Hostility: The Attitude of Xu Ruotao

                                                                                                                                                                             Gu Zhenqing

   Xu Ruotao’s artworks express a certain hostility towards the established reality and culture, but also express profound concern for the future of mankind. This hostility is a kind of artistic method, and moreover, it is an overlying attitude he holds towards the visual culture of consumerist globalized society. For Xu Ruotao, the insight and imagination catalyzed by this hostility towards past visual modes and models come to form a series of idea storms that blow against his mind.

   Culturally, hostility is the antonym of reconciliation. Chinese tradition places much emphasis on harmony and reconciliation. But in reality, cultural conflict and bitter partisanship presents a different state of normality. The Christian tale of the Tower of Babel warns that the differences between languages and cultural values are the root historical causes of difficulty in communication and reconciliation. The existence of divergent languages, different cultural views and the social divisions of labor has made hostility a mode of social behavior between different groups and different people. Looking upon others with hostility has also formed a different thread in human visual cultural history, as different traditions, models and systems face off and clash. No matter how different art traditions, models or systems change, and no matter how different artistic concepts, forms and styles develop, they all face the possibility of ossifying or blowing out due their accumulated inertia. For this reason, various cultural forces from old to new, previous to latter, deep to shallow and fast to slow, all come to view each other with hostility, grate against each other, even reconcile and hybridize. This is all unavoidable. As art replaces old with new and constantly refreshes, different artistic forces face each other honestly or with hostility, creating a cultural context that appears to be fractious and isolated, but is actually complimentary and diverse. Xu Ruotao’s inherent critical and self-critical spirit is a root of his independence from any ideology, political or cultural. Looking at established things and concepts, he is brave enough to face them honestly, but also to maintain a constant state of wariness and hostility. The sense of distance created by hostility is actually a method for maintaining respect for others while avoiding being consumed by the nature of others. Xu Ruotao’s hostile attitude has gradually been crafted into a visual form, something that permeates his creative system of observations, criticisms and rethinking of things and concepts, something that has been fused into his specific artworks from every creative phase.

   Xu Ruotao left his home of Shenyang to live in Beijing’s Yuanmingyuan Artist Village in 1991. As one of the first northeastern Chinese artists to move into the village, he paid dearly for artistic freedom and an independent character. He dropped out of university and wandered to Beijing, ending up homeless and penniless. Xu Ruotao’s decision to extract himself from the system led to an arduous and dangerous process of self-banishment. Creation, reading, thinking and fighting against his circumstances came to form the individual landscape of the artist’s independent existence. He used the image of a bed as a carrier for his metaphors, expressing a feeling of hostility and isolation from reality. His spiritual seclusion led him to look with hostility upon established, popular cultural logic, and look down upon the chaos of the mortal world. This hostile attitude sometimes left him locked in a prison of the self, but sometimes it allowed him to walk outside of himself and reappraise his self-definition.
   While doing video postproduction in 2001, Xu serendipitously discovered the visual liberation provided by painting with the mouse and computer images. Any image, normal or abnormal, real or unreal, could be scanned into his inquisitive, critical field of vision. He could use the intervening or concealing lines of the mouse to engage in subjective revisions and transformations of objective things. Xu’s creative method of changing established images, born of his hostility to established schema, suddenly had a place to come into play.

   In the ten years that followed, Xu Ruotao entered into a soaring peak of creativity. Various scenes of the universe, classics of art history and other readymade images indicative of the grand narrative became the visual material for Xu’s critical creations. On the canvas, the concealed hostility directed at the concrete level, which Xu permeated the abstract consciousness with, often lead to a tight, exaggerated internal tension, which powerfully interfered with the viewer’s observation mentality. The highly layered lines in his works were filled with a sense of rhythm and harmony, appearing as a temporal thread that constantly covered over the original images and even the lines themselves. In fact, in this process of forming these images of negated negation, Xu Ruotao enjoys an oblivious freedom of body and mind, and deftly grasps a perceptivity of unknown things and the exploration of uncertainty. With Xu Ruotao’s open state of mind, this hostile attitude and rules of the game have not hindered him but have given him increasing agility to flow back and forth across the boundaries between abstract and concrete vision, bringing him to a lucid artistic realm.