2#
大 中
小 The Big Sleep 2007-8-28 15:44
admin
The Big Sleep
Observations on the Motif of Death in the Paintings by Yan Pei-Ming
By Fabian Stech
To imagine oneself dead is to experience reality; to be a witness at the death of another is to experience emotion.
Kierkegaard
The Artist and Death
Artists have an ambivalent relationship with their own death. People who are not artists are afraid of death and agree with society that death only means the death of someone else. It is as if they have taken the advice of Epicurus, who in his letter to Menoeceus identifies two states of being: either we are alive, in which case death does not concern us because it does not exist, or we are dead, in which case death does not concern us because we do not exist. The fact of something no longer existing is one we can only experience through another. Death only ever happens outside ourselves; it is happening all around us and we only ever see the pictures of it, pictures of horrors in the media or private pictures of mourning over the loss of people who were close to us. The fear of death arises out of the fact that it is denied us as an experience. Yan Pei-Ming describes this feeling of fear of death when he relates that, from an early age, he found the fact of one day no longer existing unjust and that the very thought reduced him to tears of despair.
The artist’s ambivalent relationship towards death is rooted in the fact that he not only fears death but at the same time desires it. For at the moment of his death the artist reaches the pinnacle of his fame. In material terms this is reflected in the fact that prices for an artist’s works soar to unforeseen heights once he or she is dead. The artist’s death wish overshadows his satisfaction, expressed through his body of works, at “living on”, as Elias Canetti puts it: for in “living on”, the work becomes the representative of the one who created it.
This idea perhaps comes best to the fore in Ming’s Self-portrait in the Morgue of 2003. Ming portrays himself in this painting no longer as a person who can be identified from his face, in other words from his resemblance to the man we know as Yan Pei-Ming, but rather as a body draped in a shroud with only the feet showing. The body and face of the dead artist are not visible and are represented only by the feet, probably the most anonymous part of the body. What remains is the work and its evaluation by the public and posterity: “Behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out.” By choosing to portray his own body in this anonymous fashion, the artist bypasses the taboo of depicting one’s own body as dead; the painting becomes a general allegory of death and puts the viewer in touch with the possibility of his own death. At the same time, the anonymity of the shrouded body establishes a reference to cinema and film. Do not countless films open with a scene in which a sheet is drawn back to reveal a corpse whose death remains to be explained?
Self-autopsy
Although self-autopsy, i.e. the idea of depicting oneself as dead, has forerunners in the fine arts – Courbet’s self-portrait as the wounded L’homme blessé of 1844 is one example, as are drawings by James Ensor and Oskar Kokoschka’s Myself, dead – Ming’s painting does not belong exclusively to this tradition. It arose shortly before the death of his father and hence results from his encounter with the death of one of his closest family members. For Ming, the implications of his father’s death are these: “You’re next in line, it’s as simple as that. When your father’s still alive, it stops you from worrying about your own death. As long as your father is still living, if you think about dying, you put him before you. But when he’s dead, you say to yourself: that’s it, I’m next.” His self-portrait is therefore of dual origin: alongside its art-historical context, the concept of the family and the family as social institution, how one lives within the family, also plays a decisive role. Family also implies a line in which one stands and from which succession results, passing here from father to son. This also explains why Ming describes this self-portrait “as a fiction on his own existence, a fiction that will one day come true”. In this definition, fiction has the character of a story that will be passed down and continued. A story that, at the formal level, is anonymous and the same for everyone, and that only acquires a specific meaning within the family with the granting of names. The ambiguity that the artist feels about death thus also appears in the fiction, too.
Like the white shroud that in the self-portrait seems to rise up to infinity, whites dominate the palette of all the paintings from this brief period. Ming painted two final portraits of his father, Funeral of the Artist’s Father and Artist’s Father in the Morgue, which arose shortly before his actual death. Two further paintings of 25 October 2003 and 5 November 2003, both entitled Father’s Funeral Flowers, are dedicated to the funeral. The date of the first painting thereby corresponds to the day his father died, the second to the day of the funeral. White is the dominant colour in the flower motifs, and the often forceful contrasts found in Ming’s bi-chromatic paintings are absent. There is a shimmering quality to the white in the two funeral paintings that makes them extremely difficult to photograph. As if death wanted to defend itself against reproduction by technological means, the paintings remain accessible only through experiencing the originals. Ming explains the white in these pictures in terms of Chinese colour symbolism, according to which white carries much stronger connotations of death than black. From this one can conclude either that Ming, like many who have lived in prolonged exile from their original homeland, is skilfully playing with the advantages and disadvantages of owning two cultural backgrounds, or that the colour symbolism from his Chinese roots inevitably emerges more strongly at the moment of death.
At the same time, however, the unbroken colour of the almost white-in-white paintings underlines the state of death more strongly than a clearly differentiated palette of multiple contrasts. The painting The Bride of 2004 similarly plays with the dual system of cultural reference and redirects the white of virginity into an allegory of death. In the painting, which is based on the photograph of an anonymous woman, Ming appears to draw unconsciously upon Claude Monet’s Camille on her Deathbed, which he changes with a reduction of the palette to blacks and whites, a completely different brushstroke and a rotation of the motif on its axis from the vertical to the horizontal, and which he frees from Monet’s reflections upon colour. The women’s face and hands make one last appearance before dissolving into an unbroken white.
In painting his father in the morgue, Ming establishes a connection between him and other individuals that he has depicted in a similar position. He is thus linked in particular with Mao, whom Ming similarly painted on his deathbed in a whole series of pictures, including two polychrome canvases, but also with the picture Marilyn of 2003 and an anonymous corpse of 2001. This mixing of mythical figures with the person of Ming and the person of his father occurs not just within this specific group of works, but also appears in the portraits. What is the reason for this merging of one subject into another? Is it simply that the viewer fails to recognize the differences between them accurately enough, because his gaze is too superficial? That would imply that Ming clearly details such differences and that he is concerned with the individuality of each face (even in the case of bodies laid out after death and covered by a sheet), but that they escape the viewer through lack of attention or as a result of the uniformity of the medium, the poses and the motifs. It is to be suspected, however, that Ming is once again working with ambivalence. The individual becomes the general, just as the general becomes the individual. Figuration in Ming’s painting thereby dissolves into abstraction, without either being clearly separate. It is not just the motifs that merge and so fuse the role of father with that of the son and mythical figures; something similar also takes place in the viewer’s perception at different distances from the painting. What appears close up to be an abstract pattern becomes clear and individualised as the viewer moves further away from the canvas, only to revert to the generalisation of a giant poster, such as Ming painted as a boy in China, when the enormous format is seen from a large distance.
Lingchi
Ming’s painting makes reference to death not just in its motifs and subjects, but also through its form and execution. The use of photographs as a starting-point for painting means that the singularity of the event is already lost: it has already been reproduced. Barthes even associates the invention of photography with the crisis of death in our society and refers to photography as la Mort plate (flat Death). Ming’s pictures, many of which start from photographs, are also subject to a mechanism or an effect that one might call screening. The pictures appear to hover on the surface of the canvas; not even their paint structure lends them depth, something already negated by their composition. All form of aura is absent.
Ming’s frequent repetition of identical motifs and his work on series also bring his painting close to the reproductive medium of photography. It is as if he is trying to achieve with manual means what photography can do mechanically. A picture that Ming painted for the Musée Niépce in Chalon-sur-Saône takes up the role of photography as a starting-point for painting. The museum houses rare prints of a Chinese method of execution called lingchi, in which the body is slowly dismembered. One of these photographs from the early 20th century inspired a number of images in Bataille’s Tears of Eros. The Chinese word lingchi is made up of two characters: ling signifies to humiliate or treat badly, and chi to delay or protract. Ming deploys a photomontage, constructed from the lingchi stereoscopes, to confront the reproduction technology with painting. The montage takes an excerpt from a sequence in which three men are seen standing behind a figure lying on the ground. The work was prefaced by a digital photomontage in which the group is assembled around the basket with the dismembered body and surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. However, the most important changes only occur with the translation of the composition into paint. The crowd – gathered, according to Canetti, out of the fear of physical contact – disappears in Ming’s painting. Remaining are three men in front of the naked body of a woman lying on the ground. The men’s clothing has lost its exotic character. What now seems to be central is no longer the actual event, but rather the direction in which the men are looking. Only one man is looking at the woman; the other two direct their gaze towards the viewer. The picture thereby makes its subject the act of seeing itself. Even if the faces reveal no European features, Yan Pei-Ming nevertheless avoids assigning them to any specific cultural sphere. In the man looking down from his universal position of dominance at the sightless object of the woman’s body, Ming holds up the human desire to watch even the greatest cruelty. No further trace of Bataille’s ecstasy; only melancholy remains. Georges Bataille linked the origins of the modern museum with the invention of the guillotine, by which death is mechanized and always the same, and in which – in contrast to the protracted nature of lingchi – life and death occur in the same moment. Inscribed within the framework of the guillotine, it becomes possible to exhibit in a museum even the slow death that is lingchi.
The Viewer and Death
Next to the final version of Edouard Manet’s Execution of Emperor Maximilian in Mannheim Museum there hangs another painting with death as its central focus. Chinese District in Saigon is based on a photograph showing the execution of a Vietcong fighter by an American officer. Both paintings convey in a particularly powerful manner where man’s fear of death lies: at the moment of death to be unable to give one’s life any further meaning. The finality of meaninglessness leads man always to call for a postponement of the precise moment of death. This also sheds light on the many popular tales in which death is overcome and life given new meaning, although it is never explained what this meaning consists of and what happens after death has been put off.
The motif of the skull is one that artists through the centuries have employed to illustrate death. Ming, like Gerhard Richter before him, liberates it from the context of the still life and offers it to portraiture. Ming has said of these skull portraits that the idea of being condemned to die is frequently what draws him to this genre. As a pendant to the portrait, Ming often treats the skull, in analogy to film, to give a close-up of death. In a text by Francisco de Quevedos, Death addresses man and explains that he does not in fact have the appearance of a skeleton, but rather that each person in his present form is his own Death. This might also be the message of Ming’s skull pictures.
Kierkegaard was surely right when he wrote in 1845: “The general view of death only confuses the thinking, just as does the intention of having experiences in general.” Man cannot avoid the confrontation with his own death. Ming’s paintings are witnesses to such a confrontation, in front of which each viewer must contemplate his own mortality, in order to face up to the individual experience of another and to get used to the idea of his own death. For “whether we have been happy is decided only at our end”.
