郭凤怡：宇宙经络
策 展 人：王欢
2023.1.7—2023.3.26
长征空间（北京市朝阳区酒仙桥路798艺术区中一街）
一 命名术
郭凤怡画叫什么画？自然超能是什么意思？人体数字密码是什么？人的大脑从开始到现在都经过那些动物？
……
这些南辕北辙又多少有些风马不接的提问都来自于艺术家郭凤怡对其作品的命名，它们或许可以被视为一种“创作主题”，但更是郭凤怡彼时尚处启蒙的问题意识，以及，尚能发问的纯真与冲动。
1. The Art of Naming
What is Guo Fengyi’s Painting Called? What is the Meaning of Natural Superpower? What is the Human Numerical Code? From the Beginning up until Now, the Human Brain Has Passed through All of These Animals?
These contradictory and somewhat disparate questions stem from the artist Guo Fengyi’s naming of her works. Perhaps, they can be considered as sorts of ‘themes’ of her practices, but they are rather Guo’s awareness of problems when she was still in her early stage of enlightenment; and they are the innocence and impetus of still being able to question.
二 氛围宗教
依郭氏的说法，其创作可以视为三个动作：写下问题-展开绘画-浮现图像。如果郭凤怡如她所说是因为“不知道才画”，那么，她翘首以盼地期冀着能够给出答案的究竟是“谁”？这几乎召回了一个远古的萨满式勾天通地的情景，使得这套动作几乎可以改写为“立下诉求-展开仪式-浮现回应”。这多少让郭氏看起来像是一位“不合时宜”的灵媒显得意味深长，仿佛，那些形象真的是为其所卜算出来的答案一样。显然，这些形象几乎在“词与物”的对应关系里失败了，圣像不再是圣像，风景也不是风景，毋宁说郭凤怡自成灵媒式的绘画动作，予人提示的根本不在于某种既有宗教体验的临显，而是一种自我宗教化的氛围，弥留在空气里持续挑衅着感官。
2. Ambient Religion
According to Guo, her ways of working consist of three steps: write down the question, start to paint, and let the images emerge. If Guo Fengyi, as she claims, ‘I draw because I do not know, I draw to know’, then WHO is the one she has longed for to give out an answer? This question almost summons back an ancient shamanic scene that connects the land and the heaven, making it possible to rewrite Guo’s set of movements into ‘place the request, launch the ritual, and let the divine response appear’. Such a rewriting somehow makes unusual the fact that Guo looks like an ‘untimely’ psychic; seemingly, those images are genuinely the answers she gave through divinations. Obviously, these images have failed in the corresponding relationship between ‘words and things’, with the sacred icons no longer sacred and the landscape no longer recognisable. To put it another way, Guo Fengyi’s psychic-like painting practices do not remind beholders of the decent and manifestation of a deity, as experienced in many existing religions; instead, they constitute an atmosphere of self-religionisation, dispersed in the air and stimulating the senses continuously.
三 气功
毋需羞于谈论气功之于郭凤怡，只不过在这里，气功不仅仅被识别为一种锻炼方法或科技史的产物，而更应该将气功视为一种思想史的遗产——如何作为承载古代经验的现代思想媒介——看待其对郭凤怡的绘画驱动与影响。
3. Qigong
Avoid not to talk about qigong’s influence on Guo Fengyi. In this case, however, qigong should not be merely identified as an exercise or a product of the history of science. Instead, it should be treated as a legacy of the history of thoughts—a modern medium of ideas loaded with ancient experiences—that inspires and impacts Guo Fengyi’s painting.
四 内观-遥视
“内观”与“遥视”是郭氏创作中频繁引用的概念和方法，一如心灵和宇宙之间时常被认为是有与生俱来的关联，前者向内揭示人类的本能和冲动；后者向外总结世界的存在和法则，它们都关乎于人类最为原始的求知。这大概也是其画中那些从胚胎到宇宙，从经络到风水，从古代到天地的意象，可以跨过意识、时空与物质，被召唤在一起的根本原因。
4. Vipassana and Clairvoyance
The ‘vipassana’ and ‘clairvoyance’ are concepts and methods frequently referred to in Guo’s painting. As the mind and the universe are often believed to be inherently connected, the former reveals the instinct and impulse of humans inwardly, while the latter concludes the existence and laws of the world outwardly. Both of them are concerned with humans’ most primordial desire for knowledge. The employment of these two ways of seeing also explains why, in Guo’s paintings, from embryos to the cosmos, from the meridians to fengshui, from images of ancient times to the ones of the land and heaven, all these entities can be summoned and gathered across consciousness, time-space and matters.
五 线条
使用细密的线条进行重复而有序地勾勒是郭氏绘画的基本方法，仿佛，形象的俘获是被细密的曲线召唤出来的，它们没有皮肤和更具体的身体器官，而仅存一副隐约可辨识的身体化轮廓。对于久练气功和阅读古代文化的郭凤怡来说，当然深谙“流动即信息”之道，“宇宙与身体”之妙，以至于其绘画几乎都表现出了一个无时无刻都在流动中的精神磁场意味。
5. Lines
Using thin and dense lines to sketch repetitively and orderly is fundamental to Guo’s painting, as if the capturing of figures depends on these delicate and lavish curves, and the figures do not have skins or actual bodily organs but merely body-like contours that are vaguely recognisable. For Guo Fengyi, a long-term qigong practitioner who reads extensively on ancient Chinese culture, she surely understands the idea that ‘the flow is the message’ and the wonderous experience engendered between ‘the cosmos and the body’, so that almost all of her paintings illustrate a spiritual magnetic field in constant flowing.
六 数字
数字是其画中又一较常出现的重要元素, 而画中对数字的使用明显不是一种美学策略，而更像是承袭自中国古代的“内证”系统中的“内数”——用以对宇宙起源、自然演化、历史变迁的观测和推演的数学体系，只是郭氏又将其内化为自创的语言体系。通过不同数字编号赋予不同动作指令，置入进不同的排列和有序的组合中，由此来看，数字对于郭氏来说不再是一种数学计数，而是语言。
6. Numbers
Numbers are another crucial element appearing regularly in her paintings, and the way they are used is evidently not a result of any aesthetic strategy but rather an inheritance of the idea of ‘inner numbers’ derived from the system of ‘inner proof’ in ancient China. It is a mathematical system that is used to monitor and infer the origin of the universe, the natural evolution, and the historical changes, but Guo further incorporates it into her self-invented linguistic system. Different numbers bestow commands upon various actions, placed into divergent arrangements and ordered combinations. From this perspective, numbers are no longer mathematical counting but language itself for Guo.
七 古代宇宙观
尽管已经有相当的文字在“证明”郭凤怡的作品与古代宇宙观之间的关系，但仍有一点尚未说清是，郭氏不是在“表现”或“展示”古代宇宙观，而是在“使用”古代宇宙观来建构一套新的体验和逻辑，这种迹象并不在于一种视觉变现上，而是内驱力的根本不同。
7. The Ancient Cosmology
Although extant literature has ‘testified’ the relevance between Guo Fengyi’s works and the ancient cosmology, there remains an unarticulated point, that is, Guo is not ‘manifesting’ or ‘presenting’ the ancient cosmology but ‘utilising’ it to construct a new set of experience and logic. The sign of her construction does not depend on a certain kind of visual manifestation; its driving force is inherently and ultimately different from the latter.
八 宇宙经络
“河图”“洛书”作为古代中国流传的神秘图像，在郭凤怡的创作中曾作为重要题材和参考反复出现，事实上，两者都是来自古代中国的前现代宇宙观中有关宇宙星象变化的推演系统，而郭氏的方法论，则更像是通过自我构建的法则，观测和识别世界运转的逻辑与秩序。
基于此，本次展览借鉴“洛书”的布阵法则，以长征空间的现实坐标立柱定位，选取四十五幅作品按至不同关键概念分列九组，布于九处落位。九组关键概念相互独立，彼此阐释。作品内容从练功到宇宙观，从易经道教到历史文化，从人体数字到神经穴位进行了选取。启蒙，认知，大地，胚胎……所有看似南辕北辙的对象都回返到了一个关于“认知的问题”上。
8. Cosmic Meridians
Hetu and Luoshu, two mythical divination schemes from ancient China, appear recurrently as critical themes and references in Guo Fengyi’s practices. In fact, both images are systems of deduction derived from the pre-modern cosmology of ancient China concerning astrological changes in the universe, while Guo’s methodology is more like to observe and identify the logic and order of how the world works through self-constructed laws.
In this light, this exhibition borrows the divination rules of Luoshu. Using the actual orientation of Long March Space with its eight pillars zoning the exhibition space, it divides 45 pieces of paintings into nine groups according to the various key concepts embedded and locates them in nine positions. The nine key concepts are independent of but interpret each other, and the content of the paintings ranges from practicing qigong to cosmology, from The Book of Changes and Taoism to history and culture, and from the numbers of the human body to neurological points. Enlightenment, cognition, land, embryos…All these seemingly irrelevant objects return to a ‘question of perception’.
九 最后
如此画画，或许是郭凤怡彼时唯一的，最后的，抒情。但我们必须意识到，认知和时间一样，从来不是一成不变的，郭凤怡对于无论民间美术还是原生艺术，无论现代艺术还是当代艺术，都不是顺从某个单一系统规则的“合理经验”。要知道，这些绝大部分绘画都发生于九十年代，就连当代艺术的概念话语在彼时的中国还尚模棱两可。在这样一个就连空气中都弥漫着残存的社会主义乌托邦理想里，郭凤怡给出的答案显然是与时代格格不入的。于是，谈论郭凤怡的绘画，不仅是谈一种绘画的类型，谈一种阅读的方法，或是谈一种艺术的合法性，还是作为一种并不能撇清社会背景、历史情境、政治状况、文化角力等多种尺度下意外发生的现象，以及，更重要的是，在一个时刻冲突和变化的世界里如何行动的方式。
9. Coda
To paint like this, perhaps, is Guo Fengyi’s only and final self-expression. We must, however, realise that perception is the same as time in terms of restless changes. Folk art or art brut, modern art or contemporary art, Guo Fengyi is never a ‘reasonable experience’ that complies with one single system of rules. Notably, most of these paintings were created in the 1990s, when contemporary art discourse was still vague in China. In a time when every breath of air was still filled with the lingering fragrance of the socialist utopia, the answer given by Guo Fengyi was a marked discord of the time. Thereupon, to talk about Guo Fengyi’s paintings is not only to render a type of painting, a kind of method of reading, or the legitimacy of a sort of art; her paintings are also an accidental phenomenon that never leaves aside its many contextualisations, including the social background, historical context, political situation, and cultural wrestling. More importantly, her paintings inspire us to talk about the way to act in a world of constant conflicts and changes.
王欢 WANG Huan 