I suggest that meaning in painting is invested in its materials and processes, this is what we call painting methodology that many are pursuing. In the last essay, I differentiated the function of painting from that of photography, paintings referring to source images transmit message beyond the superficial. Thus, this mechanism also applies to sensitize the viewers who nowadays have been bombarded by the vast amounts of images and tired of distinguishing between information and manipulation, which attributes to the malpractice and misrepresentation of various mass media.

 

To be clear, the overall context is that people are living under the shade of post-truth, which is an epidemic phenomenon that has heavily affected the ideology of society in which appeals to emotion and personal belief are more influential than objective facts in shaping public opinion.

 

Many contemporary artists are leading people to question content of information and means of representation by employing different art techniques. Painting as a traditionally visual form has its own limits in many aspects. However, the point is that, when facing the pressure of information crisis, painting is also able to make information interrogate, and to rethink society in cultural, historical, and more importantly, aesthetic terms, rather than generating the reproduction of the substance of things. At the same time, painting is capable of constructing a self-reflective medium, which ‘coaches’ its viewers to ask relevant questions by themselves.

 

Working on source materials

 

My work is mainly based on photographs from different channels. The process to collect images is a way to understand a whole situation through its fragments, A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show, which can count as evidence, but not the mirror of the reality. Actually, the first-hand images we get on television, newspapers and the internet are the result of a geographical and social fragmentation of the production (Alfredo Cramerotti, 2009, P57)Any image in the context of such an information age is the product of this whole society. Its existence is built on a vast network of connections that connects each role in one event, such as the victim, communicator, documenter and witness, and finally reaches the public. Each character has an indelible influence on the meaning of the image and has changed the value of this image. Which means that a single image does not stand as an isolated episode, but rather reflects ‘the values of its context’ (Alfredo Cramerotti, 2009, P58) 

 

If these images are the views on the world, artists can feed themselves by absorbing the nutrition of information. Then to provides a “view on the view,” a way to question our assumptions about how we perceive the world.If we look at the work by Uwe Witter,his work reflects on the nature and meaning of images. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ballroom 2013

 

His source material is carefully chosen from digital representations,researched in the depths of the internet.just like jumping memories. He keeps track of the trajectory of each image for a long time, presenting the emotion behind the image, including violence, loss, or happiness.Throughout his work, Wittwer is concerned with authenticity and truth, multiple refractions of reality, and the role of the artist as image hunter and voyeur (Parafin Ltd, 2016)

 

Similarly, in the Chinese artist Peiming Yan’s watercolor work Sudanese Child (2006), the source image is one of a series of children’s portraits in the Deutsche Bank Collectionthatwe’ve seen countless times on TV or in the newspapers. We know it all too well from news coverage of war and humanitarian catastrophe: a starving child from a Third-World country staring at us from vacant eyes. It is an image that has almost become a stereotype and lost its provocative power. It is really a sorrow to acknowledge that most of the photographs from the press, social media and individuals are gradually deprived of the function to stimulate imagination and emotion as there is too much horror being watched every day. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sudanese Child 2006

 

Battles and massacres documented as they unfold have been a routine ingredient of the ceaseless flow of domestic, small-screen entertainment. (Susan Sontag 1977, P30). Photo is a critical medium that people usually receive, although sometimes its reportages are able to traumatize, but rarely ‘move’ the viewer, which means it hardly functions as reference for in-depth discussion or consequential actions that are fundamentally important in the process of creating empathy and sensitizing. in Sudanese Child Yan Pei-Ming succeeds in giving the image back its urgency through a form of painting that is as analytical as it is powerful in expression – the penetrating gaze. This is a kind of expression that allows us to talk about this mean of representation together with questioning the content it brings.

questioning the content means the exploration of realness, to find out what has actually happened or is happening. 

 

Revisiting and Reinterpretation

 

The first-hand reportage and visual representation are often provided by the minor group, resulting in a distance between the event and most of the masses. and our situation is altogether different. However, the ultra-familiar, ultra-celebrated image—of an agony, of ruin—is an unavoidable feature of our camera-mediated knowledge of the world, which means there is always a collective connection or similarity in everybody’s experience, that sends its messages in a flash through every past memory and present feeling. 

For many well-known figures and affairs, painting is serving as an access for people to revisit them, for example, by producing political or religious photo-based paintings, it is not about telling the existing truth, it is more about representing something that perhaps viewers are familiar with a second time, but in the next moment, introduce them a sense of strangeness and a narrative different from what they are used to. By which, not only the artist but also audiences can participate in the cooperation to reinterpret and revisit images that are quite symbolic.

 

  It is useful to return toartist Yan Pei-Ming’s works, which produced partly based on his memory of public spaces dominated by those historical figures. Thus, the use of their iconic images has released his intimate and personal memory and imagination. He was not the only one to go through this complex experience, of course; an entire generation that has experienced and survived the dramatic changes of global geopolitics. Ming’s painting is capable of revoking empathy within audiences according to their personal memory and experience of the world.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pope Jean-Paul II 2005 

 

we can see the vivid result of the passionate, dynamic, and powerful gestures with which he "attacks" the canvas—without lacking in conceptual depth. In compositions with broad, sweeping gestures and visible drips, he is successful in adopting these paints property as a realm to bring up something that is originally behind the source materials.

Pope Jean Paul II is one of his celebrity paintings, in which, the portrait depicted is far from any kind of celebration or worship to those personalities. On the contrary, they are provocative, critical, and even subversive. which is the force in order to mobilize public opinion and social awareness. This provocation not only subverts the convention of artistic representation; more importantly, it challenges the common sense of values in public language. (Deutsche Bank AG, 2012)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Revisiting something iconic and representative is to pick those images again, what do we think those people now, by looking images once more, it asks audiences to think about the political complicity and humanitarian crisis. In this image, pope Francis is about to keen down and kiss the feet of South Sudan’s previously warring leaders. 

The story behind and context of this depiction should teach us that hundreds of thousands of citizens died in the civil war caused by the clash of political power and parties.It is pope who performed this rare gesture, appealing to the two military forces to stay in peace on behalf of the victims. This photo has actually heavily moved many people after being published through the broadcast. however photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace, cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened. Is pope’s visit a performance or a real strategy? for me, this image serves as a signal to the fragile and brief peace, and the much more complicated contradiction and backlash are coming up to break it.

 

The lack of Transparency is everywhere, Frankly, this image is too fit into the public acceptance. Reality is usually made in Coherence that is produced when facts are inserted into a narrative that has a structure that is familiar to the viewer. Which means People like to see and accept what they are used to, when facts are embedded in a coherent narration that appears to be real and authentic, they become plausible and convincing. (Alfredo Cramerotti, P70)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Series of white, Brother 2019 (unfinished)

 

When it comes to painting, obviously the original content has been transformed into something new, the investment of painterly issues allows people to spend more time on the observation process. The aim is to encourage the audience to complete the thinking in a modest and gentle viewing process after the details and processing on the canvas lead them to observe more deeply. my painting The Series of white, Brother presents images that are known, recognizable yet slightly sinister, rendered in a palette that is muted and reduced. at the same time, the confrontation between paints and the idea of recognition never lets people forget that they are looking at paintings on canvas.

 

Stimulating through the history and contemporary

Painting resensitizing public can be seen in many works that reuse historical figures and elements, reflecting to the contemporary cases and situation. History is, of course, of crucial importance to our understanding of what we were, what we are and what we can be. (Tom. D. F 2015)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

it could be anywhere 2008 

 

Our contemporary experience of history through the widespread availability of information that has made this a time when we are re-evaluating moments of historical importance to contemplate the present.

The painting it could be anywhereby Adrian Ghenie demonstrates in a way of distance view. viewers are an observer and can’t intervene what is taking place in a quiet dark night, looking down through a hole at this advantage position which is not like the angle of CCTV, but a higher place. it raises questions to audiences that “where am I, where is my position to this?” there is a sense of silence, we all know that paints do not talk, but, here we can imagine a gun shoot, just one single gun shoot, not sense of somebody’s screaming, shouting, or violence in this black- whiteness, and chiaroscuro. Moreover, the sort of dark and slightly abstract vegetation on the right seems to serve as a veil or curtain, covering part of the deadly scene as well as history. What is also astonishing to people in this painting is its title, which, supposedly, cognitive association and implication to many contemporarily unspeakable and immoral events help revoke the collective resonance. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Trial 

 

I think that to resensitize is to remind people who had once had empathy and been sensitive of that they have literally become careless as too much images and information circulated through the mass communication are losing their significance and power to provoke, the key to bridge the gap is trying a new strategy of representation, which brings about perspectives, connects experience and memory, and introduces narratives  bythe commitment to investigate the possibilities of painting.

Luc Tuymans once stated that “the subject of my work is history, then the object is a vessel of historical memory. Many of his work refer to his own visual memory of people’s photograph rather than from the photograph itself.” (MoMA, 2004) Memory is an interesting thing that makes inconsistency, we would not need so many visual elements if we can remember everything consistently.

In the Trial produced by Adrian Ghenie to present the last moment of Romanian dictator and his wife before their execution, we can see thatdefaced people-are all there to reveal the feebleness and inconsistency of our memory. The faces are blurred, as if their very identity is being disrupted, annihilated in the process of painting. The manner in which artist uses photographic sources and then paints images which blur, scrap and obfuscate these sources has led to the obvious comparison to another photographic image-based painters Francis Bacon, whose technique is to leave out and strip down all but the most essential. “the more artificial painting is the more reality it contains. Bacon wants his work to look like real, or perhaps in his opinion the artificial is real, just like the reality has been fabricated” (Richard, P.73) The Trialis a contemporary History Painting, using the model and format of History Painting, but to deal with events from recent Romanian History. theartist provides us with a vision of a specific moment but through a lens that appreciates the impact of time, the bias of the narratives that reach us and the uncertainty of our vision (Tom.D.F,2004)

 Painting provides us with static silent moments, in which, we are able to know nothing other than the specifics which are put in front of us - the ingredients of paints and subject.A moment of articulated aesthetic experience that opens our sensibility and serves as an occasion for something else to happen.

 

Bibliography

 

Uwe, W. 2016. Uwe Wittwer [online] Parafin Ltd Available at: http: //www.parafin.co.uk/artists--uwe-wittwer.html

 

Deutsche Bank, AG, 2012. Yan Pei Ming [online]Deutsche Bank AG Available at: https://db-artmag.de/en/57/feature/yan-pei-ming-the-power-of-images/

 

Tom. D. F, 2004. Adrian Ghenie – The trial [online] Tom De Freston Available at: http://www.tomdefreston.co.uk/artist/5131/adrian-ghenie-the-trial

 

Susan, S. 2003. Regarding the pain of others, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, The U.S

 

Richard, C and Colm, T, I and Martin, H and Richard, F. 2015. Francis Bacon:late painting. Gagosian Gallery, New York

 

Alfredo, C. 2009. Aesthetic journalism. Intellect, Bristol, UK

 

Dexter, E and Heynen, J. 2004. Luc Tuymans. Tate Modern, London

Adriani, G . 2009. Gerhard Richter painting from private collections. Hatje Cantz

 

Loock, U. 2003. Luc Tuymans. Phaidon Press Ltd 

 

Ammer, M & Joselit, D & Hochdorfer, A. 2016. Expression in the Information Age. Museum Branfhorst & mumok. London, New York

 

Tuymans, L . 2016. Luc Tuymans glasses. Museum an de Stroom

 

Li, C, L. 2018. Offshore(exhibition), Hive Center For Contemporary Art. Beijing

 

Debord, G. 1967. The society of the spectacle. Bucket-Chastel. Paris

 

McComiskey, A . 2017. Post-Truth Rietoric and Composition. Utah State University Press. The U.S

 

Mcintyre, L. 2018. Post-Truth. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The U.S