Beyond the Stillness Zhou Go August 2013
When I was a teenager, I dreamed of becoming a painter after reading the works of Repin and Levitan (both Russian realist painters). It may be hard to imagine from my current works, but Repin and Levitan are still my idols.
It was more than 30 years ago when I first came to Japan. There were many worthwhile art exhibitions from Europe and the United States. I will never forget the first time I saw Mondrian's paintings that were merely divided screens and Judd's three-dimensional works that looked as if they were merely plastic blocks arranged in a row, and I felt as if I had been somewhat taunted.
Thirty years have passed since then, and the purity of spirit and courage conveyed by Mondrian's and Judd's work has moved me so much that I have become one of their admirers. It took me 30 years to understand the greatness of Mondrian and Judd.
Somewhere along the line, my questions about my own work changed from "What's missing? to "What is too much? Around the time of my graduation project, I lost interest in the descriptive appeal of figurative painting, and after a period of deformation, I turned to complete abstraction.
In recent years, my abstraction has changed to a simplification of "pictoriality - color and form". Although color and form are the elements that make up a painting, they have become too commonplace, and I have grown weary of the aesthetic fatigue.
I decided to stop the work that had been done by putting down each moment on the paper, and instead, I began to work steadily, applying more than a dozen layers of paint. He decided to stop the work that had been done by putting down each moment on the paper, and instead, he began to work steadily, applying more than a dozen layers of paint. It was more like plastering than the work of a painter. However, it is a surprisingly difficult task to maintain the consistency of the brushstrokes.
It is not good enough to aim, and it is not good enough not to aim. It is like a Zen practitioner in a whirlpool of confusion. It is also unbearable.
The soul loves simplicity," this unfounded belief had somehow turned into an obsession within me. What I seek is simplicity that is rewarding to look at and feels like iron wrapped in cotton. I was also after a surface that seemed to have grown out of the screen, a surface with almost no color. I liked the smell of spirit that emerged from the surface.
The pursuit of simplicity and conciseness, in contrast to the wonder of having one's spirituality sharply questioned, made my work worthwhile and rewarding. It seems that artists are programmed from the start with the diligence of laborers, the piety of believers, and the skepticism of philosophers. Even if left alone, they work, and they work hard.
In Japan, my work is often described as “continental". In China, it has been called "Japanese," and in the West, “Oriental". Either way, it is a "work of a foreigner". Recently, I have come to realize that I am neither Japanese nor Chinese, but an "Oriental without a homeland".