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présentation - 展览介绍 :
Sealed Memories
by Wang Jing
While today's media is highly advanced and fast, memories are increasingly retained with a composite characteristic; they are also spread and hinted at by the "authentic historical experiences” of the parties involved and through various media files such as film, video, publications, words, news and reviews etc.
Among them, photography is the most direct and imaginative carrier to suggest memories. In one of Feng Yan’s series of works about the public articles during the period of socialist construction called “The Monuments”, with a method of austere realism, photography as a means has expressed a cross-reference topic of public history and personal memories. These works include museum black leather stool, Mao style sofa, fan, shelf, clothes rack, file cabinets etc. Feng Yan deliberately severed the associations of these items with the surroundings, placed in a single seemingly careless and casual background, and photographed them as portraits from front, profile and back angles.
Memories and histories are always linked, and histories could become the most convenient grounds for eliminating or produce memories. People who have experienced the period of socialist construction would not be unfamiliar with those objects that have been locked with Feng Yan’s camera lens. When the fate and histories of countless personal experiences were tied with those lifeless objects branded with the mark of history filling the minds of the public, they became a part of the collective memory. “Favoring faded details and slipshod architecture, preferring personal and public spaces pregnant with implied meanings through subtle metaphors and dimensions of works.” With these images, the artist has transcended the quotidianness of these items into items of immortality thus shaping the polarization between the individual and public.
What is Feng Yan’s intent? Is it only to bring out these carriers of memories that we might have ignored? Such is not the case. Monuments have always carry two themes: one is concerned with the notion of immortality, and the other is related to the concept of power that never gave rise to the association of individual existence. In the past, our memories were manipulated by history, newspaper slogans, and revolutionary watchwords that propped up these ordinary objects into the altar of immortality. Individual memory as a collective consensus had emerged as the existence of "legitimacy." Through this series of works, Feng Yan expresses his social awareness through his personal involvement as a premise; with continuous observation, he infuses his full knowledge of societal and historical progress with rational cognition and judgement.
封锁记忆 （文 / 王静）
在媒体高度发达与迅捷的今天，记忆也越来越以一种复合式的特征被留住,并同时由当事人经历的“真实历史”和由各类媒体，档案譬如影视、印刷出版物、文字、新闻报道、评论等等传递和提示。
在这其中，摄影是提示记忆的一种最直接且最富于想象空间的载体。封岩在一个名为《纪念碑》的有关社会主义建设时期公共物件的作品系列中，用摄影的技术手段以及具有现实主义意味的平实的摄影方式，表达了一个关于公共历史与个人记忆的互文主题。这些作品有公共家具、博物馆黑皮椅、毛时代沙发、电扇、书柜、衣架、档案铁柜等等，这些物品被封岩刻意的截断了与环境的关联, 放置在看似漫不经心的单一的背景中，以人物肖像的方式为这些物品拍摄正、侧、背面肖像。
记忆总是和历史联系在一起的，而历史可以成为消除或制造记忆最方便的理由。经历过社会主义建设时代的人们，对于封岩摄影镜头中锁定的这些物件丝毫不会陌生，当无数个人的经历甚至命运与这些毫无生命的物品产生关联时，这些打上历史烙印的物品被灌入大众的脑海之中，成为集体记忆的一部分，“那些消逝的细节和看似漫不经心选择的场所，表达了个人内心和公众空间之间饶富意味的观察，透过敏锐的隐喻和作品较大的尺寸”，艺术家人为的将这些曾经的日常用具打造成不朽的“造像”，形成从个人到公共的定位。
封岩的意图是什么？仅仅是向人们提示这些可能被我们忽略了的记忆的载体吗？恐怕并非如此。纪念碑历来有两个指向：一个是与不朽的概念有关，一个是和权力的概念有关，却从来没有与个人性产生关联。曾经我们的记忆，都是被历史、被报头题词、革命口号所左右，将那些日常的物品托上不朽的神殿，个体记忆因为跃升为集体共识而具有了存在的“合法性”。通过这组作品，封岩对于社会的关注，表现为以个人介入为前提，他在持续不断的观察中，注入了他对社会的全部认识，以及对历史进程的理性认识和判断。
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