傅文俊 Fu Wenjun

近年来，中国艺术家傅文俊的数绘摄影正在得到越来越多的关注。通过大量的艺术作品，如《空山新雨后》、《小楼昨夜又东风》、《问茶》、《F1》、《人间四月》，《红樱桃》等，傅文俊逐渐将“数绘摄影”这一概念发展成为一种清晰的艺术表现形式。数绘摄影是通过数码后期调整与多重曝光摄影图像，组合绘画元素，以揭示独特的视觉效果。它强调重新发现和重组图像资源。傅文俊的作品不仅出现在重要的国际展览中，而且得到了许多当代艺术史学家的认可。

傅文俊本人曾经说过：“我在我的作品中其实融入了很多对中国传统艺术的体会。很多人说我的作品‘不像摄影’，但是‘不像摄影’，反而是一种新的呈现方式，我们可以改变任何东西，做一些跳脱常识性的改变。”傅文俊以摄影为媒介进行艺术表达，综合了现代艺术和当代艺术的精髓，如达达主义、抽象表现主义、概念艺术和波普艺术等。在摆脱纪实摄影束缚的同时，傅文俊的数绘摄影捕捉了绘画元素，体现出中国传统艺术中的写意性。它们为人们提供了意想不到的革新和视觉体验。美国当代女批评家罗萨琳·克劳斯（Rosalind Krauss）曾指出，自盛期现代主义绘画之后，艺术作品就极大地拓宽了媒介的内涵。媒介可以是某种事物，也可以是行为本身。换言之，媒介不再拘泥于具体的物，而存在于与观众进行沟通的场域之中。为了挑战人们对艺术媒介的内在观念，傅文俊邀请观众思考艺术的界限。

In recent years, Chinese artist Fu Wenjun is getting more attention. Through a large number of works of art, such as After Fresh Rain in the Mountain, East Wind Blew Again Last Night, Ask Tea, F1, April, Red Cherry, etc., Fu Wenjun gradually made the concept “digital pictorial painting” into a clear form of artistic expression. Digital pictorial photography is a combination of painting elements through digital post-adjustment and multiple-exposure photographic images to reveal unique visual effects. It emphasizes the rediscovering and reuse of image resources. Fu’s works not only appear in important international exhibitions, but also are appreciated by many contemporary art historians.

Fu Wenjun himself once said: “I actually incorporate a lot of experience of traditional Chinese art in my work. Many people say that my work is ‘not like photography’, but ‘unlike photography’ is a new way of presentation. We can change anything.” Fu Wenjun uses photography to express his artistic ideas and integrates the essence of modern and contemporary art such as Dadaism, Abstract Expressionism, conceptual art and pop art. While getting rid of the shackles of documentary photography, Fu’s digital pictorial photography captures painting elements, embodying a touch of freehand brushwork in traditional Chinese art. They offer people with unexpected innovations and new visual experience. Rosalind Krauss, a contemporary American female critic, once pointed out that artworks after the modernist paintings have greatly broadened the connotation of “medium”. A medium can be something solid, or it can be a behavior itself. In other words, artists’ medium is no longer tied to specific things; it exists in the field of communication with the audience. With the purpose of challenging people’s inherent ideas about artistic medium, Fu Wenjun invites his audience to think about the boundaries of art.

摄影一直被视为一种纪实性的艺术，而数绘摄影则模糊了现实与幻觉之间的界限。观众被邀请进入由艺术家创作的不同场景中去。傅文俊的作品都应该被视为一个序列来看待，因为序列为观众提供了一种完整的语境。正如美国当代学者克劳德·赛努齐（Claude Cernuschi）在分析美国抽象表现主义画家弗兰兹·克莱恩（Franz Kline）时所指出的那样：“人们根据作品周围的画布以及他们所内化的参考框架或解释背景来描述单个作品。因此，一幅像是《普罗斯特1号》（Probst I）这样的抽象绘画不可能有一个单一的、固定的意义，或者说，会在观众那里唤起相同的情感共鸣。它的意义不可能独立于观者而存在……意义或共鸣存在于观众的心中。”类似地，傅文俊的数绘摄影也取决于语境和观看者的参与。

傅文俊曾经这样总结过他的创作手段：“我的观念将以拼贴、并置等方式表达”。拼贴和并置是西方现代和当代艺术的重要创作手段。它们最早是由20世纪早期的现代艺术大师发起的，如巴布罗·毕加索（Pablo Picasso）和乔治·勃拉克（Gorge Braque），最终掌握在罗伯特·劳申伯格（Robert Rauschenberg）和安迪·沃霍尔（Andy Warhol）等后现代艺术家的手中。但不同的是，西方艺术的后现代并置在很大程度上取消了对立，而傅文俊则加剧了不同物体之间的对立，从而在二维平面上产生了张力。

Photography has always been regarded as documentary, while digital pictorial photography blurs the line between reality and illusion. The viewer is invited to enter different scenes created by the artist. Fu Wenjun’s works should be treated as a sequence, because they provide a complete context for the audience. As American contemporary scholar Claude Cernuschi has pointed out when analyzing Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline: “An individual canvas will be read in in terms of the canvases that surround it as well as against the frame of reference, or interpretive background, the spectator has gradually internalized. Consequently, a painting such as Probst I cannot have a single, fixed meaning or emotive resonance existing ‘on’ the canvas…That meaning or resonance, rather, is ‘in’ the spectator’s mind.” Similarly, the meaning of Fu’s digital pictorial photography is also contingent on context and on the beholder’s participation.

Fu Wenjun once summed up his creative means as such: “My concept will be expressed by means of collage, juxtaposition, etc.” Collage and juxtaposition are important methods in western modern and contemporary art. They were initiated by the masters of early 20th century modern art such as Pablo Picasso and Gorge Braque, culminating in the hands of postmodern artists such as Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. But the difference is that the post-modern juxtaposition of Western art largely cancels oppositions, while Fu Wenjun sharpens the opposition between different items, thus creating a tension on the two-dimensional surface.

傅文俊用各种分解和重构塑造了他的数绘摄影。当代评论家凯瑟琳·库赫（Katharine W. Kuh）认为，现代艺术的核心便是“分解”。她提出，在我们这个时代，艺术的特征表现在以下几个方面：破碎的外表，凌乱的色彩，分散的构图，分解的形状和破碎的形象。自现代艺术诞生以来，艺术的每个部分都被分解了，包括颜色、光线、颜料、形状、线条、空间、绘画表面和布局。现代艺术一直强调“分解”，但是，分解并不意味着缺乏规则，它试图建立一个新规则。换句话说，分解是另一种形式的重构。通过这样做，艺术家分析、扩大和分离了过去人们容易忽视的一些方面，并且，还经常为他们提供一些丰富而复杂的体验。

正如当代艺术史学家伊夫-阿兰·博瓦（Yve-Alain Bois）指出的那样，大多数抽象艺术家从不厌倦强调其抽象和概念主题的丰富性。作为一个生活在中国西南地区的艺术家，傅文俊一直试图表现出传统民族文化与当代文化的碰撞，这是他作品中的一个重要主题。在《问茶》系列作品中，傅文俊选择在画面中心位置呈现中国传统茶馆中的典型日常物品，但整个图像却又显示出这些物体的碎片化和分割。一方面，创作者将历史带回到现实之中，另一方面则强调了现代生活方式对传统生活方式的冲击。在他的《小楼昨夜又东风》、《空山新雨后》等作品中，傅文俊也思考了过去和现在的二元对立。其创作过程非常耗时。例如，为了创作《十二生肖》系列，傅文俊曾经花费很久在圆明园拍摄纪实摄影。回到重庆后，他又花了五个月的时间完成了总体工作。对世界的细致观察以及大量繁重的后期加工，在傅文俊的创作过程中都是必不可少的。

Fu Wenjun has shaped his digital pictorial photography with various decompositions and reconstructions. Contemporary critic Katharine W. Kuh believes that the core of modern art is “break-up”. She proposes that in our time, the characteristics of art are manifested in the following aspects: broken appearances, messy colors, scattered composition, disintegrated shape and broken images. Since the birth of modern art, every part of art has been broken down, including colors, light, paint, shapes, lines, spaces, painting surfaces and layouts. Modern art has always emphasized “break-up”, but it does not mean lack of rules. It attempts to establish a new rule. In other words, break-up is another form of reconstruction. By doing so, artists analyze, enlarge, and separate some aspects that people have easily overlooked in the past, and provide them with rich and complex experience.

Just as contemporary art historian Yve-Alain Bois has pointed out, most abstract artists are never tired of stressing the richness of their abstract/conceptual subject-matter. As an artist living in the southwestern province of China, Fu Wenjun has been trying to show the collision between traditional national culture and contemporary culture, which is an important theme in his works. In Ask Tea series, Fu chooses to locate typical daily objects of Chinese teahouse in the center, but the whole images display fragmentations and divisions. This is a way of bringing history back to the present on one hand, and emphasizing the impact of modern lifestyle on tradition on the other hand. In his East Wind Blew Again Last Night, Come and Go, and After Fresh Rain in the Mountain, Fu Wenjun also contemplates on the binary opposition such as the past and the present. The process of creation is time-consuming. For example, in order to create Twelve Zodiac series, Fu Wenjun took several days taking documentary photos in Yuanmingyuan. After returning to Chongqing, he spent another five months to complete the work. A detailed observation of the world and a large amount of tedious post-processing are both essential in Fu Wenjun’s creation.

探索抽象是数绘摄影的一个主要特征。虽然我们经常感觉很难描述抽象，但是对于抽象的体验却是我们视觉体验中的重要组成部分。傅文俊似乎是一位典型的抽象艺术家。但我认为这个结论是不完整的。在1935年与克里斯蒂安·塞沃斯（Christian Zervos）的著名对话中，毕加索表达了这样的想法：“并不存在抽象艺术。你必须从某样事物开始。然后你才可以移除所有现实事物的样子；这样就不存在任何危险了，因为事物的概念已经留下了难以磨灭的印象。”现在越来越多的人则意识到，对“抽象”和“具象”之间二分法的解释只是一种历史现象，而不是某种客观真理。

从近处看，我们倾向于将傅文俊的作品解释为形式的多样化组合，但是从一定的距离来看，我们可能更倾向于将它们解释为一个统一整体。这当然是一种笼统的概括，但在许多方面，人们在区分多样性和统一性方面确实遇到了困难。这种困难表明，抽象艺术作品的意义存在于观众的主动重建和瞬间体验中。通过数绘摄影，傅文俊试图唤起人们的敏锐感知。在这些作品中，抽象和再现都不是最终目的，而是手段。生动的图像背后隐藏的是艺术家对人、历史和文化现状的反思。因此，他的作品展现了多重和一的辩证统一：即使傅文俊的数绘摄影的形式和技巧有所不同，但它们都呈现出一个思考着的艺术家形象。

The exploration of abstraction is a major feature of digital pictorial photography. Although we often find it difficult to describe abstraction, the experience of it play an important part in our visual activities. It seems sure enough that Fu Wenjun is a typical abstract artist. But I think this conclusion is incomplete. In a famous conversation with Christian Zervos in 1935, Pablo Picasso expressed such ideas: “There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterwards you can remove all appearance of reality; there is no longer any danger, because the idea of the object left an indelible mark.” Nowadays more and more people have realized that the interpretation of the dichotomy between “abstract” and “figurative” is only a historical phenomenon instead of an objective truth.

From a close perspective, we tend to interpret Fu Wenjun’s works as diversified combinations of forms, but from a certain distance, we may prefer to interpret them as a unified whole. This is of course a generalization, but in many ways, people do encounter difficulties in distinguishing diversity and unity. This difficulty shows that the meaning of abstract artworks exists in the active reconstruction and instantaneous experience of the viewer. Through digital pictorial photography, Fu Wenjun attempts to evoke people’s keen perception. In these works, both abstraction and representation are not final purposes but means. What lies behind the lively surface is always the artist’s reflection on the status quo of people, history and culture. As such, his artworks show a dialectical unity of multiple and one: even if the forms and techniques of Fu’s digital pictorial photography are different, they all present an image of the artist as a thinker.

因此，我们可以有把握地得出结论：即抽象是否抽象，并非是一个形式问题，而是一个认知问题。人们对抽象形成分歧，并不是因为艺术形式有多么含混，而是因为人们来自不同的“阐释共同体”，这个词来自美国阐释学家斯坦利·费什（Stanley Fish）。认识到观者在意义建构中的主体性，不仅是理性地解释抽象艺术作品的先决条件，也是开启所有解释的先决条件。人们对艺术作品中抽象元素的理解和欣赏深深植根于他们的基本认知能力之中，抽象并非远离大众。

当然，我们对数绘摄影的欣赏与阅读书籍也不一样。随着书页的翻阅，我们的认知会一点点发生变化，而当我们看到傅文俊的作品时，我们会感受到某种“视觉性综合失认”。 也就是说，我们的眼睛并非是静止于画面一处的，而是会处在不断变换焦点的过程中。于是，种种互相抵触的力量便发生了，这其中包括重力和向上的力，焦点和边缘之间的张力，等等。傅文俊不断挑战着人们捕捉信息的能力。通过复杂的色彩和线条，他的数绘摄影也挑战着人们的色彩认知和形状认知。傅文俊的许多数绘摄影作品在物体的边界和角色的轮廓边界上使用了柔和的色彩过渡，因此人们感觉到难以区分图底关系。相比之下，在《红樱桃》、《问茶》、《人间四月》这些作品中，艺术家使用立体主义的方式，将摄影作品表面分割为单独的小单元，并采用鲜艳的色彩和强烈的对比度，从而使得中心图像变得更加突出。

Thus we may safely conclude that whether abstraction is abstract is not a formal question, but a cognitive issue. People’s disagreements over abstraction is not so much due to the ambiguity of the artistic forms as to people’s different “interpretation community”, a term borrowed from Stanley Fish. To recognize the viewer’s subjectivity in the construction of meaning is not only a prerequisite for the rational interpretation of abstract artworks, but also a prerequisite for initiating all interpretations. People’s understanding and appreciation of abstract elements in artworks are deeply rooted in their basic cognitive abilities, and abstraction is not too high to be popular.

Of course, our appreciation of digital pictorial photography is not like reading. Our cognition changes as the pages of the book are flipped through, while when we look at Fu Wenjun’s works, we experience a “comprehensive loss of visual recognition”. In other words, our eyes are not at rest, but in the process of constantly changing focus. Thus, various contradictory forces occur, including tensions between the center and the edge, gravity versus upward force, and so on. The artist tests our ability to capture information through different contrasts. His digital pictorial photography challenges people’s color perception and shape perception with complex colors and lines. Many of Fu Wenjun’s digital pictorial photography use a soft color transition at the boundary of objects and the contour line of the characters, so that people feel the challenge to distinguish between the figure and the ground. By contrast, in works such as Red Cherry, Ask Tea and April, the artist applies a cubist approach to divide the surface of the photograph into separate small units, using bright colors and strong contrast, so the images in the center become more prominent.

我们可以从这种安排中发现什么？当代神经科学家已经证实，颜色知觉是一种重要的知觉，它能够促进形状知觉，因为颜色不能脱离形状而存在。通过分辨颜色，人们得以将一个物体或一个部分从空间中分辨出来。如果有人失去这种能力，就会发生视觉感知障碍。可以看出，颜色感知和形状感知彼此混合。神经科学家的研究为我们理解傅文俊的摄影提供了智性参考。例如，当我们观看《红樱桃》，我们能够识别樱桃的颜色，但艺术家故意添加了矩形方块来破坏水果的原始形状。另外，通过以写意的方式呈现红色，樱桃已成为高度模糊的象征，引导人们进入想象的世界。这种精确性和模糊性的结合使他的创作尤为引人注目。

What can we learn from such arrangements? Contemporary neuroscientists have discovered that color perception is an important ability that promotes shape perception because colors cannot exist without shape. By distinguishing colors, one distinguishes an object or a part from its surroundings. If someone lose this ability, a visual perception disorder will happen. It can be seen that color perception and shape perception are mixed with each other. The neuroscientists’ research provides an academic reference for us to understand Fu Wenjun’s photography. For example, when we look at Red Cherry, we are able to recognize the color of the cherry, but the artist has deliberately added some rectangular squares to destroy the original shape of the fruit. Moreover, by rendering red in a casual way, the cherry has become a highly blurred symbol that guides people to indulge in the world of imagination. This combination of precision and ambiguity makes his work particularly eye-catching.

数绘摄影的艺术价值仍需要进一步的研究和探讨。在文化多元化和摄影普及的背景下，摄影已经超越了光敏媒介的曝光过程，人们也迫切需要新的摄影语言。约翰·伯格（John Berger）和苏珊·桑塔格（Susan Sontag）等当代艺术评论家认为，摄影不仅是一种审美形式，也是一种具有民主精神的社会领域。艺术家对摄影的不断探索促使人们放弃旧的理论范式，以新颖多样的观点应对挑战。傅文俊的数绘摄影不仅展示了艺术家的才华和专业素养，也体现出他的文化和历史责任感。通过各种视觉可能性，观众和艺术家处于动态和良性的对话中，丰富了彼此对摄影和世界的理解。

关于作者：毛秋月，艺术批评家、浙江大学博士后、同济大学副教授。

It is true that the artistic value of digital pictorial photography still needs further research and discussion. In the context of cultural pluralism and photo popularization, photography has already developed beyond the process of light exposure of photosensitive media, and photography with new languages is in urgent need. Contemporary art critics such as John Berger and Susan Sontag believe that photography is not only an aesthetic form, but also a social field with democratic spirits. Artists’ constant exploration of photography urges people to abandon the old theoretical paradigm and respond to its challenges with fresh and diverse perspectives. Fu Wenjun’s digital pictorial photography not only displays the artist’s talents and professional qualities, but also represents his sense of cultural and historical responsibility. With various visual possibilities, the viewer and the artist are in a dynamic and benign interaction, enriching each other’s understanding of photography and the world.

About the author: Mao Qiuyue，Post-doctoral Researcher of Zhejiang University; Assitant Professor of Tongji University