Author: YAN BING 闫冰

Size: painting80×60cm×3；photography50×75cm

Signed and dated: Painted in 2018

Estimate:

Final Price: RMB 700,000

video 4’ 37’’
EXHIBITED
2018 Xie Sheng, Bonacon Gallery, Guangzhou

This is the work completed to convey my understanding of “lifelike painting”, including three parts: video, photo and painting. I originally intended to show my understanding by making a lifelike painting of a tree. I met this white birch after seeing a few mountain forests. I think that lifelike painting is not merely a reproduction or recording, but an adaptation and revelation of things. A painter brings into play his own cognitive experience and purpose when gazing at the object to be painted. It is never objective. The relationship is concealed and complicated. The view-finding and composition are just the trimming of things, and also the intervention of the entirety. If it is agreed that the watched feels uncomfortable and embarrassed because of being watched, it can be understood that lifelike painting is not one-way, nor detached. Of course, the watched can also watch back.
In this “lifelike painting” process, I added an action of tree felling, and even killed a tree, focusing on the violent nature of lifelike painting, such as hunting, robbery, assassination and summoning the souls of the dead. This is a metaphor.
—Yan Bing
This group of White Birch consists of video, photo and painting. This is the work completed to convey the artist understanding of “lifelike painting”. In this “lifelike painting” process, Yan Bing recorded the process of felling birch trees as he did a lifelike painting in the form of video. This video converts the “cutting and intervention” of things in the lifelike painting into the “adaption and revelation of things” behind the lifelike painting. It is presented in a violent and intuitive manner. Yan Bing added an action of felling to his work, saying that he “killed a tree”, a metaphor for the painter’s active intervention in reality. “Lifelike painting” is a concept of the artist’s creation, and a way of on-site observation and thinking. Using this direct and powerful artistic language, Yan Bing uses diversity in the creative form.