花瓣阻隔了我们对性的冲动，性更是以一种生产型的表征、以被消费的姿态恣意地开放，作为私密的个人化的性在作品中已近消亡。就生产与消费行为的性而言，它仅仅提供了一个标准化的性模式，而不具有情感特征。

In fact, Lyu Qing’sworks reveal this information. In her work Answerin 2014, she began to touch the answer intuitively. The series works producedfrom 2015 to 2016 were name specially and directly after the Answer: My Dream and the Reality, A Flash of Inspiration, What Do You Think WhatDo You Want to Say, the Hidden Secret. In the Hidden Secret, the mental petals are designed exaggeratedly asthe curly grass-like pattern and the eye-catching colorful zippers form theflower waves under the orderly arrangement. These delicate designs constitutethe work’s characteristic of productivity and fashion. The vivid metal petalsimpede our sexual impulses and the sex blooms willfully as a productive symboland with the attitude of being consumption. The private and personal sex almostdies away in the work. From the aspect of productive and consumed sex, it justprovides a standardized mode of sex without any emotional feature.

在吕青的作品中，还有一个值得探讨的问题，即生命与死亡。这个话题本身并无新意，我们还有什么可以讨论呢？我以为她近期的作品《隐藏的秘密》却揭示了一个不同的死亡概念：作品分两部分组成：用不锈钢精心制作的棺材盖面上绽放着由多层鲜艳的彩色拉链设计的花瓣（关于它的特质在上面已有叙述），这件作品更像节日的秘密庆典仪式，具有杰夫.孔斯式的视觉震撼力。生命与死亡是艺术作品中恒久的话题，如：德拉克洛瓦的《希阿岛的屠杀》、拉斐尔前派米莱斯的《俄菲利亚》、籍里科的《梅杜萨之筏》以及高更的《我们从哪里来？我们是什么？到哪里去？》，这些作品中的人生因战争、灾难、爱情变得命运多舛，表述了对生命的眷念与追问；死亡被当做主体的悲剧精神、一直充满形而上的终极关怀。而《隐藏的秘密》从第一眼看上去就没有恐惧感，这或许来自于她内心对死亡的认知：生既是偶然的，死为何就糟糕？生与死只是一个循环系统。作品中娇艳欲滴的金属花瓣让人亢奋，因此它迅速地中和了冰冷的不锈钢棺材，死亡更接近于生产！如同“性”可以生产一样，从一个无机物到另一个无机物的延伸，既没有生也没有死。这符合经济运作的逻辑。在经济运作的链条中，我相信弗洛伊德也无能为力。

In the works of LyuQing, there is also a problem worth discussion, which is life and death. Thistopic itself is not new so what else we can discuss?  However I think herrecent work the Hidden Secret reveals a different concept of death. The work isdivided into two parts: above the well-designed coffin cover made of stainlesssteel, there are blooming petals combined by multilayer of colorful zippers(its feature has been described above). This work is more like the secretceremony in a festival with the powerful visual impact of Jeff Koons’s style.Life and death is the everlasting topic of artistic works, such as the Massacre of Chios from Delacroix, the Ophelia from Millais Pre-Raphaeliteschool, the Raft of the Medusa fromGericault and the  Where do we comefrom? Who are we? Where are we going? from Gauguin. People’s life in theseworks become sufferable due to war, disaster and love, expressing the yearningand questioning to life; death is regarded as the major symbol of tragedyspirit and always full of the metaphysical ultimate concern. However the HiddenSecret didn’t make me feel fear at the first sight and maybe it is from LynQing’s inner perception to death: since life is accidental and why death isbad? Life and death is just a circulatory system. The eye-catching metal petalsmake people excited, so it can quickly neutralize the cold stainless steelcoffin. Death is closer to productivity, just like “sex” can be produced. Theextension from one inorganic matter to another inorganic matter, there is nolife and no death. This is consistent with the logic of economic operation andI believe even Freud could not do anything in the chain of economic operation.

在吕青的作品中一切都是那么的有秩序，她运用秩序来检验她的直觉，她不断地生产着性、抽离了个人性征的性(或者仅仅是一个符号？)，使性的内容变得越来越空泛。吕青的作品给我们提出这样一个问题：当性别身份不再是社会的问题，性已经演变成时尚时，社会于是逐渐同质化、中性化、女性化。近些年人类社会的趣味明显有这样的变化—女性化的特征。这或许就是后性别时代？而我们究竟需要一个什么样的时代？

In Lyu Qing’s workeverything is so orderly. She uses the order to test her intuition, continuallyproduces the sex without individual sexual feature (or only a symbol?) andmakes the sexual context increasingly empty. Lyu Qing’s works bring us with sucha question: when gender identity is no longer a social issue and sex becomes afashion, the society gradually become homogenous, neutral and feminine. Inrecent years the social interest obviously has such a change——feminine feature. Perhaps this is the era ofpost-gender? But what kind of era we really need?

我不得而知。

I do not know aboutthat.

于广州瀚景工作室

2016.4

Wrote at the Hanjing Studio inGuangzhou

April, 2016