MAO YU
"THE LIGHT INK TRACES"

Exhibition: 11 April – 6 June, 2015

While inspecting the revelation-type interaction and combination between some kind of historical discrepancy and the existing implications of images, I want to ask, "Can such a kind of transference and borrowing of images lead to a more open space of meaning?" From this standpoint, we may be able to think what the images of art and the new reality are with the more legible clues.

Mao Yu apparently focuses on the internal vision of image generation, but not pays any attention to the sociological signifier or faces the field of realistic criticism. At the moment he set foot in Shunling Mausoleum (the mausoleum of the mother of Wu Zetian), his rubbing from the stone statues of the mausoleum in the Central Shaanxi Plain hinted the active demand in the interlacing of time and space. Centering on the "Shunling Mausoleum Walking Lion Statues" and other related statues, Mao Yu started the thinking and exploration on the relationship between images, space, objects and paintings.

In that rubbing activity with a strange process, he completed 20 rubbings of statues in different dimensions. He clearly rubbed the images from the surface of large stone statues with the Xuan paper and ink, and transformed the three-dimensional images into the one-dimensional ones. According to his saying, if the historical time is taken as the fourth dimension, the light ink traces on the Xuan paper bear and contain the ambiguous and divergent information.

In this sense, Mao Yu’s practice clearly used the historical images and the contemporary painting means to develop the form and language space; he tried to give the images the new properties while eliminating the existing properties. In the process of carrying out the subjective intervention on fragmentary images with the help of painting, the misunderstanding, imagination and invisible association would constantly appear; he spared no efforts to use them to form the art order. An image can describe the object that our eyes can see, or express the object that our eyes can never see, and an image can also make the thought clear or obscure. Now, Mao Yu continuously proposes the meanings to be understood through the exploration on visible forms.

Taking "Ao" (an imaginary creature between fish and dragon in traditional Chinese myth) as the prototype, Mao Yu created a thing that he called a sculpture, from which we could obviously see the ambivalence and metaphor attempt behind the sculpture. The "Ao" made by Mao Yu is not a complete image, but a combination of six parts, each of which is independent but inseparable. There is an echo on semantics with the rubbings from mausoleum statues; at the moment, the sculptures or paintings are no longer one and only, or it can be said that the particularity of carriers has been dimmed. Besides the images, Mao Yu adopted Chinese ancient color system to create his paintings and sculptures; there are five orthodox colors of black, white, red, blue and yellow in the system; this time, the colors were given the implication of metaphor. The colors could represent the moral mirror, and also the philosophic concept; they could represent the four directions, and the four mythical creatures (the blue dragon, the white tiger, the red phoenix and the black tortoise); and they could also represent the grades from humbleness to nobleness; all of which can be represented by colors with the constant meaning stipulated by customs. (Text by Dai Zhuoqun)