朱兵將繪畫作為了解自己和認識周圍世界的一種方式，而不是一種職業(yè)或放松身心的愛好。
可能正是出于這個原因，繪畫的過程變得非常重要，其重要性甚至可能超過作品本身。這個過程包括作品的構思、準備和執(zhí)行。有時候，藝術家會有一個明確的方向，迅速完成整個過程；但有時候，這個過程會漫長而復雜，藝術家則會疑惑重重，不斷改變主意。通過長期直面白色的畫布，面對這種我們都覺得有些害怕的“空白”，朱兵重新審視著自己充滿“拴住夢想的回憶”的生活。（引自阿根廷作曲家卡洛斯•加德爾Carlos Gardel的杰作《回歸Volver》）。這些回憶時而會有力的左右藝術家現(xiàn)在的生活，時而則會讓他懷舊而傷懷。
“未來”僅僅存在于我們的思想、希望和恐懼之中。但是，未來能夠極大的影響我們，有時候甚至會把我們打擊的直不起腰來。如果我們仔細觀察就會發(fā)現(xiàn)，“過去”是否真的存在也是一個未知數(shù)。在禪宗思想里，我們每一天都會重生。每時每刻，我們都可以下決心變成一個全新的、不同的人。但是我們仍會背負著無數(shù)經(jīng)歷的“印記”，這些經(jīng)歷造就了我們，也為我們指引方向。但是，就算我們逐漸熟悉了那些影響我們生活的元素，或者更加了解了那些我們孩提時代就存在的“鬼魂”，我們還是無法開啟生命的新篇章。我們必須面對的“空白”包含了我們過去存在的一些重要碎片：這可能也是為什么我們愈加覺得難以面對這種空白。
如今，很多人把繪畫當成一種技藝或是一種符號化語言，需要長時間的學習；畫家應該遵守各種規(guī)則和比例的要求，處理好顏色和色調之間的關系。但是，如果我們如此理解繪畫，它就失去了更深層次的、本質的特性，而這一點中國的文人相當了解：他們用繪畫來表達那些打動自己的重要真相，這群志趣相同的人之間存在著一種“選擇性親密”（elective affinities）。如果我們把繪畫當成一種技藝，它就會成為一種裝飾性或商業(yè)性的活計，繪畫的目的以及繪畫本身就不會呈現(xiàn)出任何新的東西——繪畫就會淪為彩色的污漬或是視覺敘事。
在我和朱兵接觸的這幾年中，我一直覺得他是個專注的人，也是個坐不住的人。他對于自己和繪畫的關系要求很高。他身處的當代藝術大環(huán)境和自己格格不入，因為現(xiàn)在藝術家所謂的成功取決于一些十分平庸的具體標準。但是，我看到他經(jīng)常在考慮有沒有必要手拿畫筆呆在畫室里好幾個小時。我聽到他問自己的一些問題超越了大眾關心的表面而膚淺的話題。他會去真誠而認真的思索自己藝術追求的意義。我認為他的藝術生涯和自己的生活緊緊相連，這一點可以從他的出生地河南談起。
我有幾次有幸在河南和朱兵呆了不少天。我去他那里是為了追尋他畫作中的那些風景和回憶。
黃河沿岸
朱兵出生和長大的地方在鄭州和開封之間，處于城市和郊區(qū)的結合部位；那里有著悠久的歷史，也留存著逝去時光的碎片。他自身的節(jié)奏和黃河這條大河一樣緩慢，而黃河沿岸的風景特征明顯：平整的土地、突兀的峽谷和冷漠的布滿細沙的溝壑交替出現(xiàn)。他記憶中的樹木單薄而細長，看起來有些骨瘦如柴。這些樹木成長的地區(qū)通常雨水不足，冬季寒冷，夏季酷熱。朱兵對于樹的認識說明了他是城市居民：他對這些樹有種熟悉的感覺，但并不知道它們的學名或是用途。不過，樹木是他畫作中的絕對主角。
在他舉家從河南的紅土地上搬到廣東后，他被那里的植物所吸引。他吃驚的發(fā)現(xiàn)，廣東的草木多為常綠物種，長得枝繁葉茂，幾乎無處不在。在中國這樣的國家里，由于城市之間基本上沒什么區(qū)別，氣候和植被的差別成了抵御視覺“全球化”的唯一壁壘。
我覺得朱兵對于樹木的熱情和他的朋友兼同行孟煌對于樹木的感情不同，也和畫家段建宇（鄭州人，在廣州住了不少時間）的感覺有別。段建宇作品中的樹很容易辨認：畫中有竹子和冷杉等樹種，看起來像是畫家參照了植物學手冊，然后用相當諷刺、風趣且玩世不恭的方式表現(xiàn)了出來。孟煌作品中的樹則是不斷生長和運動的活物，就像是伸向天空的手。而朱兵畫的樹是由久已散佚的回憶和相對年輕的記憶生成；它們讓人想起某些氣氛和心境，同時也在質疑觀者。
“為什么畫樹？”朱兵問自己。“這跟北方有關系：每當想起河南的時候，我總會想到冬天的樹林；是冷的氣氛感動了我，是樹枝扭曲的形狀打動了我；扭曲的形狀也讓我想起了中國畫常見的樹的主題。”
讓藝術家回想自己成長的地方似乎會影響他的“現(xiàn)在”；可能回憶這個過程本身讓他過去的經(jīng)歷顯得不那么艱辛，讓它們變得有些親切，使人欣慰。
或者說，朱兵經(jīng)常生活在“過去”，因為“現(xiàn)在”看起來太過乏味、舒適和平常。簡言之，它缺乏那種數(shù)代中國人都十分熟悉的近乎英雄般的犧牲的感覺。通過和一些同齡人、比我大一些的同輩（五六十年代出生的人）以及一些后輩聊他們的童年，我了解到他們最深刻的記憶也是最感人、最尋常的記憶都是“缺少”某件東西的記憶：物質的缺乏帶來了各種奇思妙想和天馬行空的創(chuàng)意。
我想大家都覺得容易到手的東西都容易被忘卻，之后也不會留下任何痕跡。而自己努力贏到的東西則體現(xiàn)了個人艱苦奮斗的結果，會帶來內在的成長。朱兵年輕的時候在一家工廠干活，工作累的想要撒手不干。但是，他的年輕歲月中也有許多快樂，這些簡單的記憶讓他印象深刻。比如：他十幾歲的時候和一群朋友逃課，躲到鄉(xiāng)下，像大人一樣烤食物和抽煙。再比如：他與工廠的關系也很特別，這里是他學工的地方，也是他受苦和受累的地方。
夢境的風景
我認為，朱兵過去幾年創(chuàng)造的作品表明他一直在做減法。他早期作品中的風景里充滿了玩偶、人偶和動物等各種東西，而現(xiàn)在它們逐漸被一種種氛圍所替代。這些氛圍也帶有相同的神秘感，而不再需要那些過分直白，有時候有些古怪的事物的襯托。他的用色變得“滿是灰塵”，作品輪廓不清，人物融在一起，看起來幾乎無法分辨。朱兵喜歡用土色，比如黃棕色（sienna）和紅棕色（burnt sienna）。（這里兩個表示顏色的英文詞不是來自河南泥土的顏色，而是來自意大利“錫耶納Siena”城的泥土顏色。這一點看起來挺怪，不過從單詞的歷史來看，表達這個顏色的單詞來自意大利語。）藝術家很少用鮮明的純色：他用的顏色都是自己調配的獨特顏色，無法復制。
貓是朱兵最鐘愛的動物，也是最神秘的動物：他經(jīng)常在作品中描繪貓科動物，可能是一群，也可能是一只；它們的輪廓在畫面背景的襯托下十分鮮明，有時候它們也會和其它東西融在一起。除了他畫作中常常描繪鳥類之外，他希望通過這些貓科動物表達一種神秘和迷茫——它們的尺寸有時候和風景不成比例，這也凸顯了它們的神秘。
朱兵作品中的一些背景讓我們想到了城市中常見的小公園：小橋、木制或水泥的亭子和巨大的蘑菇般的雨傘。看上去在這些地方什么事情都可能發(fā)生，就好像有一個迷迷糊糊、悶悶不樂的愛麗斯剛從奇境回來，小心翼翼的穿過一條條道路，經(jīng)歷一次次奇幻之旅。
朱兵作品中另外一些背景包括骯臟的城鄉(xiāng)結合部，畫中我們能看見飄滿垃圾的小溪。雖然人類對這些地方造成了巨大的破壞，但我們還是可以看到自然神奇的創(chuàng)造力。
我個人最喜歡的作品是那些剝離了各種符號或是易于辨認的各種形象的作品（參見前文的介紹），我偏愛畫家直接將一種狀態(tài)轉變成繪畫本身的做法，他把這種狀態(tài)變?yōu)楣P觸和油彩，讓它們成為一種幾乎無法分辨的整體；從長期來看，這種處理手法可能會發(fā)展成為純粹的抽象風格。
但是，朱兵最近告訴我，他對于講述一個完整的故事更加感興趣；他希望作品中有敘事的發(fā)展和結局：如果他想要表現(xiàn)時間的跨度，最合適的就是采用影像等能夠捕捉動態(tài)的媒介。因此現(xiàn)在他對這些媒介非常感興趣。
他有一件大尺寸作品由數(shù)張畫紙并置而成，是他朝這個美學方向發(fā)展的第一步。我相信他未來肯定還會有自我的、尚難預測的發(fā)展。他已經(jīng)不再去過分擔心顏色的使用，這是一個很現(xiàn)實的問題，而是將精力集中在敘事中，僅僅采用石墨色的背景和筆觸。這里浮現(xiàn)出藝術家進一步表達自己的欲望，通過使用可以辨認的元素描繪集體的想象；因此，他開始更加關注外部世界，而不是自己的內心世界。人類和動物形象一同出現(xiàn)在他的畫布上，比例和透視都被顛覆。這些形象讓我們想起了卡通的風格，當然它們也帶有我們熟悉的懸疑和神秘的感覺。
我相信，藝術家的創(chuàng)作歷程會引導他嘗試新的藝術語言和理念，讓他的作品在彰顯自我特性的同時，更加易于他人理解。
莫妮卡•德瑪黛（Monica Demattè）
2009年10月8日作于洛陽
翻譯：黃一
NOSTALGIA FOR THE FUTURE
For Zhu Bing painting constitutes a way to know oneself and one's surrounding reality, rather than a profession or a relaxing hobby.
It is perhaps for this reason that the process of painting, which includes a work's conception, preparation, and execution, which are at times quick and determined, at others long, complex, and ridden with doubt and changes of heart, holds an importance which is perhaps greater than the final result. Through his continuous confrontations with the whiteness of the canvas, with an “emptiness” that - more or less - terrifies us all, Zhu Bing re-examines his life, which is full of “memories that chain dreams” (as in the lyrics of “Volver” [returning] - a beautiful song by the Argentinian songwriter Carlos Gardel) and which influence the artist's present life in sometimes pressing terms, while at other times tinging it with a yearning nostalgia.
The future exists but in our thoughts, hopes and fears, yet, despite this, it can affect us in powerful, sometimes castrating ways. Upon a closer look, the past's actual existence is just as uncertain. According to Zen thought, each of us is born anew every day, in each moment one may decide to become a new, different person. Yet we bear the “marks” of countless experiences, which forge and direct us. Not even our progressive awareness of the elements that have influenced our lives, of the ghosts that we may trace back to our childhoods, can allow us to be open to new chapters in our lives. The “emptiness” we must confront also bears certain profound vestiges of our prior existences: perhaps that's what renders it even more difficult to face.
Painting is now often considered as a technique, a codified language that stems from long hours of study and the observance of rules, proportions and the relationship between colors and tones. In this way it is stripped of its deeper, foundational significance, which Chinese literati knew so well: that of expressing and communicating profound truths that resoundingly strike the collective chords of those kindred spirits who share “elective affinities”. Thus reduced to a purely decorative or commercial function, the object of painting, the painting itself, does not unveil anything new – it is but a colorful stain or a visual narrative.
During my encounters with Zhu Bing through the years, I have always found him to be intent, restless, and demanding with regard to his relationship with painting. Although immersed, despite himself, in an environment – that of contemporary art – that gauges success according to highly prosaic, concrete criteria, I have seen him constantly question the sense of spending long hours in his studio, brushstroke in hand. I've heard him ask himself questions that go beyond the external, superficial marks of public recognition, instead honestly and rigorously questioning himself about the meaning of his artistic endeavors. I believe his is an autobiographical course, which began in the place of his birth, Henan.
It is precisely in Henan that I chose to spend several days with the artist on a number of occasions, in pursuit of the landscapes and recollections that fill his works.
Along the Yellow River
Zhu Bing was born and raised between Zhengzhou and Kaifeng, between the city and immediate suburbs of places with a rich history that bear the vestiges of bygone days. He carries within himself the slow rhythms of the great river, the distinct landscapes that alternate flat, regular areas with sudden gorges and impervious, crumbly-soiled ravines. The trees he remembers are thin, slender, and rather scrawny, as are those that grow where rain is scarce, winters cold, and summers hot. Zhu Bing's knowledge of trees is that of an urban dweller, who carries within himself a sense of familiarity for them, rather than a knowledge of their names or possible uses. Yet trees are the absolute protagonists of his paintings.
When he moved with his family from Henan, the land of red soil, to Guangdong, with its lush, evergreen, invasive and imposing vegetation, it was precisely this feature that struck and attracted him. In a country such as China, where each city alas resembles all the rest, variations in climate and vegetation constitute a barrier to visual “globalization.”
I think Zhu Bing's passion for trees differs from the likewise as intense one of his friend and colleague Meng Huang, as from that of his colleague, the painter Duan Jianyu, a native of Zhengzhou who has been living in Guangzhou for a few years. Her trees are all easily recognizable: bamboo, firs, and the like, which seem to have been derived from a botanical manual and reproduced in a rather ironic, breezy, irreverent vein. Meng Huang's trees are living matter in a state of perpetual growth and motion, like hands stretching towards the sky. Zhu Bing's trees are instead engendered by both long-lost and more recent recollections; they evoke certain atmospheres and states of mind while questioning the viewer.
“Why paint trees?” Zhu Bing asks himself. “It has to do with the north: each time I think of Henan, the woods in winter come to mind, and that sense of feeling cold that moves me. It's the shape of the naked branches that tightens the throat and makes me think of trees and how they so often appear in traditional Chinese painting.”
Conjuring up the places where the artist grew up seems to overwhelm the present; perhaps the process of remembering softens the hard nature of his past experiences, lending them a tender, comforting air.
Or perhaps Zhu Bing often lives in the past because the current situation seems overly humdrum, comfortable, and ordinary; in short, it lacks that almost heroic sense of sacrifice that scores of Chinese generations know so well. From my conversations about the childhoods of both my contemporaries and slightly older peers (born in the fifties and sixties) – or even younger – I have come to realize that the sharpest memories, which are also the most moving and commonly shared, regard the “lack” of something: material lacks that have in turn led to the development of ideas, flights of fancy, and creativity.
I think it is true that for each of us things that are acquired too easily are just as easily forgotten, leaving no marked traces in their wake. Instead, every personal conquest is the fruit of arduous, impervious, hard-fought personal paths that lead to inner growth. Zhu Bing's youth, which was also spent toiling in a factory which taxed him to the point of making him quit, nonetheless holds within it the glowing glimmer of joys as simple as they are intense. Such as the time when, as a teenager, he skipped school with a group of friends to go on a trip to the countryside, where they all barbequed some food and smoked like grown-ups. Or the artist's relationship with his factory, a place of human apprenticeship, but also of suffering and strenuous effort.
Landscapes as Dreams
The artist's paintings during the last few years I think show that Zhu Bing has adhered to an important, significant process of subtraction. The items that crowded his landscapes a few years ago – dolls, human figures, animals - have gradually been replaced by atmospheres which alone contain the same sense of mystery without the need for overly explicit, sometimes exotic, elements. The colors have become “dustier,” the contours hazy, and the figures dissolve into each other, becoming almost undifferentiated matter. Zhu Bing favors earth tones, such as sienna or burnt sienna (it seems strange to speak of colors whose name derives from the earth of “Siena” rather than Henan's, but historically that color's name bears Italian roots...). Sharp, pure colors and tones rarely appear: for the most part the colors the artist uses are unique blends that cannot be reproduced.
Cats are the artist's most beloved animal, and the most mysterious; he often depicts feline figures, whether in groups or singly, whose profiles are sharply delineated with respect to the background, or whose figures blend in with the matter depicted. Along with birds, which are also a familiar subject, these felines are meant to exalt a sense of mystery and disorientation – their size, which is sometimes disproportionate with respect to the landscape, only serves to underscore their arcane nature.
A few settings remind us of the small parks that are so often found in the cities: small bridges, wooden or cement pavilions, and huge mushroom-like umbrellas. It seems that anything could happen there, that a dreamy, rather gloomy Alice has just returned from Wonderland and is thoughtfully picking her way through one path or another, one amusement ride or another.
Other settings include squalid urban outskirts bordering fields with debris-swollen brooks, which, despite the havoc humans have wreaked, still bear traces of the creative, enchanting force of nature.
Personally, the paintings I like best are those in which, as I mentioned above, the painter does without symbols or easily recognizable figures, and instead directly transforms a given state of being into the act of painting itself, into brushstrokes and drippings that are immersed in an almost undifferentiated whole that could, in the long run, lead to pure abstraction.
Yet Zhu Bing has recently confessed to me that he is more interested in telling a complete story, with a narrative development and an ending: the scanning of time, which is better expressed through media that capture motion, such as video, greatly interests him.
His large drawings, made up of several sheets of juxtaposed paper, are but the first step in this aesthetic direction, which I think will be marked by original, unpredictable developments. Having freed himself from the concerns which, whether one likes it or not, the use of color entails, the artist may now wholly devote his efforts to the telling of a narrative through the use of graphite backgrounds and strokes. Here a further aspect of the painter's expressive needs emerges, that of drawing upon a collective imagination through the use of recognizable elements, hence addressing the outer realm more than his own inner realm. Human and animal figures share a space in which proportions are subverted and thus perspective as well. They remind us of the language of cartoons, despite their also bearing that sense of suspension and mystery we've come to know so well.
I am convinced that the artist's creative course will lead him to experiment with new languages and artistic visions, which, while increasingly reflecting his own nature, will nonetheless become ever more accessible to others.
Monica Demattè
Luoyang, 8 October 2009
Translation by Francesco Giusti
【編輯：霍春?！?/span>
