An individual’s life line is also the upper bound of human life-ethics!
by Zha Changping, PhD
Whether as a lower or upper bound, human life is essentially about seeking certainty within uncertainty, breaking through certainty to enter some uncertainty, and thereby achieving self-transcendence. The recent works of contemporary artist Dove reveal to art-lovers these two turbulent poles of human existence. In the work Earlym (which means undecided, 2024), the black linear block stretches diagonally left and right, tilted at an angle, suspended in the air, hesitantly searching for its belonging. It can be interpreted as a “brother” descending ever closer towards the green and red, or as a linear block moving away from them and rising up, or even as an “offspring” splitting from them. Perhaps, this is the meaning of “Earlym” in the mind of the artist, and more so, for us contemporaries, a representation of that early-morning feeling of directionless (vita sine ratione) sometimes.
In terms of renewing the language of media, contemporary artists are essentially faced with three possible choices: being a pioneer that invents a new medium, a promoter that further develops an existing medium, or a cross-media creator that fuses several media. Liang Shaoji’s “Silk Art” makes him a representative of the first possibility. Most artists in the Chinese art world experiment and explore the second and third possibilities. Following the pictorial approaches of Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Lee Ufan, Dove has devoted himself over the past two decades primarily to expanding the language of an existing medium and renewing its possibility for the abstract expression of life. He differs from those abstract artists whose thematic concern is about the intellectual experience of living. His earlier “Cross” series (2006-2010), the Genesis series, the Twelve Lunar Months series (2013), and the “Ten” series (2014-2023) are all based on his perception of the certainty of the emotional experience of living and its related worlds. At least, under his brush, whether through monochromatic repetition or polychromatic harmony, all uncertainties seem to be consciously or unconsciously reduced to humankind’s primordial, determined symbol of the cross. His new works, Pworlds (that is to say, Being-in-the-World, 2024) and One Two Three Four (2025), feature horizontal and vertical colourful blocks of varying thickness, which, intersecting to form cruciforms, strive for a super-stable static or dynamic structure. These distinctly coloured configurations seem to articulate the underlying life-ethics of human-human relationships in society, an ethics of care that entails mutual compassion and appears in the pictorial tableau. Human events of life emerge from these paintings, surfacing in the interlaced lines of his One Two Zero Four Seven (2025). These lines, as a metaphor for human emotional experience of living, seem to accumulate in number, converging or dispersing, narrating the human entanglements of love and hate.
If modernity is humankind’s shaping of certainty, it is, inversely, humankind’s yearning for uncertainty. In terms of the experience of individual lives, human intellectual experience of living leans towards the understanding of the certainty of oneself and one’s life world, while his emotional experience of living focuses on the perception of their uncertainty. Both of them merge in the human volitional experience of living, especially in this mixed-modern era, where they entangle and struggle ever more intensely, rushing and colliding, thereby allowing the individual life to attain a fuller and richer “selfhood.” In Dove’s Dax (2024), the ten parallel linear colourful blocks from top to bottom resemble the numerous “I” hidden in an individual life. The “I” being similar to a pale yellow band of light in the middle seems to become the “Corinthian pillar” that fixes and purifies the dim, varied, and sinking “I”s on its left and right, making the individual glow brilliantly amidst the ruins of life that is reminiscent of ancient Rome relics.
In fact, in the life world of reality, humans often experience uncertainty within certainty, and they need to make risky decisions in uncertainty. Life comes into being between the two. The openness of the self is thus founded, and the entropy of human life towards disorder is thereby negated. This is the artistic truth revealed by Dove in his work Aboutc (2023): To what should an individual life open himself ? To the broken authentic cross or the endlessly built Tower of Babel? To some inner hidden order or some artificial, ornate rules?
(The author is a critic, biblical scholar, and editor-in-chief of Humanities & Art. Translated by Yuantao Liu)