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(Exhibition
catalogue essay, 1999)
Turn on the TV or
tune in to whatever audio/visual medium is beckoning and it’s as
natural as getting out of bed. Putting on the news is like putting
on your shoes; we don’t even think about it. We immerse ourselves
naturally into the socially orchestrated world of signs and
signifiers, far away from lived experience without a thought. This
is a given; common knowledge. We don’t withdraw from the synthesised
- as though we are missing something - we embrace it. We happily
tune out our senses when we tune in. You think we are looking and
hearing? Sorry, not so. We don’t look, we read and we don’t hear, we
decipher. Of course we do. Socially, it is up to the brain to make
sense of what we sense - otherwise sound and sightings would just
wash over us like a warm shower. We decode the rabble of media info
coming at us through a screen of social signifiers: words, images,
signs, symbols and sounds that conceptually stand in for actual
events.
As I sit here at my
desk, is there anything that I can see that is not the product of
human enterprise? Even the sky has a nice warm yellow tint...
Second Nature as it is called, belies the fact that there could ever
possibly be a first nature. It is very easy to overlook the fact
that there is something else going on in the world apart from what
we orchestrate. There is? Where? This is harder to answer than it
may seem. As soon as one tries to finger the actual presence of a
‘medium’ which enabled the human presence to come into being in the
first place - which maintains us still - we extinguish it. As we
subject it to the kind of intellectual scrutiny we use to classify
everything else, we simultaneously distance ourselves from it. We
apply the critical distancing of objectivity in order to better know
it, thus obliterating the possibility of any such knowing. The point
is, that phenomena independent of our social constructions cannot be
rationally itemised, it can only be sensed. How can we, as sentient
beings (a priori to our self-conscious street-smartness), appreciate
our own sentience and at the same time become aware of the
unfathomable presence of whatever it is that incubated us? We can do
it through art - at least through some art.
Tony Ng’s paintings
offer this possibility. Ng understands art’s ability to speak of
things that neither he or anyone else can orchestrate. Further, he
understands the difference between speaking of the ‘phenomenon of
existence’ (for want of a better phrase) and simply conjuring a
representation of landscape, or a narrative about it. What Ng really
provides, is what we may call a sentient space, an open visual field
which can be experienced, rather than read like a billboard. His
paintings require a different approach to the kind of rationalist
processing required for TV. How can one create a visual ‘image’
which bears no relation to the usual avalanche of familiar mass
media imagery, an image which also insists on being understood in a
totally different way? Well, it’s to do with motivation. The artist
does not assert his will, the work is not a self-engrossed statement
and it does not try to sell you anything. Additionally, the medium -
paint, pigment, ink etc is not simply the means towards these ends.
Instead, in an important way, the medium is also the subject of the
work. Rather than the artist ‘mastering’ the medium, he forms a kind
of contractual agreement with it. Ng uses ink, pigment, paper,
gravity, evaporation among other things, and in a way, these mediums
use him. Together, they form an alliance and the image develops out
of this symbiotic relationship. In the end, the work celebrates the
phenomena of person interacting in the world of material substances
and the ineffable forces that guide it; it observes the essential,
mutually inclusive relation between body and world.
For the viewer, the
prolonged process of looking into Ng’s paintings makes one aware of
this essential relation. It is embedded in the layers of the work,
in the residual evidence of the body’s mutual relation to medium. To
observe this is an experience not unlike that of scrutinising a
chunk of volcanic rock. If we are prepared to look at it - and look
hard - we may glimpse, momentarily, something of unimaginable
significance, something which our brain’s socially constructed
responses do not allow us to witness. It is something one may call
flux. We may sense in the rock that matter is not ‘static’ and it is
not ‘solid’, it merely exists between continually changing states -
as we do. Momentarily, we may grasp what it is that is beyond our
invented concept called time. Like everything else, ‘time’ is the
dissection of something into workable fragments, each an object to
observe, analyse and monitor. Our rationalised world is a
conglomerate of these static entities, each isolated from one
another with its own name and number. Most of us have long forgotten
that in fact everything is seamless, that there is no such thing as
a static entity operating alongside everything else. Rather,
everything is interdependent and is always in constant flux, forever
shifting from one stage or state to another. As the philosopher
Nishitani says, the flower is merely an incremental stage between
seed and dust.
Ng is ideally
situated to speak of these things. His Eastern background means he
springs from an ancient culture which has for millennia recognised
‘inclusiveness’ as opposed to objective fragmentation. This is not a
‘concept’ and it is not a ‘belief system’ and it is also understood
by various cultures the world over. In Ng’s case, he is able to
reflect the essentialness of this way of thinking and transcribe it
into his own contemporary voice. This sounds simple but it requires
remarkable conviction at a time when many contemporary artists are
succumbing to the more glamorous post-popist art idioms, utilising
the typical hi-tech mediums and methods we use in our daily lives.
At present, many artists emulate the personal neuroses of our
dysfunctional society as though they are addressing important
cultural issues. These parodies may instead, merely operate as a
temporary mask for our despair. But for artists like Tony Ng, who
are prepared to avoid the nihilistic slip towards the soup of the
everyday, a more enduring art emerges. His engagement with the
deeply embedded phenomena of our own sentience - the essential
nature of our being that enables us to recognise the relevance of
things not accessible to our usual synthesised processing - might,
in the end, turn out to be the most important cultural issue of all.
© Robert Hollingworth |