王凯凡 KAIFAN WANG

One Piece

BLUM 画廊 洛杉矶

2024年11月2日 – 2024年12月21日

BLUM 画廊很荣幸带来展览「One Piece」，这是常驻地柏林的艺术家王凯凡（Kaifan Wang）在本画廊举办的首场个展。

王凯凡的思维方式蕴含着游牧的特质，这种特质在情感上统领艺术家的实践，也是本次展览的主调。王凯凡出生于中国呼和浩特——作为一座历史悠久、文化丰富的城市，其深厚的底蕴却为快速的都市化进程所掩盖。艺术家目前生活于柏林，他不只是一位故事讲述者，还能够在生活或工作之地发现中国移民史与业已存在的叙事之间的重叠之处。对王凯凡而言，移民便是穿梭文化之间、打破时空界限，以在当下找到意义。

艺术家从不同的指涉参照中汲取灵感，并以出人意料的方式将其串联。例如，艺术家会借用画作中的动作和姿态，与内蒙的家乡呼应——有些笔触顺应的是重力抑或构图的自然流动，有些则逆向而行。在考虑到中国与西方抽象绘画史反差鲜明的前提下，王凯凡的作品仰赖流动的姿态，依托画布上一丝一缕的油彩、油画棒绘迹和丙烯颜料，对破碎的文化身份和人类迁徙的流动性进行了反思。借此，原本棘手的话题也拥有了兼具知性与感性的结论。

在为「One Piece」做研究时，王凯凡观摩了古斯塔夫·克里姆特（Gustav Klimt）的画作《贝多芬的饰带》（1901-1902）：这是一幅为奥地利维也纳分离派展览馆创作的壁画，克里姆特在画中描绘了瓦格纳对贝多芬第九交响曲中不断上升的渐强音与恢弘感的文学性诠释，将其视为欲望的表达。好似借用一根金线，王凯凡串起了三大要素：克里姆特画作金箔中的金、艺术家童年时的沙尘暴以及吸引第一代中国移民前往美国的淘金热。于此，黄金成为了欲望与个人回忆的交汇点。

以王凯凡的画作《Gum Shan》（2024）为例，其标题取自旧金山的粤语名，意为“金山”。《Gum Shan》捕捉了艺术家对希望的生动想象，这种希冀或许是激励19世纪中国淘金者跨洋前来加利福尼亚开采黄金的重要原因——他们被要求在动身前往异国前结婚生子，有时距离出发日期仅有数月之隔。他们注定要日夜劳作，将辛苦所得寄回中国。正如王凯凡所言：“在‘寻’与‘欲’二者之间存在的固有矛盾，是束缚。”对幸福的渴望或许反倒成为了一道枷锁，阻遏寻觅独立自主的道路。

日本漫画及动漫《海贼王》（One Piece）讲述的是一群敢于冒险、勇于探索的航海家，每一位都代表着不同的文明、有着各异的灵魂。故事中的所有角色都渴望找到传说中名为“One Piece”的终极宝藏。尽管宝藏本身究竟为何无人知晓，但它仍将角色们凝聚在一起，让众人朝着共同的目标前进。这种理念贯穿于王凯凡的创作实践，不仅可以在他对各种指涉的有机融合上得到体现，也流淌于每个独立的故事中。《Reverse Mountain》（2024）是一幅超现实主义风景画，画中的水流沿着金色的山脉向上涌动，流向通往“新大陆”的大门；与之相对，《Calm Belt》（2024）则描绘了设置在那些想要前往新大陆的人面前的阻碍——在这幅宁静的小画中，既没有劲风，也没有水涌，而这两者本可以推动船只成功驶向神往的目的地。

王凯凡的首本同名画册将与展览「One Piece」同时发行。这本画册深入探讨了艺术家的创作实践，并收录了翁笑雨、马丁·赫伯特（Martin Herbert）和玛尔塔·吉尼普（Marta Gnyp）的文章。

翻译自英文版

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BLUM is pleased to present One Piece, Berlin-based artist Kaifan Wang’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

There is a nomadic underpinning to the way that Wang thinks—this mindset sentimentally unifies the artist’s practice as well as this exhibition. Born in Hohhot, China, an area with a long cultural history that has been buried by rapid urban development, and living in Berlin, Wang is a masterful and worldly storyteller with the unique ability to find overlap between the histories of the Chinese diaspora and the preexisting narratives embedded within the places where he lives or works. For Wang, migration is a means of traversing cultural references across time and space to find meaning in the now.

The artist draws out disparate references and discursively relates them to one another in surprising ways. Wang nods, for instance, to emigrants from Inner Mongolia through the movement and gestures in his paintings—some strokes moving along the pull of gravity or the natural flow of the composition and others moving against. Bearing in mind the stark contrast between the history of Chinese and Western abstract painting, Wang’s style ruminates on fractured cultural identities and the fluidity of human migration through flowing gestures and plumes of oil, oil stick, and acrylic on canvas—offering conclusions at once intellectual and emotive on a topic that is otherwise quite slippery.

While doing research for One Piece, Wang visited Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze (1901–1902), a mural commissioned for the Secession Building in Vienna, Austria in which Klimt depicted Wagner’s literary interpretation of the swelling crescendos and opulence of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony as an expression of desire. As though with a gold thread, Wang draws unlikely parallels between the gold of Klimt’s goldleaf, the sandstorms of the artist’s childhood, and the gold rush that drew in the first generation of Chinese migrants to the United States. Here, gold becomes the intersection of desire and personal memories.

Wang’s painting Gum Shan (2024), for instance, takes its title from a Cantonese name given to San Francisco that translates to “gold mountain.” Gum Shan captures Wang’s vivid visions of the glimmer of hope that might motivate nineteenth-century Chinese prospectors arriving in California to mine gold—encouraged to marry and have children, sometimes just months away from their departure dates, they were meant to work hard and send their profits back home. As Wang puts it, “The inherent contradiction in the relationship between searching and desire is bondage.” The yearning for happiness can be a yoke along the path to autonomy. 

One Piece, a Japanese manga and animation, is a story of risk-taking, adventurous seafarers, each representing different civilizations and spirits. All characters in this tale are driven to find the ultimate treasure of a fabled prize known as the one piece—although its nature is shrouded in mystery, this treasure unifies the characters in a common trajectory. This idea pervades Wang’s practice, apparent in the fusion of his vast array of references as well as each individual story. Reverse Mountain (2024) is a surrealist landscape. Its water flows upward along a golden mountain range toward the important gateway to the New World. Calm Belt (2024) is the impediment posed toward those who want to enter this same world. In this peaceful vignette, there is neither wind nor currents that could propel a ship toward successful passage to the coveted destination.

One Piece coincides with the release of Kaifan Wang’s first monograph. Eponymously titled, this in-depth exploration of the artist’s practice features essays by Xiaoyu Weng, Martin Herbert, and Marta Gnyp.

作品图拍摄：Hannah Mjølsnes，现场图拍摄：Evan Walsh，视频制作：Dan Finlayson