Beyond Realism: The Life aesthetics and Lyricism in Lin Hao-Bai’s Paintings.
The experience of looking at Lin Hao-Bai’s Paintings
strikes one as something unique.
The paintings, at the first glimpse, unequivocally evokes the thought of the
sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” written by the British Romantic
poet John Keats:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Lin’s exquisite skills in realistic oil painting, the apparent “realism,” undoubtedly
attracts many viewers to stop. However, what makes viewers linger on is actually not the
ostensible realistic form of the paintings but the exquisiteness, the impeccable beauty,
and the aura of urban literati these paintings exude. Even though galleries and art
exhibitions have always labelled him as a painter of realistic art,1 such labelling only
manifests the undeniable fact that Lin belongs to the long tradition of realism and is
acknowledged as one of the best among the new generation painters in Taiwan.
The labelling, however, obscures other valuable aspects of his art that deserve
attention, namely, the life aesthetics and restrained lyricism his artworks radiate. If
understood in light of the nineteenth-century realism, the term “realism” denotes the
“objective, calm, and faithful” depiction of life. Even though Lin’s works is labelled
as realistic, the interest of his paintings actually does not reside in “objective,
calm, and faithful” depiction of the details of real life; rather, the still lifes or
urban landscapes in his paintings are carefully arranged and painted to reflect his
inner state of mind, emotions, lifestyle, dialogues with the surroundings, and most
importantly, his extreme pursuit of beauty.
Taking a closer look, one may find with no effort that although his adroit skills in
“subtle realism” may seem eye-catching, the charm of his paintings does not lie in
“realism” or “photographing” but the refined taste of life emitted from the
“performance” of the delicately arranged vase flowers or potted plants. Just as the
French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has put it: “Habitus is a system of dispositions,
that is of permanent manners of being, seeing, acting and thinking.
In Radiance | Oil on linen mounted on panel | 53 x 45.5 cm | 2015
Or a system of long-lasting (rather than permanent) schemes or schemata or structures of perception, conception and action,”which precipitates in histories and daily life (“Habitus” 27-28). When habitus is infused into the painter’s artistic creation, the afore-said schemes will manifest themselves as the style and manner of artworks. Judging from this perspective, one may regard Lin’s paintings as the accumulation and manifestation of his life experience and taste, namely, his implicit attitude toward life—his “habitus.” Thus, watching his artworks evokes the feelings of facing up close a silent dazzling stage performance. The “Still Life” series seem to adopt multiple light sources. The objects in the paintings are illuminated by the natural light through the window, but there are also spotlighted parts breathtakingly displaying the silhouette of petals, creating fabulous, dramatic effects: all kinds of flowers, plants, and glassware are in their best posture, standing on the fashion stage irradiated by strong light. Stripped off their ordinary images and materiality in daily life, these objects have been reborn and miraculously transformed into bright and transparent porcelain-like metrosexuals and urban goddesses.
Posing like the 19th-century “dandy,” they serenely and elegantly show their gorgeous appearance after full makeup, as if they dress up purely for the audience’s gaze and gasp in admiration. Even though ever since 2017, Lin has extended the theme of his creation from interior still lifes to the urban landscape peeped through the window, his works still show consistent characteristics—a rare sense of purity, calmness, refinement, lucidity, tranquility, and peace. While his paintings may be reminiscent of techniques such as photorealistic rendering, they are not the same. Objects or sceneries in his paintings are in fact lyrical reality carefully designed and arranged. For instance, the composition and layout of his artworks—be it is a still life or a landscape, remain symmetrical. This can also be found in the subtle symmetrical stretch of flowers or vegetation in gestures, or the delicate balance between objects and the space arrangement of the paintings. It all reveals that what he paints is not reality, but a settled state of mind expressed through the depiction of objects. Therefore, we may assume that “faithful” reproduction is not the artist’s goal; on the contrary, through painting, the artist implicitly expresses the mood, feelings, and interest of life. This makes Lin’s paintings cross the boundaries of realism.
An Ordinary Morning | Oil on linen mounted on panel | 65 x 60 cm | 2020
Tina Pang interviewed Lin in 2018. 2 The photos taken in Lin’s studio record his creative life. The concentrated figure of Lin painting in his clean and well-ordered studio reveals his daily practice of life aesthetics. His studio is clean and bright, orderly, lush with flowers and trees, and full of greeneries, just like his elegant and calm exterior and the meaning of his name, Hao-Bai, “a vast expanse of whiteness.” The unexpected neatness and clarity of his studio subvert the stereotypical impression of a painter’s chaotic studio. (Just imagine the twentieth-century Irish-British painter Francis Bacon’s studio!) This also in turn confirms that his creative concept is derived from his attitude towards life. No support or endorsement of too much art theory or academic discourse is required: what he requires is tranquility and restraint, but he also advocates elegance and delicacy. The most important thing is an emphasis on the beauty of life in the painter’s inner world. The kind of life aesthetics makes him render the soft falling petals with meticulous care and accuracy. With splendid skills, he presents these smooth delicate petals as something snowy and feathery, silky and satin, turning them into immaculate art creations worked with great precision. With such an aesthetic standard, Lin paints his mood in a minimizing style and pursues the upscale taste. All these are shown through the painter’s soft whispers to the greeneries and flowers in the paintings.
Sanyu, a Chinese-French modernist painter, once stated his creative views: “I am just a
painter. Regarding my works, I don’t think there is any need to give any explanation.
When viewing my works, you should clearly understand what I want to express . . . just a
simple concept.” Although it is difficult to compare the two for the
moment, Sanyu’s life, artistic taste, and his gradual alienation from the galleries in
his contemporary time shows that art creators may not be necessarily regulated by
tradition, genre, art theory, ideology, or the art market. The artist’s desire to pursue
creative freedom and creativity often transcends the boundaries of tradition and genre.
Therefore, when the exhibition labels Lin’s works as “subtle realism,” viewers may want
to further ask: Does his work pursue a kind of “photorealism”? Lin’s drawing notes
indirectly responded to this question: “I never pursue the texture of the work like a
photo. Although it is a concrete picture, I hope that the picture has a human
temperature, and traces of painting can be found in it. Therefore, I kept the brush
strokes in the painting, but still follow the “dark/thin, bright/thick” principle to
apply the media. Although I preserved the brush strokes, I tried to weaken them as much
as possible to express the sense of purity I wanted.” If so, the viewer can’t help but
ask again: What is the significance of engaging in realistic painting in contemporary
times? Is it because the painter intends to draw the collector’s attention with
exquisite techniques? Or does he prefer drawing on his remarkable aesthetic taste and
personal charm to attract the viewer?
The famous French poet/art critic Charles Baudelaire once defined the attributes of
beauty dialectically in his famous art criticism “The Painter of Modern
Life,” in which he opined that the composition of beauty must contain two elements: the
first is “ invariable element,” and the second is “
an eternal,
a relative,
circumstantial element
which will be . . . whether severally or all at once, the age,
its fashions, its morals, its emotions” (3).
,” “
Both of them are, in his judgement, indispensable. In the same vein, he further defined
the term “modernity” that emerged
in the mid-nineteenth century, stating that “[B]y
ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal
and the immutable. (12) This discussion shows that if a work of art is to stand the test
of time and history, it must have the qualities of permanence, as well as the creativity
and ability to accurately capture, describe, and express contemporaneity, which was
called “modernity” in Baudelaire’s time). This is indeed the greatest challenge faced by
all artistic creators. Lin’s paintings have such potential because his paintings can
exhibit a precipitated, eternal beauty. This is mainly due to his capability of limning
with refined taste the perfect mental image of the flowers and sceneries in his daily
life. The kind of creative potential also won him the affirmation of many domestic
awards. Like many contemporary artists of oil painting, he experimented with techniques
in many ways and finally figured out the technique of spreading calcium carbonate onto
the surface of linen as a base, and then applying oil paint layer by
‘modernity’ I mean the
layer. In this way, the painting can avoid the sense of heavy stacking in traditional
oil painting. The surface of the artwork thus may look smooth and flat and present a
sense of delicacy and purity. By doing so, Lin carves out a niche for himself in oil
painting. However, as far as painting ideas and theories are concerned, his paintings
tend to be introspective and slightly secluded, without the intervention of too many
external theories. Interestingly, precisely because he focuses on the inner world and is
not disturbed by theories, this characteristic makes him the avatar of the unique
humanistic spirit and lifestyle of the generation born in the 1980s. His life aesthetics
and taste coincidentally demonstrate the contemporariness of this generation of
Taiwanese painters nurtured by Taiwan’s economic prosperity and opens up a new
possibility for Taiwanese literati paintings. This contemporaneity makes possible the
eternity of his artworks, enabling them to stand the test of time. The kind of quality
might also make his works more enduring when compared with other popular attempts to
promote artistic conceptions or local symbols. This is the “ circumstantial element”
claimed by Baudelaire—the singularity of style taking shape in the interactions between
the painter’s artwork and his contemporary condition.
Since he started to engage in creative art until now, Lin has been trying to break away
from the singularity of the theme in his paintings. As yet, the themes of his paintings
have expanded from the “Still Life series” that began in 2009 to the “Urban Landscape
series” that appeared in 2017. During his several trips to major European
relative,
cities, he began to build up a relation between the interior and the exterior with the
aid of window images, thereby extending the focus of his creation from indoor still life
to the outdoor sceneries overlooked from the window and the streetscape observed in
roaming. To some extent, depicting exotic urban landscapes outside the window implies an
attempt to step out of the familiar comfort zone, explore the unknown, and take risks in
foreign cities. This virtually reflects the artist’s inner state of mind: “Part of the
window represents the artist’s vision, my persistence, my framing, and my observation of
the city; the other part also represents me as a traveler, I am in this city, although I
am very close to her, but there is always an insurmountable gap between this city and
me, so I use a darker window, which gives me a feeling of peeking.” From still lifes to
window scenes, what remains consistent is the style of expressing emotions in the works.
Lin hopes: “I want to let the appearance of the works be closer to my inner state. . . .
I want to express the relationship between indoors and outdoors, not just the outdoor
scenery. This idea comes from my previous series. Now I want to let the outdoors become
the protagonist of the picture. What constitutes the picture is the window view from
which I look out from the indoors, and the indoor elements represent my personal private
space and line of sight. I become an observer, and the city is the object of my
observation.”
Chance Encommter | Oil on linen mounted on panel | 90 x 124 cm | 2018
The composition of the “Urban Landscape series,” which indicates the painter’s intention to peek at the outside world from the window, is reminiscent of the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte, for example, The Human Condition (1933) and The Promenades of Euclid (1955). Both paintings feature the scenery observed from the window, although the painter has a different intention——forcing the viewer to understand the image itself is not real. In the two window image paintings, Magritte expressed his artistic conception by confusing the boundaries between reality and representation: “ The problem of the window led to La Condition humaine. . . . For the viewer, the tree was simultaneously in the room in the picture and outside in the real landscape. That existence in two different spaces at once is like the moment existing simultaneously in the past and the present as in déjà vu” (“Life Line”).
Simply put, he considers that the real world is just a representation of the mind. Lin seems to have been inspired by the kind of composition when he depicts the urban landscapes peeped through the window. This new attempt indicates that the painter began to ponder the relations between other cultures and his situatedness during his travels. Perhaps he might also start to think about how to keep a safe and appropriate viewing distance from the outside world through some kind of intermediary. When Lin was preparing to exhibit the “Urban Landscape series”—Beyond in 2017, he mentioned that he could accurately control the details of the objects in painting indoor still lifes. However, when painting Beyond, his newest work at that time, he realized that the complexity of the distant cityscape was beyond the scope of his control, so some details were simplified. This also reflects that there is an unbridgeable gap between the city and him. This “epiphany” to some extent responds to Magritte’s surrealist thought; that is, the painter’s grasp of the external world depends on the representation of his inner state of mind or his consciousness; in other words, the reality exists as a reproduction of inner state or consciousness that goes beyond “reality.” As for Lin’s paintings, reality for him is the display of life aesthetics and emotions. Taken as a whole, the sedimentary thoughts, the lifestyle, the minimized lyrical undertone, the spiritual dialogue between the painter and his life situation may be regarded as the soul of Lin’s two series. Nonetheless, the kernel of these values is often obscured by his stunning realistic renderings. How the artist explores new directions after his urban adventures will unequivocally depend on how he distills deep thoughts from everyday life.