Nothing Had Happened / by Han Wei

A sewing machine, a toy, a pet, and a pair of eyes that peep into an empty space, are ordinary, plain and irrelative daily fragments in a living scene. As a master, the artist repeats, meditates, combines and describes the selected living fragments from memory during the process of daily life. Then after that, there is no narrative function behind those realistic images and the relationship among objects are split. Every picture is like a piece of momentarily teased fragment, while the daily fragments keep playing irrelative comedy under his paintbrush.


Driven by the inertia of life, everyone would experience such daydream trap unconsciously. The signan and designatum both disappear in the painting. You don’t even ask why they are placed here. Every object shows again without any doubt, becoming a set of simple sign connections and feeling at ease.

At the first sight of Zhou Yongjie’s paintings, they were placed in the corners of the room. The audience accidentally compare the daily objects with those in the paintings. The familiar objects are side by side but unacquainted. However, a new path was found between intimacy and strangeness. The artist hopes to guide the audience into this space to search for their own perceptions and cognition. It seems easier to enter such situation with the 3D glasses. Another dreamland appears when the lens filters the deviated colors, bringing not only the effect of strengthened depth of field, but also the still space without the time dimension. He is fascinated by such visual enjoyment because it’s a kind of “free anatomy” watching, away from the normal viewing experience. So, using joking and humorous language in the painting gives the audience the utmost freedom of appreciation.

With the development of graphic communication technology, especially the 3D techniques, entertaining images keep stimulating the public sensations and make the audience mad with joy. While implanting the technique, the artist creates a new medium between 3D image and painting. The result of the performance tries to the thinking and interpreting of the pure sensory satisfaction brought about by the modern entertainment. The technical application is directly connected with the concept, building a new series of painting languages in a new path. Perhaps the artist tends to regard painting as a game. Once wearing 3D glasses, we can enjoy an ordinary scene with pleasure. On this illusive stage, the audience is the symbol reader as well as the significance giver.

As a poker face, “ordinary” is neither passionate nor indifferent. Even if you don’t care about its existence; everything is well settled. When the artist keenly notices it changeless, he can’t be involved in the time to experience the delight of life. The artist can place himself in the lost and indulgence of modern Paradise Lost only through the absurd teasing jokes of daily memory fragments and pictures of eternal instant.

Translation: Fan Chen
翻 译：范 晨