傅文俊 Fu Wenjun

美国人卡尔.萨根，被称为 “全世界最伟大的科普作家”，他在那本别具影响的著作《神秘的宇宙》中对人的记忆做了一种非常有趣的诠释。他说，大脑的发育是因为人的基因无法储存我们生存所需要的全部信息的结果。而后来，我们的复杂生存环境又需要我们知道比大脑储存得更多的信息，继而人类才发明了体外储存信息的本领。体外信息储存的真实含义其实就是我们称之为的“集体记忆”。
在书中，卡尔.萨根说的这种储存信息的本领主要指的是书籍。所以，照他的说法，书籍算得上是人类最主动最系统的集体记忆手段。人类靠书写来记忆它所经历的种种创造与毁灭、成功与失败、优美与丑陋、善良与罪恶，并把它们装订为册，由此，人类历史的行为踪迹被选择性地保留了下来。但是，除了书写，我们不能忽略，人类留下的物品也是我们记忆的一部分，比如器皿，比如服饰，比如建筑，比如艺术。大多数人对人类的集体记忆都持有一种保护意识，因为记忆是人的历史存在的唯一证明。但令人费解的是，有一些人却对记忆充满了偏见与仇恨，为了个人或社会动机，他们会对这些记忆载体——书籍、建筑和艺术点起火来，把它们付之一炬，其目的是人为地造成人类的集体失忆。两千多年前的秦始皇、秦末草莽英雄项羽、攻打中国的八国联军、第二次世界大战发动者希特勒都是这类喜欢放火的暴徒。它们抹去了许多珍贵记忆凭据，但它们反人类而动的暴力行为仍然逃不掉我们的记忆。要不然我们今天怎么会知道他们的劣迹斑斑呢?
除此之外，自然界也在记忆与失忆之间参与进来,用它掌握着的无尽的时间武器来灭绝记忆凭证。经过岁月的消磨，一切事物都将变得模糊甚至腐败而最终销声匿迹。更有趣的是，历史仿佛懂得人的情感心理，让失忆成为人从痛苦中自我解脱的最佳良药。但殊不知，自然规律设置的对人类这一有目的的善良初衷，恰恰违背了人类需要记忆的愿望。由此，人类发明了各种各样的记忆工具对此进行抗争。

The American scientist Carl Sagan, hailed as “the greatest science popularizer in the world,” offers a striking interpretation of human memory in his influential work Cosmos. He argues that the development of the human brain is, in fact, a consequence of the limitations of our genes, which are incapable of storing all the information necessary for survival. As human living environments grew increasingly complex, they demanded knowledge far exceeding the brain’s innate storage capacity. It was under these conditions that humanity invented the capacity for external information storage. The true significance of such externalized storage is what we refer to as “collective memory.”
In the book, the form of information storage to which Carl Sagan primarily refers is the book. By his account, books may be regarded as humanity’s most active and systematic means of collective memory. Through writing, human beings record the creations and destructions they have experienced, their successes and failures, their beauty and ugliness, their goodness and evil, binding these records into volumes. In this way, the traces of human historical action are selectively preserved. Yet beyond writing, we must not overlook the fact that material objects left behind by humanity are also integral components of memory: vessels, garments, architecture, and works of art. Most people maintain an instinctive impulse to protect humanity’s collective memory, for memory constitutes the sole proof of our historical existence. What is perplexing, however, is that some individuals harbor prejudice and even hatred toward memory itself. Driven by personal or social motives, they set fire to these carriers of memory—books, buildings, and works of art—reducing them to ashes, with the deliberate aim of engineering a collective amnesia. Figures such as Qin Shi Huang more than two millennia ago, Xiang Yu at the end of the Qin dynasty, the Eight-Nation Alliance during their invasion of China, and Adolf Hitler, the instigator of the Second World War, all belong to this category of arsonist-tyrants. They erased countless precious evidences of memory, yet their anti-human acts of violence themselves could not escape remembrance. Otherwise, how would we today know so well the extent of their ignominy?
Beyond human agency, nature itself also enters into the contest between memory and forgetting, wielding the inexhaustible weapon of time to annihilate the evidences of memory. Under the erosion of years, all things gradually grow indistinct, decay, and ultimately vanish without a trace. More intriguingly, history seems almost to understand human emotional psychology, allowing forgetting to function as a palliative through which individuals may liberate themselves from suffering. Yet what often goes unrecognized is that this benevolent intention embedded in natural law—designed to ease human pain—runs counter to humanity’s need for memory. Precisely for this reason, human beings have invented a wide array of mnemonic tools in order to resist and contend with forgetting.

因此，我们可以结论说：记忆与失忆从就没有放弃过一种势均力敌的博弈。
所以，一种更重要的记忆方式在上上个世纪末被发明出来，这就是我们目前最广为使用的摄影。
今天，无论在哪儿，只要人群集中的地方就有摄影。可以说每一个参加派对、开幕式或酷爱旅游的人手里都不会再是握着一支笔，而可能是拿着一个相机。今天，摄影几乎已经取代了一切其他工具成了记忆最优先的选择。它的重要性不言而喻。在今天，无论在世界的哪个角落发生了公共事件，摄影都会尾随而至，会真凭实据地把证据保存下来，从而进入人们的集体记忆之中。正因为我们对摄影的如此依赖，一种既传统又先锋的艺术形式——摄影——在当代艺术架构中才可能占有了一个非常重要的位置。

Therefore, we may conclude that memory and forgetting have never ceased to engage in a contest of evenly matched forces.
Consequently, a more significant mode of memory was invented toward the end of the century before last: photography, which has since become one of the most widely used forms of memory in our time.
Today, wherever crowds gather, photography is present. It can be said that anyone attending a party, an opening ceremony, or devoted to travel no longer holds a pen in hand, but rather a camera. Photography has all but replaced other tools to become the primary medium of memory. Its significance is self-evident. In our time, no matter where in the world a public event occurs, photography follows closely behind, preserving tangible evidence and thus entering into collective memory. Precisely because of this profound reliance on photography, a form that is at once traditional and avant-garde, photography has come to occupy a crucial position within the structure of contemporary art.

傅文俊便是坚持用摄影镜头来陈述自己艺术观念的艺术家。在他的作品中，记忆作为艺术的功能之一，仿佛总是被他不厌其烦地凸显出来：已经被废弃的工业设备，立即就要被现代化浪潮淹没的旧城、遗留着生活痕迹的面孔……，不仅仅是传统意义上再现式的记忆，傅文俊重视的是时间在物体上的刻痕，这些刻痕就是自然力量要毁灭记忆的步骤之一。傅文俊的作品似乎妄想与自然界的失忆进行较量。敏感的观者根据他图像中的刻痕提示便可以从中对照自已的审美与文化价值判断，回忆起记忆中的失忆。
作为一种记忆与失忆博弈的视觉论证，傅文俊在北京今日美术馆个展展示的两组新作——《十二生肖》和《万国园记》就是对记忆与失忆的文化阐释。《十二生肖》这组图组是把中国人熟悉的北京圆明园的历史残骸作为画面的背景，在近处，一个打开的电脑屏幕上，圆明园的十二生肖兽首骇然在目。这些造型怪异的动物头颅其实并没有崇高的审美价值，反而是丑陋无比，甚至可以被归为造型上的失败之作。但它们象征的中国人的历史命运却赋予了这些不伦不类的红铜雕刻巨大的文物价值，也因此而引申出了高度的商业价值。圆明园兽首曾经一度印证了中华民族过去的耻辱伤痛与今日的经济成功之间的纠结心态而成为了拍卖与媒体的焦点。傅文俊正是利用了传媒的高密度累积而产生的全民认知效应，把它转化成了图像文本。电脑屏幕、十二生肖兽首与圆明园遗迹在图像上的共创图景暗示了历史与当下、虚拟与现实、失败与成功、商业与传播等诸多时代情结。傅文俊通过这些情结的图像记忆揭橥了中国人在现实与历史的纠葛中特有的“剪不断，理还乱”的既快意又凄厉的文化精神。

Fu Wenjun is precisely an artist who persists in articulating his artistic concepts through the photographic lens. In his work, memory—as one of art’s essential functions—appears to be repeatedly and insistently foregrounded: abandoned industrial machinery, old urban districts on the verge of being engulfed by waves of modernization, faces bearing residual traces of lived experience. Yet this is not merely memory in the traditional, representational sense. What Fu Wenjun emphasizes are the inscriptions of time upon objects—marks that constitute one of the stages through which natural forces seek to annihilate memory. His works seem to harbor an audacious ambition: to contend with nature’s propensity for forgetting. Guided by the traces embedded in his images, perceptive viewers are able to measure their own aesthetic sensibilities and cultural value judgments against them, thereby recalling the forgetting that resides within memory itself.
As a visual argument articulating the contest between memory and forgetting, the two new series presented in Fu Wenjun’s solo exhibition at the Today Art Museum—Twelve Chinese Zodiac Signs and Story of Expo Garden—offer a cultural interpretation of this dynamic. In Twelve Chinese Zodiac Signs, Fu Wenjun takes the historical ruins of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, so familiar to the Chinese public, as the background of the images. In the foreground, an open computer screen startlingly displays the twelve bronze zodiac animal heads from the Old Summer Palace. These oddly shaped animal heads possess little in the way of elevated aesthetic value; on the contrary, they are strikingly ungainly and could even be regarded as failures in sculptural form. Yet the historical destiny they symbolize for the Chinese people has endowed these incongruous red-bronze sculptures with immense value as cultural relics, which in turn has generated extraordinary commercial value. For a time, the zodiac heads of the Old Summer Palace embodied the entangled psyche of the Chinese nation, caught between the humiliation and trauma of the past and the economic success of the present, thus becoming focal points of auctions and media attention. Fu Wenjun precisely harnesses the collective cognitive effect produced by the high-density accumulation of media exposure, transforming it into an image-text. The composite visual scene formed by the computer screen, the zodiac heads, and the ruins of the Old Summer Palace suggests a range of contemporary tensions: between history and the present, the virtual and the real, failure and success, commerce and communication. Through these image-memories of entanglement, Fu Wenjun reveals a distinctly Chinese cultural spirit—at once exhilarating and tragic—characterized by an emotional condition that is “impossible to cut through, yet no clearer for having been sorted,” arising from the ongoing struggle between historical legacy and present reality.

摄影作为记忆手段发明一个多世纪后，电脑在全球普及成了个人的日常用品。电脑与从它派生出来的网络技术最后成为了人类社会，或者更进一步说从地球生成以来最便捷，最充分，最有效，最持久、也是最集大成的一种记忆方式。电脑以及网络技术是人类反自然或征服自然的最高成就之一。当一种图像或一段文字通过它被蓄意传输上网络之后不久，这些信息就会被好事者所转移、下载或收藏，使它成为一种永远的存在，即便有人企图刻意对它进行删除也将为时过晚。
傅文俊对电脑这个现代化的伟大成果决不会掉以轻心，他把它作为图像中一个稳定的符号固定下来，权当自己艺术系统的逻辑线索。他的另一件作品《万国园记》和《十二生肖》一样同样是被这个线索连接成了他的图式系列。《万国园记》与《十二生肖》相同的是形式上的一贯性：建筑背景、电脑道具、以及电脑中的图像。不同的是内容却作了大幅度的更换：《万国园记》把《十二生肖》的圆明园废墟更换成了2010上海世博中的英、法、德、意、奥、美、俄、日等国专馆的不同身影，而电脑中的图像置换成了圆明园废墟。众所周知，圆明园废墟在此时此刻的现身，使中国世博园里的八个国家复现出了它们的历史面孔。这些国家曾经组成一个联盟于1900年对清帝国发动了一场征战。作为这场战争的胜利者，他们在英法联军1860年焚毁过的圆明园再度放火，并进行了更残暴的掠夺。因而，圆明园废墟就不单只是一个历史遗迹，也不仅仅是中华民族机体上的一道战争创口，它更是中国人精神上永远都难以抚平的伤痛。而在中国人的记忆中八国联军也几乎就成了为我们造成这个伤痛最主要的罪魁祸首。

More than a century after photography was invented as a means of memory, the computer has become a ubiquitous object of everyday life across the globe. Together with the network technologies derived from it, the computer has ultimately evolved into the most convenient, comprehensive, efficient, enduring, and indeed most integrative form of memory in human society—or, more radically, since the emergence of life on Earth itself. Computers and network technologies represent one of humanity’s highest achievements in resisting, or even conquering, nature. Once an image or a passage of text is deliberately uploaded to the internet, it is only a matter of time before it is copied, downloaded, or archived by others, thereby acquiring a form of permanent existence. Even if someone later attempts to erase it intentionally, such efforts will almost certainly come too late.
Fu Wenjun does not take lightly the computer as a great achievement of modernity. He fixes it within his images as a stable sign, treating it as a logical thread within his artistic system. His other work, Story of Expo Garden, like Twelve Chinese Zodiac Signs, is likewise connected by this thread and thus forms part of a coherent schematic series. What Story of Expo Garden shares with Twelve Chinese Zodiac Signs is a consistency of form: architectural backdrops, the computer as a prop, and images displayed on the computer screen. What differs, however, is a substantial shift in content. In Story of Expo Garden, the ruins of the Old Summer Palace that appear in Twelve Chinese Zodiac Signs are replaced by the various national pavilions—British, French, German, Italian, Austrian, American, Russian, Japanese, among others—at the Shanghai World Expo of 2010, while the images on the computer screen are substituted with views of the Old Summer Palace ruins. As is well known, the appearance of the Old Summer Palace ruins at this particular moment causes these eight nations within China’s Expo Park to re-present their historical faces. These countries once formed the Eight-Nation Alliance, launching a war against the Qing Empire in 1900. As victors in that conflict, they again set fire to the Old Summer Palace—already burned by the Anglo-French forces in 1860—and carried out even more brutal acts of plunder. Consequently, the ruins of the Old Summer Palace are not merely a historical site, nor simply a wound inflicted upon the body of the Chinese nation; they constitute a spiritual trauma that remains perpetually difficult to heal. In Chinese collective memory, the Eight-Nation Alliance has thus come to be regarded as the principal culprit responsible for this enduring pain.

从中国人第一次参加世博会到今天，中国所经历的这种巨大的历史变迁真是难以令人置信.1904年，中国官方正式接受参加世博会，China这个神秘东方大国的到来在整个西方引起了轩然大波，西洋人对中国的巨大好奇心似乎给满清王朝带来了荣誉的满足感。但随后一场羞辱接踪而至，负责中国参会的组织者设计了一组泥雕：街头娼妓、杀人囚犯、鸦片烟鬼、褴褛乞丐、小脚女人，它们在西方人用来展示高科技的世博园里荟集一堂。中国几千年来最野蛮、最丑陋的一面集中展现于世人，以致让外人凡过眼者无不哑然失笑、嗤之以鼻，而国人凡自尊者莫不无地自容、视为国耻。但中国的百年磨难却仿佛在提出一个漫不经心的反问：中国的国耻哪止于此?国耻了又何妨?
国耻固然难当。我们可以设想倘若我们没有经历百年沧桑，没有现代主义的觉醒，没有一场革命的洗礼，没有经济崛起，2010年的世博能演变为今日中国主场吗?我们能雪耻蒙光，去辱居贵吗?傅文俊的作品正是诞生于这种复杂的背景、心境与语境。作为一个艺术家，面对当下境遇，他的创作手记作了如此记录：“看到上海世博园中各个国家馆的相继设立，在这欣欣向荣的建构场面与圆明园废墟的景象之间，某种无言的诉说震撼着我的心灵……我想到了2010这个具有历史性意义的时刻。”

From China’s first participation in a World Expo to the present day, the magnitude of the historical transformation the country has undergone is scarcely believable. In 1904, the Chinese government officially accepted the invitation to take part in a World Expo. The arrival of China—that mysterious great power of the East—provoked a considerable sensation across the Western world. Westerners’ intense curiosity about China seemed, at least momentarily, to confer a sense of honor and gratification upon the late Qing court. This, however, was swiftly followed by a profound humiliation. The organizers responsible for China’s exhibition designed a group of clay figures depicting street prostitutes, convicted murderers, opium addicts, ragged beggars, and women with bound feet. These figures were assembled together within an exposition space otherwise devoted to showcasing Western technological progress. In this display, what were construed as the most barbaric and ugliest aspects of China’s millennia-long history were concentrated and exposed before the world. Foreign viewers could scarcely suppress their derision, responding with mute laughter and contempt, while any Chinese observer possessing a sense of dignity found no place to hide, regarding it as a national disgrace. Yet a century of suffering seems to pose an almost indifferent counter-question: was China’s national humiliation limited to this alone? And even if it were humiliation—what then?
National humiliation is, of course, difficult to bear. Yet we may ask: had China not endured a century of upheaval, had there been no awakening of modernism, no baptism of revolution, no economic resurgence—could the World Expo of 2010 have unfolded as China’s own stage today? Could we have redeemed humiliation and reclaimed dignity, transforming disgrace into esteem? Fu Wenjun’s work emerges precisely from this complex convergence of historical background, emotional disposition, and discursive context. As an artist confronting the circumstances of the present, he records the following in his creative notes: “Watching the national pavilions of various countries rise one after another in the Shanghai Expo Park, I felt an unspoken narration reverberate through my spirit—caught between this scene of vigorous construction and the image of the ruins of the Old Summer Palace… It led me to contemplate the historically significant moment of 2010.”

根据傅文俊提供的图像，我们应该这样来理解：今天我们不适宜再采用壮志饥餐胡虏肉，笑谈渴饮匈奴血的暴虐姿态来洗清百年国耻;我们需要的是保持冷静的历史记忆，我们需要的是更进一步的成功，我们需要的是一种国际共生关系中的宽容。但不能轻视的是，只有成功者的宽容才可能成为宽容，而失败者的宽容恰恰是一种懦弱，而那些曾经的施暴者经过百年的风雨轮回骤然面对受辱者崛起，露出的必定是一种失忆后的笑意温柔。
因此，我们总是说，当代艺术是具有问题意识的艺术，是具有意义的视觉符号。而傅文俊的摄影就是有意识地利用这种符号来所指中国在千年难逢的时代机遇的信心与困惑，成功与反思、自满与自卑的历史心态，是在故意挑动记忆对失忆的激烈博弈。

关于作者：张奇开，四川美术学院油画系教授。

Based on the images provided by Fu Wenjun, we may arrive at the following understanding: today it is no longer appropriate to purge a century of national humiliation through a violent posture of heroic fervor—of “feasting on the flesh of the enemy” or “laughing as one drinks their blood.” What is required instead is a composed and lucid historical memory; what is needed is further success; what is called for is a form of tolerance grounded in relationships of international coexistence. Yet one point must not be underestimated: only the tolerance of the successful can truly be called tolerance, whereas the tolerance of the defeated is all too easily reduced to weakness. And those who were once perpetrators of violence, after a century of historical cycles, when suddenly confronted with the rise of those they once humiliated, will inevitably reveal a gentle smile born of forgetting.
Therefore, we often say that contemporary art is an art endowed with a consciousness of problems, an art of meaningful visual signs. Fu Wenjun’s photography deliberately mobilizes such signs to point toward China’s confidence and perplexity amid a once-in-a-millennium historical opportunity—its success and self-reflection, its complacency and insecurity as historical states of mind—intentionally provoking an intense contest between memory and forgetting.

About the author: Zhang Qikai is a professor in the Oil Painting Department at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute.