Page 112 - La Biennale di Venezia issue of World of Art Magazine

contemporary artists in la Biennale di Venezia issue WIND OF TUSCANY NO.1, 2018 DIGITAL PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTO MIXED MEDIA 40 X 40 CM.

WIND OF TUSCANY NO.2, 2018 DIGITAL PICTORIAL PHOTOGRAPHY, PHOTO MIXED MEDIA 40 X 40 CM.

FU WENJUN
Lives and works in Chongping, P.R. China
www.fuwenjun.com

New Visual Experience: Fu Wenjun’s Digital Pictorial Photography
In recent years, Chinese artist Fu Wenjun is getting more attention.
Through a large number of works of art, such as Wind of Tuscany,
Ask Tea, F1, April, Red Cherry, etc., Fu Wenjun gradually made
the concept “Digital Pictorial Photography” into a clear form of
artistic expression. Digital Pictorial Photography is a combination
of painting elements through digital post-adjustment and multiple-
exposure photographic images to reveal unique visual effects. It
emphasizes the rediscovering and reuse of image resources. Fu’s
works not only appear in important international exhibitions, but
also are appreciated by many contemporary art historians.

Fu Wenjun himself once said: “I actually incorporate a lot of
experience of traditional Chinese art in my work. Many people say
that my work is ‘not like photography’, but ‘unlike photography’ is
a new way of presentation. We can change anything.” Fu Wenjun
uses photography to express his artistic ideas and integrates
the essence of modern and contemporary art such as Dadaism,
Abstract Expressionism, conceptual art and pop art. While getting
rid of the shackles of documentary photography, Fu’s Digital
American contemporary scholar Claude Cernuschi has pointed
Pictorial Photography captures painting elements, embodying a
out when analyzing Abstract Expressionist painter Franz Kline:
touch of freehand brushwork in traditional Chinese art. They offer
“An individual canvas will be read in in terms of the canvases
people with unexpected innovations and new visual experience.
that surround it as well as against the frame of reference, or
Rosalind Krauss, a contemporary American female critic, once
interpretive background, the spectator has gradually internalized.
pointed out that artworks after the modernist paintings have
Consequently, a painting such as Probst I cannot have a single,
greatly broadened the connotation of “medium”. A medium can
fixed meaning or emotive resonance existing ‘on’ the canvas...
be something solid, or it can be a behavior itself. In other words,
That meaning or resonance, rather, is ‘in’ the spectator’s mind.”
artists’ medium is no longer tied to specific things; it exists in
Similarly, the meaning of Fu’s Digital Pictorial Photography is also
the field of communication with the audience. With the purpose
contingent on context and on the beholder’s participation.
of challenging people’s inherent ideas about artistic medium, Fu
Wenjun invites his audience to think about the boundaries of art.
Fu Wenjun has shaped his Digital Pictorial Photography with
Photography has always been regarded as documentary, while
various decompositions and reconstructions. Contemporary
Digital Pictorial Photography blurs the line between reality and
critic Katharine W. Kuh believes that the core of modern art is
illusion. The viewer is invited to enter different scenes created by
“break-up”. She proposes that in our time, the characteristics of
the artist. Fu Wenjun’s works should be treated as a sequence,
art are manifested in the following aspects: broken appearances,
because they provide a complete context for the audience. As
messy colors, scattered composition, disintegrated shape and
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