ARTIST STATEMENT

Undergoing a fast movement of modernization and urbanization, China currently witnesses a sharp increase in the number of vehicles. Nowadays we spend most of our times in car. Therefore, a vision on the road namely highway-vision becomes a new and indivisible part of visual experience in our daily life.

In summer 2008, I got my little Mini Cooper. Scenery reflected in the rearview mirror cheers me up everyday, and inspired me to start my highway-vision painting.

The world is changing everyday just like the changing moon. We see roads spread to every direction like capillaries. Driving my Mini going through the heart of this city and seeing the land view running backward is really a confusing experience for me. Am I going forward? Or the world is going backward? It seems unimportant. My life always exists in a changing environment, I do not know what will happen next. Is this the situation for everyone? It also seems not important. What is for sure is that we are living in an unpredictable and uncertain reality.

The world is big, every individual is so small. I am sure I can’t hold the whole world. My visual angle falls back in the rearview mirror of my car. At this moment, backward land view, blind spot beyond horizon, the blank space and the visible area, and the immediate telepathy have formed my whole world.

When I drove my Mini go through a viaduct, I saw the moon in the rearview mirror sitting just on the surface of the viaduct, it seems like an owl standing on the tree branch…the rearview mirror has changed the land view outside! At present, the relation between the nature, the world and us perhaps turned into another kind of unity other than the ancient unity of the heaven, earth and human.

We are separated from the nature and the world by a curtain. Most of the time, we observe the nature, the world and ourselves through this curtain or some medium. A window, a lens, a screen, the metal shell of a building, a stream of water, the pupils of lovers, the rearview mirrors of car……We feel, recognize and understand the world and ourselves through the perspectives and reflections of all kinds of medium. It is difficult to distinguish the relations and distance of the real nature and the man-made and industrial nature. What kind of relationship are we dealing with the nature and the world? Where can I go?

It’s a beautiful world, with eye-killing colors. Maybe I should just stretch my arms and have a rest in such a relation……

Autumn, 2011, Zhang Lun at the studio