明姬评论文章---指示

节选自法国著名批评家菲力浦•拉古拉巴特《指示》 我看过明姬myonghi作画，两次。每一次当然都站在远处；不是“偷偷地看”，也不是“不请自到”，只是不引起注意地观察；尽管如此，我还是站在不太远的地方，以便每次都能够准确地知道她在画什么，猜想或隐约看出她为什么画这个，我琢磨的不是她怎么画，而是她必须在什么样的情形下才这样画，而不那样画。 因为明姬是“依据实物”而画，或者，如塞尚时代的人们极为喜欢说的“室外写生”。她的画本身就说明这一点，标题里注有：一个地点，一个时间，或者一个地名和对一个事物的指示。明姬所画，是她选择的极为精心寻求的“风景”（或者说组成风景的部分）：总是一些经过优选的地点。为此她多次旅行，有时候非常遥远（Patagonia巴塔哥尼亚，Mongolia蒙古）。她带回的画——事实上也总是很遥远，就算它们来自法国乡村或故乡韩国——任何一种现代眼光都会认为这些画是“抽象”的，实际上它们却具有我们所说的“表现性”。更具体地说，是“对自然的表现”。虽然风格上有某种连贯性，尽管极难定义，但“对自然的表现”是如此的真实，因而塞热斯特（ségeste）（西西里岛上带废墟的风景）与塞里农特（sélinonte）（同为西西里岛上带废墟的风景）毫无相似之处；戈壁滩上的峭壁即刻区别于Alps阿尔卑斯山区的断层；the Strait of Magellan麦哲伦海峡的海水也不同于朝鲜海域上Chejudao济州岛周围的海水。还有，法国多菲内地区的梨树枝，既不是台北橡胶树的树枝，也不是巴黎圣日尔曼大街上某一栗树的树枝。 面对明姬的一幅画，除非事先被告知，否则，谁都说不出：这是岩石，这是树，这是大海；更说不出：这是西西里岛，这是智利，这是东方或是西方；甚至也说不出：这是一处风景，或是“什么东西”。如果我们把“表现”甚至“具象”image理解为平常认为的概念，把它看作是对“现实”的“美术化”，那么明姬的画什么都不表现。甚至连标题——从这个角度来看，都派不上用场：人们至多只能凭其文字来理解它。然而确实有某种东西被表现出来，因为“表现”这个词的本义就是使展现或者当下化。我还没看明姬作画的时候，她给我展示过几幅作品，每一次，都非常精确地向我解释画的内容：“那儿，”她对我说，“是在巴塔哥尼亚，一条条狗追逐着鸟雀；那儿，是在阿尔卑斯山区，一条展开的路；还有那儿，是急流，冷。”她的话语完全是“现实的”，有实景的，几乎是面面俱到的。的确，听着她的讲解，我看到（隐隐约约地看到）了她所看到的，看到了我可能永远看不到但终于通过直觉准确感受到的，看到了她所能看到并这样描绘出来的东西。这确实是在表现。但对我们来说，这与摹仿是分不开的。明姬服从摹仿自然这一在我们看来完全西方的“美学”指令。我们自然而然地认为“抽象”破坏了摹仿的合法性。但是，这一摹仿所呈现的与传承给我们的imitatio（摹拟）的教条——甚至当我们追溯其源头，与mimèsis（摹拟）无懈可击的必要性——关联甚少。而且，这也与其简单的对立面关联甚少：所谓的不具象，反映的永远只是主观感受的无限力量。 明姬的艺术，如今，就是这样一个谜。我力求弄懂的，就是这个美妙的谜。 Designation Excerpted from La Designation, written by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, notable French critic I used to watch Myonghi draw and every time, of course, I would stand in the distance, not peeking or paying an unexpected visit, but observing from a distance unnoticeably. Still, I would not stand too far so that I could know exactly what stuff she was drawing, and at the same time try to guess or figure out why she chose to paint this. What I consider was not how she produced her art pieces, but under what circumstances she would paint in this but not that way. Myonghi draws by imitating concrete objects, or what people at Paul Cezanne’s time prefer to call “sketching from nature”. This was made clear by her painting itself, whose title may be a location, time, the name of a place, or the denotation of stuff. What Myonghi painted were the landscapes or parts of the landscapes she has carefully selected; always well-chosen places. For this reason, she traveled a lot, sometimes even to remote countries like Patagonia and Mongolia. And the paintings she brought with her—which also traveled a long distance from remote areas, even when they came from certain French village or Korea, Myonghi’s motherland, they would be thought to be “abstractive” by any modern eyes—actually possessed the quality of what we called “representation”, or to be more specific, “the representation of nature”. In spite of certain continuity which was hard to define in the styles of her paintings, Myonghi’s “representation of nature” was so real that in her hand there were no similarities between Segeste and Selinonte, both of which belonged to the sceneries with relics in Sicily, crags in the desert were instantly recognized to be distinctive with faultage in the Alps, and the sea waters surrounding the strait of Magellan are different from those round Chejudao in the Koran maritime space. To be more, twigs of pear trees in Dauphiné, France were not those of rubber plant in Taipei, nor are they those of one chestnut tree on boulevard Saint-Germain of Paris. Looking at Myonghi’s paintings, no one was able to tell, unless being told in advance, that this was a rock, that was a tree or the sea, nor could he/she tell that this was Sicily, Chile, the East or the West, or even a scenery or “some stuff’. But if “representation” or even “specific image” was understood to be the concept that we normally accepted, that is, artisticalization of the reality, Myonghi’s pieces represented nothing, even the titles couldn’t help (normally with whose help people could at most understand them). But something has really been represented, because the word “represent” itself originally means “display” or “show”. Before I ever watched Myonghi draw, she used to show me some of her pieces, and every time she would explain to me precisely what was in the picture, “That”, she told me, “was in Patagonia where dogs were chasing after the birds; and that was in the mountain areas of Alps, an expanding path; and there was the torrential currents, very cold.” Her descriptions were “realistic”, relating to actual sceneries, and virtually comprehensive. Indeed, her explanations made me see (though indistinctively) what she saw, what I might never see but felt well and truly through intuition, and what she was able to see and describe. This was a kind of representation, which for us was undetached from imitation; Myonghi obeyed to the aesthetic instruction of “imitating the nature” which was for us totally western. And meanwhile we took it for granted that abstract form destroyed the validity of imitation. But what Myonghi’s paintings represented through imitation was hardly related to the doctrines of imitatio that we inherited, even when we traced back to its origin, the mimesis, it was the same. Neither was it related to its simple opposite; the so-called non-figurative painting represented merely the boundless power of individual’s subjective perception. This is Myonghi’s art, a great enigma that I have been striving to understand.