Deng Cheng Wen

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Biography

Deng Cheng Wen’s Blind Walking series captures the collective ambition, ignorance and emotional flurry within the young Chinese of his generation. His works adopt a concept-based approach in order to seek a depth and complexity – at a level that causes some of its viewers to recognize personal truths when standing before the art. For an emerging artist, Deng’s insight into the issues unique to his generation is encouraging. Despite his youth, his message is compelling and pertinent while his arresting compositions attest to his immaculate attention to detail. The strong compulsion to express himself on the condition of his generation suggests that some have already started to see and will lead their compatriots towards a more meaningful future. And rightly so, this collective ambition is directed towards their infatuation with still-life techniques. Because modern life is multi-faceted, they cannot hope to achieve the public consensus that Yang Fei Yun's garners. However they have to veer away from simplistic representations of single-faceted beauty.

Through his own sensitivities, Deng has re-constructed a new visual experience that evokes the spirit whilst creating an art that integrates both symbolism and metaphors. Deng’s works counter the clash between perceptions of image and language. Of course the separation between language and image in order to find his own method of creation is consciously derived from his personal history. This method of painting is heavily imbued with symbolism and gradually fashions Deng’s eventual painting style. Deng’s works are a stunning display of the contradicting visual imagery that many in his generation encounter daily in their lives. His analysis often presents itself in the arena between imagery and language, with a biasness towards the unstable flux of their times.

Deng Chengwen:Blind Walking and Its Meaningless

Text/Zhu Qi

Deng Chengwen’s blind walking series is about the allegorical theme of the survival of the next generation. He uses stimulating visual situations to describe the lost mental state of Chinese youth after globalisation.

In 2007 a few of Deng Chengwen’s “blind walking” pieces were on show at the first 798 art festival which I organised. The scene was several stern looking young people who looked like they were playing a game of feeling their way around in the dark, standing in a line, with the last person in the line covering the eyes of the first. Being like an embyo of this whole series, when this piece first began it started off with just two or three people with a freehand empty background of grey nothingness. Later, the number of people was increased to seven or eight with a specific city, wasteland, river and country road background. “Blind walking” depicts the new generation and their landscape after China’s rise. The temperament of the new generation in Deng Chengwen’s works already possess the same post globalization characteristics as young people all over the world; not having the special political naivety of those born in the 50’s and 60’s, nor the adolescent cruelty accumulated during the preliminary stages of capitalism of those from the 70’s. Due to their excellent material standards and robust bodies they have good skin and fashionable clothing, with some young people even dying their hair to become a western blonde colour.

However, compared to those in other international cities, the new generation of Chinese possesses its own special characteristics, namely “sombreness” and worry. We can’t say that the youth of other countries do not possess these characteristics, but that they seem to be expressed very strongly in the new generation of Chinese. This is of course caused by China’s unique culture of political, economic and social revolution, which having economically liberated this generation still leaves it with other mental burdens.

Yet this kind of “burden” theme is absent from most art of the new generation. The theme of popular art is the superficial visualisation of cartoon, loveliness, and fashionable-beautiful women. Compared to his compatriots’ fondness for the new culture depicting cartoon loveliness, which reveals a lack of politics in contemporary art, Deng Chengwen chose to show sombreness. His depiction raises the mental problems of the new generation with his subjects mainly being people of the same age. They seem like they are the generation with no cares and worries after China’s rise, however they do not appear happy and are racked with anxiety.

Loss of direction causes this generation’s anxiety and even fear which has become the phenomenon directly expressed by Deng Chengwen. He depicts various kinds of people’s psychological actions; those with mouths wide open; those with mouths tightly shut; those with two arms outstretched; those with hands together in prayer; those with bodies bent forwards and those with heads turned looking back. It is easy to see; Deng Chengwen is not only expressing the mental state of himself, but that of a group. Furthermore, it seems this is a collective phenomenon. Their state of being burdened and lost also possess some special characteristics; they are not in the midst of politicized activities but in an adolescent state of grasping their way. In this state of grasping they feel directionlessness, unspecified fear and anxiety

Deng Chengwen’s “blind walking” was originally a void with no background, with the foreground being a burdened and anxious face covered by the hands of another. The game style survival method causes this generation to fall into a vain directionless, anxiety, fear and to become burdened. This is the phenomenology of the work “blind walking”. In the early stages of the “blind walking” series, Deng Chengwen only showed the mental phenomena of the present generation and didn’t directly show the reason which led to it. In the later works in the series, he added background situations for the blind walking line of people such as cities, rivers, wasteland etc, showing the different spheres causing the burden and fear.

These different spheres all belong to a series of difficult situations, for example, a line of blind walkers on top of a building in the city walking straight ahead, the leaders feet being right on the edge of the roof. In front of them is a landscape of towering buildings and a sea of neon lights but they have already walked to the edge of the building. Certain difficult situations are located by rivers in the city suburbs, the blind walkers are pressing forward through a river up to their waists in water or some young men and women are just standing around aimlessly in the water. Another scene is blind walkers in a patch of wasteland. Despite their being no immediate danger the blind walkers faces are full of emptiness and anxiety.

Ever since the paintings of the 70’s, it has become a pattern to express the self characteristics of the new generation and their mental state through realism, super realistic pictures and allegori