The work of Geng Jianyi
The work of the artist Geng Jianyi is characterised by an abiding resistance to all settled forms of interpretation. Since he first came to prominence during the mid-1980s as a leading member of mainland China’s then newly emerging ‘avant-garde’ (a movement now widely referred to as the ’85 New Wave), Geng has performed this resistance by deploying a wide range of formally disjunctive techniques—including various forms of painterly transcription, staining, frottage, photographic transfer, chemical transformation and textual juxtaposition—whose conspicuously unsettling/obscurantist qualities actively interfere with the stable coalescence of meaning. Among the artworks produced by Geng over the last quarter of a century are not only images and texts that conspicuously recontextualise and remotivate supposedly objective forms of iconic and symbolic representation, but, in addition, a number of ready-made objects, assemblages and sites that have been marked by the traces of inconclusive, imperfectly directed or chance acts. Consider here, for example, two works produced by Geng during the year 2000: first, the photo-text work Identity Cards, in which a series of official portrait photographs, appropriated from the identity documents accumulated by an individual Chinese citizen throughout their lifetime, were blown-up and remounted as a way of drawing attention to the inescapable context-dependency and consequent unreliability of public representations of the self; and second, the ‘paper installation’ Reading Manner, which consists of nothing more than a book of blank paper pages despoiled variously at the margins, and to no obvious end, by the ink-stained fingerprints of an indeterminate number of ‘readers’.
In a number of instances Geng has compounded this indeterminacy by using of objects and images whose apparent significance shifts discernibly between contrasting positions when viewed from differing socio-cultural/ideological... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline