The Heroic of Painting- The illuminated paintings of Lin Bao Ling

The Heroic of Painting- The illuminated paintings
of Lin Bao Ling    

  Ian Woo

Your cities do not exist. Perhaps they have never
existed. Why do you amuse yourself with consolatory fables? 1

 Kublai Khan to Marco Polo

The paintings reveal illuminated matter informed by the grids and structures of a city. Made up of multiple reflections of illusionary glare, the illuminated subjects seem to be exalted, suggestively arranged to appear in an order that resembles
building and structures. James McNeil Whistler’s preoccupation with luminosity and visual poetry plays an important role in influencing the way Bao Ling paints and sees. It was Whistler who suggested the importance of the formal
arrangement of colour and lines as a way to emphasis the materiality and discreet act of painting over the elaboration of subject matter. The similarities that lie between Bao Ling’s and Whistler’s paintings are their concern with painting as a way to illuminate matter rather than as a medium to give detail to observation.

It was in the painting of fireworks; Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket by Whistler that caused a reaction from the noted art critic / artist John Ruskin to commend that it looked like a unresolved painting made out of drips and accidental marks with no concern to the craftsmanship and labor of painting.2 However, the argument would be that painting, as suggested by Whistler, should serve a double fold to represent material as itself as well as that of creating the illusionary. The idea of painting here is pigment being engaged at different levels. One can experience the mark of pigment that is fluid and immediate. At another level, there is the shaping and ordering of form; both characteristics allow a series of dialogue between representation and abstraction. There is a constant shift between these two states of reading, setting up the mind to enable a degree of shift between a formalism of aesthetics to that of representation. Here, we see the language of painting
reveal its processes but the structure that governs its flow to become visually comprehensible plays key to enabling the mental state to play language games. This range of illusionary depth provides momentary displacement as the eye tries
to make sense of the illuminated subject matter. The momentary displacement that results in this combination resembles the fleeting memory of the registration of a remembered image, one that is unclear, fragmented, in parts. In Bao Ling’s paintings, the parts are situated and differentiated by colours, creating fluctuating optical shifts as one gathers the visual identity from the suggested parts of illuminated matter.

In Bao Ling’s nocturnal cityscapes, the spontaneity of painting to capture memory is relayed with acrylic while an overlay of oil paint gives contrast to configure shadow and light to highlight portions to be illuminated. The paint is than brushed
and dragged to further distort to create contrasting depths of mutation and saturation in the lighted experience. The structures in Bao Ling’s paintings stand as corridors and towers that reflect on the relationship we have with the world. The viewer seems like the only person looking at the city. The lighted sensation also seems alien, making the city appear without inhabitants, emphasizing only the artificial colours of green, blue, yellow and red asilluminated matter.

Metaphorically, the dynamics in Bao Lings painting seems festive and celebrative; bringing comparisons to the notion of the heroic. As Bao Ling talks about light as symbolizing a kind of wishful desire, this aspect really captures the heroic nature of his light subject, where they stand as glimmering perhaps even burning structures of hope, like an iconic mirage within all the darkness that surround us. The depth in his paintings allow one to engage in background foreground shifts in focusing and losing sight of this vision of hope. Perhaps these paintings are an analogy to the manner in which hope can come into being,
yet it can also disappear and fade out, if the focus is shifted elsewhere.

So where is the location that Bao Ling seem to have captured its heroic subject from? Though he works from photographs as a platform, he also extends and fabricates the structures with distortions and extensions of light, making the original identity of the subject matter seem redundant. But perhaps the identity of the location is unimportant; perhaps it could be anybody’s city or parts of a city. Socially, we understand the city as a melting pot, where cultures are interweaved and challenged, yet on a personal level, it’s conundrum can often leave one alienated causing emotional emptiness and loneliness. In these
illuminated paintings, the latter experience of solitude and alienation can be seen as that which desires to be illuminated. This example can be contextualized to the painting’s contrast between shadow and light, where darkness and light plays a role in conjuring a dual experience of dark vacuums being filled with light. But what are the illuminated parts doing in the
fulfillment of the voids that make up each painting?  It seems that at times, the juxtaposition of warm colours in these illuminated spaces are verging on the fiery, like burning coals, echoing a kind of dream association to ideas of hell and its labyrinth of heated structures and never-ending depths. Yet, next to these fiery spaces are coloured chandelier like structures that offer a sense of stoppage and gaze. The combination blinds with its glare, tempting one to get into the space of its furnace.

In these paintings, I suggest that the city is not real, it’s a metaphor…painted from memory. It’s a re-depiction, a trace of its original source that is hinted, mentally made up, like one of the imaginary tales of one of the many intricate architecture of cities told by Marco Polo to an aging Kublai Khan in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Similarly, Bao Ling’s painted cities like Polo’s mental inventions seems to be made up of fire, glaring garnets, illuminated stones and shattered dreams, culminating a city of suspended states like that of one being burnt alive. Some of the buildings look like they are on fire and there is a fluctuating state where its particles of the city seem to be in a mist of being martyred in fire, like a thousand Joan of Arcs’.

There is something peculiar about seeing matter or a person being lighted on fire. It is illuminated, beautiful, with an eerie presence; victory portrayed in its final momentary state of existence, like a celebrative performance to mark the end of one’s mortal state, that which is soon to disappear into ashes. But death, the aftermath, that which is burnt is not important, but rather, it’s the moment of burning that is important. It’s the duality of presence and glow, connotations that are remembered from religious characters, historical martyrs and certain ceremonial rituals. It’s a final moment captured in testament to our work and all that has been built, our illuminated farewell to the heroic grandeur of achievement, just before it returns back to the ground, buried with the rest of our historical ruins.

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1.       I. Calvino, Invisible Cities: Harcourt Brace 1974, p59

2.       L. Peters, James McNeil Whistler, Todtri 1996, p51 -52

Ian Woo is a
painter and musician. He currently lectures at the Faculty of Fine Arts, LASALLESIA College of the Arts, Singapore.