觉晓
2025
撰文：黄柏然
发表于艺术论坛 ArtForum
穿过天目里园区的池水园林，再下到B1OCK艺术买手店负一层就是俞菲尔的“觉晓”现场。出了电梯，前台摆有一幅临摹民国初期医学人体的素描，一只闪着电子火焰的蜡烛。如果清末的知识分子看见这个情景，大概要震惊后人学习科学人体再到模拟自然只用了一百年。
不过，今天的人反倒哀叹于技术对地球的计算和榨取，这也才让许煜的宇宙技术论有了发展空间。倒不是说这个展览回应了许煜的提案，而是两者在思考绘画（技术）及其界面的态度有些相似。展厅作品的顺序是精心安排的，似乎有意让你慢慢注意到图像以外的物质支撑：一件古代人物的局部临摹，但木板侧面画着白色榫卯结构（醉侯，2025）、一只半出鞘的中古嫁接刀，刀身画有熟睡的人（眠眠，2025）、三块大小不一的木条拼成场景，画着酣睡的老者、鱼肚白的夜晚和湖面（醉侯2，2025）。在看完三个图像与物件的实验之后，我开始注意到影子：一种画在图像边缘，一种来自射灯的光。
再往下走，一组由三张木板组成的《正午显影》（2025）画了同一个鱼形模具但不同光影，精确地说，是只在木板上画了阴影来示意模具在时间里的变化。我想起俞菲尔以往常画的空心盔甲和各种器皿，但不同的是以往更强烈的总是形里的空缺，有一种主体不安甚至忒修斯之船的意味。但在《正午显影》里，模具的材质不用颜料表达，直接留白露出的木纹像是绕了个弯甩掉没完没了的主体追问。我猜其中的秘诀在于：放弃用绘画（语言）掌握一切，真实世界就会自动递补缺口。这也像许煜思考技术时谈到“图形”和“背景”的重新合一，但又有些不同——他回溯山水是为了把道家思想更新成区别于西方的技术，因此主体必须消融在山水里化为一种融贯逻辑；但俞菲尔显然具体的多，甚至你可以说她处理的可能是事物如何在边界上转换的问题。比如，展厅正中央的一件足底按摩绘画（无题，2025），在前面作品的铺垫下我想到身体里的经络：当穴位被按压时，经络才会从酸楚感里成为现实。
在展览里我总注意到绘画的边缘：那些细心画上的折面阴影、榫卯和裱褙后留下的托边，有时甚至会削减图像的纯度，把太遥远的神游拉入现实。展览末尾，俞菲尔和我在一件描述雨的作品（雨，2025）前提起中国画论里常形/常理的讨论，我想起古代文人生产画论的历史其实也是一段垄断诠释的过程，以至于后世思想家为了在理论上做决斗而回溯历史时，或多或少有点在前人偏爱的精神之道上一路加速的状况。尽管《雨》是一件由分割画面演绎不同雨势（也就是常理）的作品，但我在一条分割线的边沿发现几道无关分隔的笔触。我看了很久，虽然不太清楚意图，但它必然与界限的思考有关。
严格说来整个展览没有明确的主轴，图像是轻柔的，但边界上的暗示又让它们变得坚实。令我意外的是，当我回到一楼步出电梯，一道横梁投在地上的阴影让我下意识地顿了脚步。
Soft Awakening
2025
Text by Pojan Huang
Translate by Kristina Bao
Passing through the ponds and gardens of OōEli down to B1OCK art and concept store on the basement level, you arrive at Yu Feier's exhibition “Soft Awakening." On the reception desk just outside the elevator sits an imitation sketch after an anatomy drawing from the early Republican period, beside it is a flickering electronic candle. If late Qing dynasty intellectuals were to see this scene, they might be astonished by how it took only a century for humanity to advance from learning the science of human body to simulating nature itself.
Today, however, people lament the ways technology calculates and exploits the Earth—creating the very space for Yuk Hui to develop his cosmotechnics. It is not to say that this exhibition responses directly to Hui's proposals, but the two share a similar attitude toward painting (or technology) and its interfaces. Arrangements of the works in the gallery were carefully decided, seemingly to make one slowly noticing the material supports beyond the images: a partial sketch of an ancient figure has white mortise-and-tenon joints patterns on the sides of its wooden panel (The Drinkers, 2025); a half-drawn vintage grafting knife has a sleeping figure painted on the blade (Sleepy Sleepy, 2025); and three uneven planks together formed a scene of a dozing old man, a fish-belly-white night, and a lake (The Drinkers 2, 2025). After seeing these three image-object experiments, I began noticing the shadows: one kind were painted on edges of the image, the other casted by the spotlights.
Further in, a triptych titled Mysterious Object at Noon (2025) depicts the same fish-shaped mold under different lightings—more precisely, only the shadows were painted to suggest passage of time. I recalled Yu's earlier paintings of hollow armors and vessels, yet the emphasis was always on the void within the form—evoking an unease of subjectivity or even a kind of Ship of Theseus anxiety. But in Mysterious Object at Noon, the mold's material was not expressed through pigments but blanks, unveiling textures of the wood as if the coiling wood grains could deftly sidestep the endless pursuit of subjectivity. Perhaps the key is to relinquish the urge to grasp everything through painting (language), so the real world could naturally fill in the gaps. This recalls Hui's discussion of the reunification of "figure" and "ground" in his philosophy of technology, though Yu's approach differs—Hui revisits landscape paintings to reintegrate Daoist thinking into a non-Western cosmotechnics, where the subject must dissolve into nature to form an integral logic; Yu, on the other hand, is obviously more specific. One might say she is concerned with how things transform at their boundaries. For instance, there is a painting showing a foot massage scene (Untitled, 2025) at the center of the gallery. With the previous works in mind, I thought of the meridian—only when an acupoint is pressed and created ache could it becomes concrete reality.
Throughout the exhibition, my attention kept returning to edges of the paintings: the meticulously painted faceted shadows and mortise joints, and the narrow borders left after mounting. These details sometimes even reduced the purity of the images, pulling distant reverie back into the real world. At the end of the exhibition, Yu and I stand before a work depicting rain (The Rain, 2025). We discussed the classical Chinese theory of "constant form" and "constant principle (or inherent reason of things)." I was reminded that the history of Chinese painting theory was also a history of interpretive monopoly—so much so that when later thinkers revisit it to reason for theoretical duels, they often accelerated along the very spiritual paths their predecessors favored. Though The Rain used segmented panels to depict different intensities of rainfall (that is, the constant principles), I noticed a few stray brushstrokes along one dividing line that do not contribute to any separations or segmentations. I lingered over them for a long while, uncertain of their intent; yet, they were surely related to a meditation on reality and boundaries.
Strictly speaking, the entire exhibition has no explicit axis. The images are gentle, yet the hints at boundaries stouten them. What struck me the most was that, upon returning to the ground floor and stepping out of the elevator, the shadow of a beam cast on the floor made me pause instinctively.
*图片致谢想象力学实验室