Maze Hidden in the Cube
Deng Jianjin and His Students as a Situation
By Yang Xiaoyan
Deng Jianjin’s art has a kind of intertwined personal emotion, that is a sort of blatant and cautious daydream, a type of silent scream hidden in the desire! I have been watching his art practice for nearly 30 years, from imaginary style to dreamlike style, then the dreamlike style evolved into peremptory style. Until one day, the free drift of style suddenly stopped, the query is no longer about sex, the breath is revealing moan, the morbidezza has turned into discourse. It results in the disappearance of daily view, the stare has stretched the figure of ego in neurotic gaze and has made the appreciation of beauty more tridimensional, and eventually has grown into a multi-dimensional peculiar maze.
The point is, as a senior teacher, the personal maze of Deng Jianjin also has become a unique art situation of his students, and they have wandered in it for a long time. Here, the maze means the spontaneous and even wild growth of a concept about artistic freedom, it has effectively changed and profoundly abolished the despair tradition of students copy style from their teachers, and it also has made the aesthetic education evolve into many students’ reformational construct of the teachers' personal mazes, mazes become the object and inspiration, even the platform for new artists’ development!
As an independent artist, Deng Jianjin smiling, whispering and witnessing the natural extension of his personal maze, and he effectively creates chances for the free variation of the maze in this extension, so that his followers could get self-improvement in the maze. This is the power of situation! That is to say, Deng Jianjin establishes himself as a situation for the promotion of others’ development, and lets the successors through his personal maze to create the mazes of their own. Today, these mazes together constitute a more extensive situation than Deng Jianjin’s personal art, and the situation demonstrates the era significance of art!
This is a cubic demonstration! It is situation and also maze! Or, on the contrary, it is maze and also situation!
January 3, 2016 in Clifford Estates, Guangzhou
Sentimental Pan Organization Structure with Eloquent Words
By Hu Bin
We could say that Deng Jianjin is one of the most representative contemporary artists who are obsessed with oil painting in southern China. His artistic creation is closely tied to the trend of Chinese contemporary art, meanwhile it also has the meaning of maverick. Critics identified him as “transcend the new generation" in the early 1990s, later, topics for the discussion of his works include youth, lust, violence, morbidity and other aspects that cover sociology, psychology pathology and many different fields. His exploration has continuous and clear stage characteristics, from which we can acquire the intrinsic venation of the evolution of an artist’s creation in the context of a certain age.
Deng Jianjin has influenced many young students in Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts with his unique artistic thinking and open teaching model. We call this kind of influencing model “situational cube”, and it is not a single transmission of style or pattern, nor the one-way communication from teacher to student, but the multidimensional combination contains emotion, subject, art and social environmental factors, and it constitutes the interactive and motivational network field. In teaching and daily discussion, Deng Jianjin and his students promote the individual apperception and creation about the artistic language, and emphasize the attention to the change of social culture and the trend of modern and contemporary art. And there has been growing a kind of implicit mechanism which is different from regularized teaching and apprenticeship model in their sentimental pan organization structure with eloquent words.
Here we place Deng Jianjin and some of his students’ works together, we want to explore the effect and significance produced by this mechanism. Among these students, we can see the survey and analysis of ego, the representation of the new visual and sensory environment, the ideational thinking of the relation between image and word, etc, these explorations are relevant to their ambience and based on their feelings and interests. If we put their works in a certain period and inspect them, we can also find some individuals are inclined to the conversion process from schematic creation to the speculative vocabulary. And it has a certain consistency with the cutting-edge orientation of domestic contemporary art.
21 Space Art Museum pay close attention to the creation states of young artists, and also on the growth mechanism behind such states, and the promotion of teachers and students exhibitions with inner relevance is one part of the mechanism research. Through the series of "XXX and his students" exhibitions, we want to present a changing academic new phenomenon, and the artistic ecological appearance that influenced by this new phenomenon.
