Neutral Posture

Wang Min’an

Ge Hui paints a variety of people, though they look little different: with the same gaze, the same hairstyle, the same face, and even the same slim figure, they resemble the replica of each other. Nor do the eyes of these figures reveal any inner emotion. They neither stare intently nor with empty indifference; they are neither painful nor joyful, neither cranky nor calm. They are simply without passion. They are full of androgynous styles: both emotional and gender-specific. They are not even distinguishable in terms of age. All that differentiates them is their dress, which varies in style and colour: almost every garment is one colour, each occupying a conspicuous homogeneous colour block on the picture. Bodies are identified by the colour blocks of their clothes (tops, trousers, skirts). These bodies are so thin that the body's inner energy is diminished: their lack of passion comes not only from their dull gaze but also from this slender body. Here, the body is attached to the garment rather than the garment to the body, and the body seems to be a collage of the colours of the garment. Ge Hui has also painted some naked bodies and body parts, but the dominant colours of the garments swallow up their elasticity and vibrancy. These bare body parts also do not reflect strong corporeality. The colours used by Ge Hui are very eye-catching. Since each piece of clothing is composed of almost uniform colour blocks, there is a strong contrast between the different blocks of clothing - these images thus appear to jump around in blocks of colour. The background of the picture is also a significant colour block, which makes the whole picture cut and superimposed by blocks of strong contrast colour. Here, the image is a splicing and flashing game of colour blocks.

This game of overlaying exterior colours also drains the characters of their inner nature and temperament. These characters are also devoid of personality. Despite the absence of historical context (the backgrounds are abstract blocks of colour), we can still see that these are contemporary human figures (their hair and clothing styles are contemporary).  They seem to be suspended in the picture and the vacuum of history; they are in a state of rootlessness (there is neither history nor earth in the picture; they are shown in poses against a background of emptiness. The images are filled with exaggerated limbs: legs and hands are disproportionately elongated compared to the body – rather than struggling to draw these figures, Ge Hui works to remove their hands and feet, to mark their curves and turns - these exaggeratedly elongated limbs allow them to take significant turns with the hands and feet appearing as curves in the picture: it is not the whole limb that is drawing the curve, but each knee and elbow is turning dramatically. These turning lines make up these curved limbs and the various curves in the picture. These exaggerated curved turns give the image a sense of complex interlocking curves in addition to a jump and superimposition of colour. Sometimes it is an interlacing of two people, sometimes of many. There is no pattern to this interlacing; they are a kind of blind interlacing: sometimes their bodies overlap, but not in an intimate and natural embrace; they seem to be interlacing just for the sake of interlacing. This interlacing even makes the picture lack a sense of centre. The more people there are in the picture, the stronger this sense of chaotic it becomes. The interplay of bodies and limbs even smacks of the fantastic, of the surreal. The jumping and superimposing of colour blocks and the interlacing of lines make the picture appear more turbulent, passionate, and sparkling. Even though the faces of Ge Hui's figures are devoid of passion, the images themselves are full of enthusiasm.

Why did Ge Hui paint the poses of these contemporary people instead of their expressions? Why paint big swings of limbs instead of delicate flashes of faces or eyes? Gestures are also expressing, but silently, relying on movement. Agamben said: " Gesture by its very nature is never a gesture about the ineffable; it is never really a literal gag, the word meaning, firstly, an object stuffed in the mouth that prevents one from speaking and, secondly, an improvisation by the actor to compensate for memory loss or loss of speech.”In other words, when language is stuck, silent and impotent, people express themselves through gestures. People say the unspeakable through posture. Posture is an older and more original expression than concepts and language; posture is a pre-linguistic, linguistic stratum through which people acknowledge the silence and amnesia of language, the irredeemable deficit of speech. Posture is the expression of the inexpressible, just as the early silent films of cinema did. Posture is the language of silence. In Ge Hui's work, despite the passion for the picture, it is also the passion for silence. Or rather, the image is not paradoxically as silent and impassive as how many jumps of colour, how much-restrained spillover excitement, or how many entwined exaggerated poses it displays. Ge Hui keeps his paintings in a confrontation between indifference and enthusiasm, silence and clamour through this deliberate pose.

The posture is an unspeakable language; that is, it does not produce a definite external meaning, it does not point to anything, it does not have an external social symbolism for each gesture, as Brecht imagined, and it does not even have a purpose. Ge Hui’s attitude towards postures is that his paintings are only covered with colour blocks without any suggestive historical background. Removing the historical background allows the postures to be more enclosed within themselves. These poses are not even infused with sociological elements. People sometimes distinguish postures according to social habits: peasants have peasant postures, students have student postures, and cadres have cadre postures - for Bourdieu, posture is the marker that distinguishes class. Postures record a person's social and historical background. However, in Ge Hui's case, these characters have erased their social identity, which also means erasing the poses based on social habits; conversely, the universality and commonality of these characters are affirmed once the poses themselves do not reveal social and historical patterns. These are not specific historicised and socialised poses; they are pure poses. To make these poses thoroughly sweep away social and historical meaning, Ge Hui's painted poses are even somewhat surrealist; they are even impossible poses: some poses are so unbelievable that their natural bodies are impossible to accomplish: sometimes, a body pose floats in the picture; sometimes a body pose unbelievably crosses other bodies; sometimes a body shows a partial pose and then inexplicably loses another part of it. And there is an odd postural connection between people, even when they are in physical contact with bodies of the opposite sex, whose postures do not express the usual intimacy. They are an odd postural connection. This postural connection has no clear goal, logic or meaning. It is the imaginative connection of surrealism. It abandons the requirement for realism.

We see that this unnatural and unrealistic posture is not a posture of contentment; neither is it a posture of bondage nor a natural posture. It would be pure posture if it had neither meaning nor purpose nor reality. But these poses no longer contain passion; they are no longer the crystallisation and storage of a body full of energy, as Warburg would have it. These poses, therefore, do not lead to the powerful beauty of life, nor the opposite, the frail beauty of life. In Ge Hui's paintings, even when these figures are with the beast, their pose still seems passionless: their posture is neither expressed as joy nor a struggle. It is the neutral pose, the pose without meaning, the pose without any reference. They are poses that, like the faces of the figures in these paintings, have astringent substances. In this sense, the pose is a moment of mere movement. As this movement is neither responsive to purpose nor driven by passion, it is also a pose of stagnation, a dialectical posture of stagnation and motion. It stagnates while it moves. It is the stagnation of movement or the stagnation of movement.

Contemporary people are constantly making all kinds of exaggerated poses, striking poses, uncanny poses, and poses of being with and entangled with others. But these stage-like poses are meaningless, poses that are suspended, poses that have lost their passion and soul. But the more so, the more people strive for postures: "An age that loses its postures, also obsesses over them; for the man who has been robbed of all his true nature, the postures become destiny. And the more postures that lose their comfort under the pressure of unknown forces, the more life becomes uninterpretable." In Ge Hui's case, perhaps contrary to Agamben’s statement, the pressure of unknown forces leads to various postures through which life is interpreted.