法国哲学家 JEAN BOUDRILLARD认为后现代社会是一个拟像（SIMULATION）的世界，按我的理解，则并不是对现实的虚构，相反，它是据以创造现实的观念，先有拟像，然后才有现实。拟像应该是上帝做的事情。上帝死后，人成了上帝，创造了高技术化的后工业现实。 另一方面信息技术的高度发达使人们对现实世界的好奇心冷却下来，转而对超真实的虚拟世界充满向往，例如《骇客帝国》与《指环王》所营造的世界，以及充满幻觉的电子游戏。当代的文化环境同样也影响了艺术家的创作，这样借鉴当代大众文化的影响，艺术家通过使用摆拍和模拟想象来完成作品成为当代艺术的重要手法，从辛迪．舍曼到马修．巴尼，再看中国的许多影像艺术家的作品，这样的手法越来越多样与成熟，尤其是在电脑PHOTOSHOP和3D技术的支持下。
80年代后出生的中国年轻一代，不仅在对技术发展的运用和掌握的层面上基本同世界发达国家保持着同步，更为幸运的是，作为他们当中的艺术家不仅能使用新的技术化语言来创造新的艺术，而且，前所未有的社会变革与尖锐的矛盾冲突为他们创造自己的艺术提供了温床。
还在中央美术学院读书的刘韧可以说其中的佼佼者之一。她的大量作品，例如《回忆系列》，《完美生活系列》，《天堂系列》，《我们俩系列》等等，用丰富的视觉语言和符号，营造了一个个令人回味的意象世界，一种介于现实（REALITY）与超现实（HYPER RELITY）之间的视觉世界。这些图片委婉而细腻地折射出艺术家对世界的看法，对人生的期待，对理想的渴望，以及对生命的敬畏与梦幻。也许是基于更为简单而朴实的理由，诸如一个梦境的再现，一个眷恋往事的心境，或者此时此地的触景生情。 她细腻而敏锐的感受促使她用大量的合成图象来传达自己对周遭的认识与期待。
《我们俩》这组作品是关于每一个成年人都能亲身经历过感情故事，虽然艺术家说这组作品是用来纪念自己逐渐远去的青春和爱情，但也传达人们普遍的和抽象的人性，而作品中丰富的细节则寄托了艺术家个人化的经历与浪漫的想象。画面上一队青花瓷器样的，头上生长着长长的角的梅花鹿。这种瓷瓶质感的鹿美丽矫健，但空虚而易碎，她们如同被放置在祭坛上灵物。原本在森林中可以恣意奔跑的生灵除了留在人们脑海中的记忆外，她们还来到今日都市的丛林。一个关于自由，美好，矫健，活波的，曾经享受着蓝天，阳光和青草的自然之子成为一曲爱情的旋律在人们心中荡漾。人成为理想爱情的看客和梦幻者。
艺术家写到“爱情是一个漂亮的水晶娃娃，我一直小心翼翼地守着。可它还是碎了。留给我满地漂亮的碎片。我静静的一片片的拾起，藏起来，并试图忘掉曾经的拥有。只是，有的时候当我端起一杯水时，或是当我听到空中一只笨鸟的鸣叫时，或是在课堂上某个走神的瞬间，她突然间地涌出来，一桩桩的往事像洪水一样迫不及待地将我吞没，措手不及”。艺术家用这种精致而细腻的笔调转述了对于爱情的微妙感受，也成为她理解这一系列作品的恰当注脚。虽然奔波周旋于现实社会的疲惫与焦虑，以及由此而引起的莫名其妙的黯然伤神时时困扰着一棵敏感的心境，但艺术家将这样复杂的感情世界的微妙变化用绮丽的图象传达出来，再冥顽不灵的人在这样的作品面前，也会有些许的触动。因此，《我们俩》不仅是怀恋与吟咏爱情的视觉歌谣，也是进行时状态下的感觉的叙事诗，是对生命里程的高保真记录。而画面上的数字化图象语言，让人们感受到现实社会的虚拟性图象景观，使我们的感觉细胞也在想象，现实，与超现实的不同空间飞奔。
《回忆》系列是比较早的作品之一。这套作品是一件关于青春期的幻梦的追忆。记忆搀杂着幻想与幻觉，呈现出凄迷而惆怅的情调。这追忆不一定真实，但也不一定虚妄。是人生必经阶段的感受和情绪，无法逃避，也不想沉溺其中。所以，在这一系列中，艺术家使用了大量的球状物，如同有瞳孔的人的眼睛，张得圆鼓鼓的，在致密地寻找着可以目击的对象。艺术家的思绪和记忆，如同这些四处窜动的眼睛，在她生活过的环境周边寻觅自己和种种痕迹与气息，无论是在学校，还是树林，抑或荒废的渡口。艺术家认为，无论什么时候，看到自己都不是件容易的事，在面对着真实还是虚假的时候做出选择是很困难的。因此，艺术家索性将这样的感受呈现出来，她自己则隐藏在画面的背后，窥视着观众的反映。
艺术家生活在这个世界上是幸运的，不仅仅因为是在中国，一个正在飞速发展，人类历史上还很难有这样的一个充满变动历史时期，艺术家之所以幸运是因为没有人告诉他/她这是一个怎样的世界。这个世界像是一台电视机，无论怎样换台都找不到一个中意的节目。换了半天，脑子里没有一个完整的节目，有的是各种各样的节目的碎片。在刘韧看来，这些碎片的堆积是她作品的原点。从这里出发可以到达任何地方，随心所欲。《某日某地》就是这样的作品。某日某地不同于“此情此景”这样的煽情和容易令人感伤，它是一个虚置的假设，是许多可能性的梦境与真实场景的重叠，是一个假定的时间与地点的坐标，以便为多样的思绪与感觉的点提供和落实明确的方位。例如，在北京候车站前的夜晚，一个梦游般的女孩在辉煌的广场（幻化成有波浪的海滩）上不知所措，恍然若失。夜空中则挂满栖息着美女的星球。
梦境，想象，迷幻，海市蜃楼与现实景象都叠加在一起，传达了人们对现实社会的迷失感与非确定性。
艺术家这些令人惊叹的作品大多是来到北京后完成的。在北京复杂多样而充满竞争与压力的生活和城市面貌为她提供了丰富创造源泉与素材。例如北京的传统建筑，现代标志性建筑，政治符号，以及她所生活的中央美术学院与周围的花家地，望京地区的寻常社区也都进入了她的视阈。这让我联想到90年代初，中央美术学院还在王府井的商业中心区的时候，一批被称为新生代画家的美术学院青年教师所描绘的周遍胡同里的市井生活，都充满了浓郁的人情味道。今天，刘韧这茬新一代艺术家的作品仍然承继了这样的人文气息，同时增添了数字化时代图象品质和审美特征，当然，年轻的艺术家也自然会在作品中表达自己的感受，从而形成自己特有的视觉叙事。
她的作品中充满了水，波浪和大海的潮汐。这与曾经长期生活在海滨城市秦皇岛有关。是她童年与少女时代的青春记忆有关。而且在潜意识中，也包含着女性的生命意识。她将北京的城市建筑变成高山，将广场和街道变成海洋，这是她童年生活的印象，但在数字电脑技术的支持下，她编撰出梦想的世界。
刘韧的作品继承了现代主义时期超现实主义的艺术传统，并有梦幻现实主义的魔力。当然，或多或少，也有日本艺术家森万里子的影子；在确认女性意识的角度上看，似乎也能察觉到辛迪舍曼作品的意味。所不同的是更新过的，有中国当代体验的更为新鲜而充实的视觉世界。这样新鲜的感觉部分地来自于幻想与现实体验及感受的纠缠。而无所不在的大众传媒将梦幻一样的大量广告图象填充到社会生活的每一个角落。使中国的社会生活和都市景观充满了幻觉的味道。心理学家认为，视幻觉带给人们的的两个影响是：(一)对认知的剥夺。从认知的角度|讲，视幻觉不同于传统视觉经验的视知觉，它是直观的刺激，不需要认知和理解力的参与便可接受，这就意味着对认知能力的剥夺。(二)超脱平庸的心理需求。另一方面，幻觉本身成了当代人的一种心理需要。所有视幻觉的背后都隐藏着另一种平庸乏味的现实景象。
在我看来，第一个影响是广告和政治宣传所要达到的，诸如北京接头无数巨大的广告牌。后一个影响是象刘韧这样的艺术家的作品所希望达到的，也就是超脱平庸的心理需求，因为图象的背后，也隐含的对平庸的腻烦与反叛。
BOUDRILLARD1995年的著作《完美的罪行》中有这样的警句:“影像不再让人想象现实，因为它就是现实。影像也不再能让人幻想实在的东西，因为它就是虚拟的实在。”这是当代哲学家对今日社会的观察，刘韧所制造的介于现实与非现实之间的景象则拉近了虚拟与现实之间的距离，从而也让哲学和生活更加贴近。
BETWEEN THE REAL AND THE SURREAL-Impressions on the visual world of Liu Ren
Zhang Zhaohui
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard considers that post-modern society is a world of simulation. In my opinion, it is not about an invention of reality, but on the contrary of a concept based on a creation of reality, where reality comes only after simulation. Simulation is something which must be done by God. And after the death of God, man became God, and created a post-industrial reality equipped with high technology. Moreover, the extremely rapid development of information technology has appeased the curiosity of mankind for the real world, and has pushed them towards the fictional world of the surreal, such as depicted in films like The Matrix or Lord of the Rings, or in video games, which are nothing but illusion. Today’s cultural environment also influences artists’ creation. Under the influence of contemporary mass culture, combining still photography and simulative imagination in an artwork has become an important process today. If we look at the works of Cindy Sherman or Matthew Barney, but also at the works of a number of Chinese visual artists, one realises that this process is increasingly varied and mature, especially with the help of Photoshop and 3D computer technology.
The young Chinese generation born in the 80’s, is not only up to par with more developed countries when it comes to making use of and mastering technology, which allows those artists of that generation to create new art in a new language, but they also benefits from something much more important, and that is the hitherto unseen mutation of society and its contradictions and intense tensions, which make for an exceptional ground for their artistic expression.
Still a student at the Central Institute of Fine Arts, Liu Ren can be considered as one of the best among her peers. In her significant work – let’s mention here the series “Memory”, “Someday, somewhere”, “Paradise”, and “Us” among many others- she creates with rich visual language and signs, an impressionable and unforgettable imaginary world, a sort of visual world between the real and the surreal, between reality and hyper reality. These images reflect the worldview of the artist in a soft and refined manner, her expectations from life, her thirst for idealism, as well as her respect entangled with fear and illusions of life. Or perhaps it is more simple and natural than that, like a repeated dream, a nostalgic mood, or even an attempt at reaching and tangible time and space. Her subtle and clever impressions lead her to use a great deal of layered images to transmit her perception of her surroundings, of her story, and of her hopes.
The series “Us” deals with sentimental stories, such as could be encountered by any adult. Although the artist herself claims that this series was created to commemorate her youth and love progressively growing apart, she nevertheless brings out human nature, universal and abstract. The rich detail in her works clearly unveil the artist’s individualisation process as well as her romantic imagination. On the picture two deer, made of decorated porcelain, with long antlers on their heads.These porcelain foes are beautiful and vigorous, yet they are empty and fragile, like decorative animals placed on an altar. These live beings, which once ran freely in the forest, discontented with staying in the memory of man, have entered in the jungle which are the cities of today. A child of nature, who incarnates freedom, beauty, vigour and liveliness, and who once upon a time revelled in the blue skies, sunrays and green grass, has turned into a love melody, rippling in the hearts of man. And man has become the spectator and the dreamer of this love.
The artist wrote: “Love is a pretty crystal doll, which I’ve cautiously kept by my side since the beginning of time. But despite my care, she has shattered, covering the ground in pretty splinters. I picked them up calmly one by one, and hid them, trying to forget what had belonged to me in the past. And yet sometimes, when I carry a glass of water, or hear a stupid bird in the sky, or while daydreaming in class, she suddenly bursts forth, and the past swallows me like water in a flood, and I am helpless.” With her refined and carefully chosen words, the artist unveils her subtle impressions of love, and thereby delivering a perfect explanation of her creation of her artwork. Despite the exhaustion and the troubles she has to face in the real world, despite the suffering and sadness which incur, tormenting her fragile little heart, the artist manages to transmit with beautiful images the subtle transformations of this complicated world of feelings, in a way which would shake to the core even the most insensitive of people were they faced with one of her works. Thereby “Us two”, more than a visual song regretting and declaiming love, is a narrative poem about feelings as they are, a rendering of the process of the life of an untainted truth. The language of the digital elements in her images makes us appreciate the range of the virtual imagery of real society. Our sensitive cells imagine the real flying alongside, yet in a different space, of the surreal.
The series “Memory” is one of her oldest work. It’s a piece about the search for memory, dreams, and illusions of youth. Memories are a mix of imaginings and illusions, and betray feelings of sadness and melancholy. This memory is not necessarily realistic, but neither is it necessarily empty and wrong. These are the feelings and moods of the phase we all have to go through, which we cannot escape, and in which we don’t want to sink into. Thus, in this series, the artist uses a lot of round shapes, as though there were human eyes, wide open and protruding, waiting for objects to acknowledge. The thought and memory of the artist are much alike these agitated eyes, looking around for places where she has lived, that repressed or abandoned pier where all traces and breaths remain, be it in school or in the forest. The artist considers that, at whatever moment, to look at oneself is never easy, and that it is very hard to choose between reality and what is artificial. It is for this very reason that the artist plainly unveils this feeling while hiding behind the image, peeking at the spectators’ reactions.
To live in this world is a great advantage for the artist. She’s lucky not only because she lives in China, in a time of such rapid development, so rare in the history of humanity. The reason this is a good thing, is because no one tells you how the world is. This world is like a television set, you continually switch the channels and yet never find anything good to watch, and at the end of the day, there isn’t one complete show in your mind, but rather you are left with shards from all kind of programs. For Liu Ren, the accumulation of these shards is the starting point of her work. Starting from there, she can create however she likes. “Someday, somewhere” is one of those pieces: “someday, somewhere” differentiates itself from “this feeling, this landscape”, -which touches and saddens-, in that it is a built hypothesis, the layering of dreams of numerous possibilities of real scenes, the coordinates of a supposed time and place, so as to supply and create a clear orientation to the diverse train of thoughts and feelings. For example, in “Night in front of the Beijing train station” a young girl as if sleepwalking does not seem to know what she’s doing in this glorious square (turned into beach and waves). The night sky is filled with bubbles which hold beautiful women.
Dreams, imagination, illusions, mirages and real landscapes overlap and come together to reflect the feelings of being distraught and uncertain which afflict mankind when it comes to real society.
The artist’s works which most strike the public were for the most part created after her arrival in Beijing. The diversity of life, competition, pressure, and even the face of the city of Beijing itself are for her a raw material and a source of creation. The traditional buildings, the emblematic construction sites, political banners, as well as the Central Institute of Fine Arts where she lived and the nearby ordinary neighbourhood of Huajiadi and Wangjing are all a part of the richness of her visual environment. This makes me think of the early 90’s, when the Central Fine Arts Institute was still in the commercial area of Wangfujing, and of the way a group of young professors of the institute, who were known as the painters of the new-born generation, would describe the ordinary life of the neighbouring alleys. They would speak in a very humane way. Today, Liu Ren’s works retain this humane tonality, but add to it the image quality and the aesthetic characteristics of the digital era. Of course, this young artist naturally expresses her own impressions in her works, thereby creating her own unique visual narration.
In her work, water, waves and tides are omnipresent. This is linked to the artist’s long stay in the coastal city of Qinghuangdao. It is connected to her childhood memories and youth. Furthermore, in the unconscious, this is also a sign of the vital feminine consciousness. The way in which she transforms the buildings of Beijing into high mountains, the squares and roads into oceans, comes from her childhood, which she transforms thanks to digital techniques into a dreamlike world.
Liu Ren’s works inscribe themselves in the continuity of the artistic tradition of surrealism of the modernist period, and has the charm of the illusionist realism. Of course, we can also note, with more or less intensity, the influence of the Japanese artist Moriko Mori; and if one pays close attention to the affirmation of the feminine consciousness, one can get a glimpse of Cindy Sherman’s style. What differentiates Liu Ren’s work from the previously cited artists, is a revisited visual world, more fresh and more substantial, and rich of the experience of contemporary China. This feeling of freshness comes in part from the combination of illusion and experience, and from the impressions of reality. And mass media, omnipresent, fill up social life in all possible spaces like myriads of dreams, and Chinese cities thus diffuse a scent of illusion. Psychologists consider that visual illusion influences man in two ways: first, it grabs hold of the faculty of knowing. In terms of knowledge, visual illusion is different from the visual perception of traditional visual experience, in the way in which it is an intuitive stimulation, which does not mobilize knowledge and comprehension to be accepted. This amounts to the dispossession of the capacity of mankind to know. Secondly, the psychological need of detachment from the banal. Furthermore, illusion itself has become a psychological need for mankind in this day and age. Behind all these visual illusions, hides the very real scene of another insipid banal state.
As for myself, I think that the primary influence is what the advertising and political propaganda wants to reach, such as the enormous and countless billboards in the streets of Beijing. The second influence is that which artists such as Liu Ren want to reach, more specifically the psychological need to surpass the commonplace, as behind the images also lie the disgust and the opposition to the banal.
In Baudrillard’s famous work “The perfect crime”, in 1955, lies this warning: “photography and video no longer let people imagine reality, because they are reality, and they no longer provide people with the illusion of things real, because they are a fictitious reality.” This is the contemporary philosopher’s observation on today’s world. The images which Liu Ren creates between reality and non-reality shorten the distance between fiction and reality, and thereby also bring closer the philosopher and life.
