WORK
EASEL PAINTING AND PRINTMAKING
2013 Not in Time-World Famous Painting Series
In 2014, Yuan Gong started his series of work, Silver Lining (Fig. 27), focusing on the materiality of the packaging from the 1960s to the 1980s in China. At that time, tinplate was the most popular material for making fast food tins and biscuit boxes. The artist simply worked on large tinplate sheets that were considered as faulty during the production line, and erased the signs and symbols from the original design. Nothing can be recognised, in terms of the product, brand and year, whilst the tinplate sheets are left as ‘abstract paintings’ with geometric patterns. Interestingly, during the process of production, unlike with conventional painting practice where artistic gestures are made as a method of ‘addition’ to the canvas, it has evolved as one of ‘subtraction’, to reduce textual and pictorial information, or in other words, to purify the subject as a rational visual form – imperturbable, with no connection to a particular period of time. They look historical, but at the same time, ‘non-historical’.
2013-Not in Time-Old Summer Palace Series
Yuan Gong’s Readymade series also introduces a temporal dynamic to the traditional readymade. (Here, we must note that the artist employs a source material of biscuit tins current in China during the artist’s childhood in the 1970s. Such biscuit tins were among the only commercially sanctioned objects to bear images that resembled traditional Chinese shan shui landscape painting, albeit with a comparatively garish color scheme consistent with the image’s function as a consumer commodity decoration to encourage sale of the biscuits to the minority who could afford to buy them. The artist employs a steel scouring pad in order to efface the colors of the image, gradually allowing to emerge a line image that cancels the commoditization properties of the the source, imposes a monochromatic aspect that recalls traditional landscape, and imparts a relatively fluid spatial transparency that also evokes traditional landscape).
