The Imaginary Enemy of Du Yan and Lv Ying

Gu Zhenqing 

Du Yan and Lv Ying have always been trying to reject the instrumental characteristic features of art. They try to leave everything behind, not only the fonctions of art of expression, communication, cognition, aesthetic appreciation, promotion and its educational fonction, but also decoration, consumption and capital gain investmental fonction endowed to art. They try to liberate art from its fonctional innovation and conceptional originality and return to it with their primordial emotion. Therefore, art to them becomes an reflection of individual liberation and individual freedom.

For Du Yan and Lv Ying, nothing in the real life remains unchanged. Ideology and social cutural structure, which could be the most steady systems in contemporary China, their daily changes are still perceptible to artists. Since always, system and regulation restrict artists in a subconscious way but never did they succeed in rocking the independent thinking and free spirit of artists. Du Yan and Lv Ying work seriously both in life and in art, breaking the rules and challenging the systems, seeking recognition through doubts, and continue questioning after gains of certain recognition. With constant interrogations, there can be no eternity nor truth of anything, neither entrance nor exist of essentialism. However, with the gradual broadening of their life tour, the artists experience certain kind of self restriction from time to time. The differences between themselves and their former peers in imagination, insight and conception may be merely differences of individuality. If what supposed to be smashed can all be smashed up, how about the identity of artist? The imaginary enemy of artists may be nothing but a question of the self.

In every single day of life, artists experience the uncertainty of being. A life so changed. One step forward, one might not be dragged into the fearful misery. One step backward, one might not retreat to the bridge of gold neither.