By Chen Kuang-Yi | The author, a Ph. D. in art history from Université Paris X, is the Department Chair of Fine Arts of National Taiwan University of Arts
Feng Wei is a landscape painter as all his paintings are about landscapes. As landscape paintings have a history of several hundred years, it is a great challenge for a contemporary artist to create something new. However, he seems willing to take the challenge. His seemingly mundane paintings trigger many intriguing reflections on the Oriental and Western art.
You may find characters hardly play any role in each of his landscape paintings under scrutiny. In fact, characters play noticeable roles in landscape paintings. The Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), exploited the characters to guide the audience to expose the inner amazement of insignificant humans at the immensity and beauty of nature. Non-human landscape paintings by Theodore Rousseau (1812-1867) symbolizes his naturalistic philosophies. Likewise, what Feng Wei depicts is human landscape instead of desolate nature. If he just wants to arrange for elements of landscape to appear, such as the sky, clouds, bridges, lanes, lakes and towers, they constitute his paintings, which are not only representations, but also metamorphosis of the landscapes.
Feng Wei, West Lake Series 13, Oil on canvas, 100 x 80cm, 2013
As a matter of fact, as his paintings focus on some repeated themes, they are “conceptualised”. His paintings like the tower series, bridges series, lake series, Lane series are close to a series of industrial architecture by Benhard & Hilla Becher, who travelled and photographed all over Europe since 1950, rather than the Rouen Cathedral series by Claude Monet (1840-1926) or the Mt. Saint Victor series by Paul Cézannes (1839-1906). Like Monet, Feng Wei has travelled a lot, looking for beautiful scenery and studying different changes of the same scenery under different climate conditions. Like Cézannes, he also observes and comprehends the nature and structure of the same mountain at different times and from different angles. However, I think the search for the shape and structure of paintings is not his sole purpose, as his oil paintings do not emphasize the noumenon so strongly unlike Monet or Cézannes. The light and blurred landscapes in his paintings are not so oily. The subtle layers of colours, looking like grey-dominated and mixed with other colours, thin and dry, or wet and cool, are an attempt to attract people’s mind instead of their eyes. Those who understand Chinese paintings will be able to appreciate the beautiful landscapes in his paintings like “Banks of Antai”, “A Distant Gaze at the 17-Hole Bridge”, whose structures and colours are tinted with subtle oriental atmosphere. No wonder he claimed, “Chinese oil painters should apply extensive Western painting theory and critical thinking to re-read our traditional Chinese paintings.” This reveals his ambition of repainting the landscapes.
Feng Wei, Tower Series 5, Oil on canvas, 100 x 80cm, 2013
There must be a deeper meaning in Feng Wei’s paintings. Just like the Bechers who travelled all over Europe and systematically photographed industrial architectural equipment including water towers, cooling towers, coke ovens, blast furnaces and winding towers, they engaged in a kind of study called “typology”, influenced by the New Topographics movement, aiming to record the industrial environment and raised social, cultural and aesthetical problems caused by the constant destruction of old architecture. Although Feng Wei’s ways of painting repeated towers, bridges, lanes and lakes are far different from the Bechers’, they compel the audience to compare and judge the architecture from an unusual and aesthetical perspective. In my opinion, Feng Wei expresses his views of the culture of the southern China, especially Fujian and Taiwan culture, as he doesn’t care about the objective details of what he depicts and instead he turns them into something systematic, semiotic and abstract, which makes us unable to identify those buildings and thus becomes a lone sign. That is what I regard as the most peculiar and thought-provoking among his works of art.
Feng Wei, Kuanyin Mountain 1, Oil on canvas, 100 x 70cm, 2014