Vase, Rather Than Vase

Jieyin Wang

Nov 29, 2008 ~ Dec 15

“Vase, rather than vase” is the main theme of a series of silk-screen printmaking Lu Zhiping has created in recent years. The internal essence of aesthetics and ideal of contemporary art behind the theme cover the artistic concept and pursuit of creation in all his artworks created in recent years. His printmaking series such as “Water Hometown”, “Archaeology” could be named with other similar titles, for he would like to present some historic and realistic images through the articles characterized by contemporary aesthetics by means of deliberate subversion, deconstruction, combination and restructuring. “Vase, rather than vase, uncommon vase”, the vases in Lu Zhiping’s artworks are not those ancient boutiques which we appreciate, however, they serve as traditional elements and factors integrated into the atmosphere of contemporary creation to seek the ideal convergence with the beauty of modernism, create brand-new constitutional logic and present artistic explicit mode featuring contemporary sentiment. Here traditional constitutional factors have been stimulated and obtained continual extension and expansion while inherent essence of beauty has been extracted and enhanced, thus finding companion in the new field of aesthetics to be transformed into brand-new inspiration featuring “image-oriented” philosophy as well as symbolic metaphor.

Many traditional historic art symbols have consciously been injected into Lu Zhiping’s artworks, for example, there are monster pattern, dragon & phoenix pattern and thunder pattern on bronze wares, net pattern, string pattern and falling curtain pattern on pottery in “Vase, rather than vase” series, tangled-branch pattern, bent-branch pattern and lotus pattern on porcelain. When these symbols are integrated into the atmosphere of subversion and reconstruction as cited, they turn into a series of modern symbols of beauty orientation. Perhaps Lu Zhiping realizes that for people in modern age who are keen on physical spirit, they call for new spiritual space. Therefore, he tries to construct an unique “possible world” by means of deconstruction language while the real world turns to object-concreting of the “possible world”, in which way he tries to doubt the real world, isolate substance, guide people to another space to seek unique companion and reaffirm the judgment of beauty value.