鄭麗雲作品元素
曰：何以為似？何以為真？叟曰：似者，得其形，遺其氣。真者，氣質俱盛。凡氣傳於華，遺於象，象之死也。–荊浩 (C. 870-930), “筆法記”
就像五代的荊浩一樣, 鄭麗雲是寫實派的畫家。她的作品不僅是畫面上的寫實，更是對元素天然力量的表現；不僅是在畫布上展現了自然，更是內含了澎湃的海浪、旺盛的火焰、聶人的山巒、永恆的銀河所擁有的能量。鄭麗雲以敬畏的心，面對自然的力量，在自然的包圍下尋找心靈上的認知。
鄭麗雲作品的主題是西方宇宙論的四元素-地、氣、水、火。最令她感興趣的是水與火這兩種無法被完全駕馭的元素。水可化為暴雨、洪水、海嘯; 火則從小火柴到地核溶岩都似乎離不開毀滅。能用這兩種元素作畫二十年的藝術家，一定與水和火的矛盾與統一融為一體。
就像鄭麗雲，25歲的她就不顧家里的反對，獨身一人到美國學習藝術。本科畢業后，就步入了婚姻的殿堂，開始了自己的家庭生活。可是不久后，又聽到藝術的呼喚，開始創作與自然有關的作品。從中國五代荊浩到美國弗雷德里克·丘奇，風景畫一直都是不同文化、地域及世紀的藝術家的偏愛，可是鄭麗雲延續的不僅是元素的形態，更是內在的能量及元素帶給人類的希望及恐懼。
藝術其實都是沖動的，跳出了生活的表面，用熱心與直覺而成就的。很少有人能在這樣充滿緊迫的世界來去自如，但鄭麗雲在這種環境里確是最活躍的。在大眾要努力才能維持對生命的熱情時，她把她的熱情釋放出來。在她的作品內，我們聽到了原始的迷人歌聲，到處都有海浪、火焰、山巒和星空的畫。使得鄭麗雲的作品，以超越視覺的元素向觀眾說話。
最接近鄭麗雲靈魂的，莫過於她早期的海洋系列作品。或許在另一個世界，她是一個航海冒險家，那才能解釋她對海洋的廣闊深邃的認知理解。她以讓人誤以為她從海中出生的流暢道出海流、海浪及海花。歐洲畫家特納筆下的海洋是敘述人類的命運; 美國畫家溫斯洛·霍默筆下的海洋是美國緬因州岩石海岸上拍音樂劇的演員。鄭麗雲的作品并不是像他們一樣的戲劇演出，而是在寫實與抽象的完美合作下，表達出海洋的真實的根本模樣。鄭麗雲的海洋是海也不是海，能清楚看到的海浪其實是交錯的線在鮮艷的底色上產生的幻覺。在技術上是在畫布上塗上一種或多種的色彩，干涸后再塗上一層比較深的顏色，然后就像文藝復興時代的壁畫家一樣，在未干透的顏料上用尖筆刻划讓底下的顏色浮現。上千萬的刻痕像是銀筆畫、像是蝕刻畫、像是塗鴉、像是零散的頭發、像是電光，是一種沒有改錯的畫法，每一副畫都像是即興爵士樂一樣充滿了風險及勇氣的現場演出。
中國書法是所有藝術的起點，而鄭麗雲的作畫方式也帶有中國傳統書法的韻味。她以自然的曲線把水寫進了作品。鄭麗雲小時候受到道教燻陶，作品無止境的距離感跟中國唐代與宋代的畫作相呼應，把太極圖中的兩極融和具體化。她的山與水的作品有些是以貝殼為靈感的，似乎都與海洋有關，卻同時擁有火的特徵。鄭麗雲的火其實源於她父親過世火葬時的火焰，是破壞也是淨化。她的火逼真得像活的一樣，無論站得多遠，那火似乎都可以把人吞沒。火的盛怒把靠近的玉蝶照得更深刻，更美麗。我們看不出蝴蝶是因為對火的迷戀而撲火自滅，還是那像紙一般的美麗翅膀受到了上天的眷顧而不為火傷。
鄭麗雲的畫是兩極的記載，是固體與液體、光與暗、熱與冷的平衡。在其中一副作品里彗星划過星空最能代表熱與冷的平衡。鄭麗雲最令人驚嘆的是她作品的空間感-既遠亦近，像在后退又似在前進。海洋的畫作似乎是以俯視的角度，在沒有船或陛地，海水延伸至永遠。似乎一個長行旅途的半路，沒有任何同伴，也不確認能否到達陛地。像是古代水手馴養的鳥，滑翔、俯沖、高飛，在海浪上孤獨狩獵。不單是她的海洋作品，無論是山，是雲，是天空，還是銀河都讓我們懸於狂喜及敬畏之間。
兩極平衡的循環有很多原因，它反映了藝術家自我的曆史，特別是鄭麗雲人生中兩個重要事件: 1983年獨身從台灣去美國及1997年她父親過世。她最初有關火的作品，就是要獻給父親的敬意。而無論她是在亞洲還是在美國，都與其中一個家隔着海洋，在她與水有關的作品里，充滿了對彼岸的思念。父母的離世可以改變一個人的人生，鄭麗雲火的作品展現了她的純真、多變、騷動、熱情。這些個人情感都在作品的外延表現，可是她作品的內涵卻說出了掌管宇宙的元素。是上帝或是”道”;是科學或是曆史，鄭麗雲畫出了一種支配宇宙一切的力量。讓我們感受親切及茫然，明明是神話卻又似是與生活非常相近。她的作品把大家知道的與不知道的呈現在我們面前，讓我們感受到卻找不住。她用她那自然的火，把我們帶到自己心底，走進天堂中。
—Timothy Cahill, 2012年 3月
注: Timothy Cahill 美國紐約作家，認識鄭麗雲將近20年，專寫鄭麗雲的藝術。本文章是從2000年出版的謄寫版。
The Elements of Leigh Wen’s Art
I questioned: “What do you call lifelikeness and what do you call reality?” The old man answered: Lifelikeness means to achieve the form of the object but to leave out its spirit. Reality means that both spirit and substance are strong. Furthermore, if the spirit is conveyed only through outward appearance and not through the image in its totality, the image is dead.” —Jing Hao (c. 870-930), “Notes on the Art of the Brush”
Like Jing Hao during the reign of the Five Dynasties, Leigh Li-Yun Wen is a painter of reality. Her work does not content itself with surface appearance but plunges deep into the power that resides in the elemental forces of swelling waves, raging flames, impassive mountains, infinite galaxies. She stands bravely exposed to the energy of these forces, facing them with clarity and reverence, surrendering herself to their persistent, enveloping otherness and finding in them our deepest psychic identity.
Leigh Wen’s subjects are the four elements of Western cosmology—earth, air, water, and fire. Of these, the latter two dominate her interest. Water and fire, the least fixed of the spirits, are avatars of independence and change. Both may be harnessed, but neither fully tamed. Water goes feral in deluge, flood, tsunami. Fire, from the match’s flame to the earth’s molten core, is never far from destruction. The artist who dwells with these wild energies, as Leigh has for two decades, must become one with their turmoil and sovereignty. These are words that define Leigh Wen. Against the wishes of her family, she left home when she was 25 and traveled alone to the United States to study art. After receiving her undergraduate degree, she married and started a family, but soon heard the cry of art once more. She resumed her studies and found her voice and calling as a painter of nature. This she undoubtedly is, and yet she is no such thing. Her work is one with a landscape tradition that spans centuries, cultures, and continents from Jing Hao to Frederick Church. Leigh Wen’s art depicts not only the physical appearance of nature but its inner force that expresses the aspirations and fears of what it means to be human.
There is anarchy in all true art, an impulse to break through the surface of life to the quick of blood and nerve. Few of us are comfortably at home in this heightened world of being, but it is where Leigh Wen comes most alive. The life force that most people work to keep assiduously controlled she releases, and we hear in her paintings the siren song of our own native wildness. Clearly, these are more than simple images of waves and flames, mountains and stars. Leigh’s art is the restive language of the elements, expanding beyond the farthest visible point.
Her first paintings, and those closest to her soul, are those of the ocean. In another life, she might have been a seafarer, a traveler of the deep. That would explain her intimate knowledge of the ocean’s vastness. In swells and currents, surf and spray, she speaks with the fluency of one born to the blue. The sea of a European painter like Turner was a stage where the fates of men were played out. The crashing breakers in the paintings of the American Winslow Homer act as characters in a melodrama of Maine’s rocky coast. Leigh’s paintings stage no such theatrics. Rather, in appearance and essence, they embody the ocean itself, through a near-perfect synergy of realism and abstraction. The artist’s ocean paintings, for which she will be long remembered, are and are not what they claim. We see them clearly as receding ranks of waves on the face of the open sea. Yet even as the illusion takes hold, we simultaneously comprehend it as a complex tangle of strokes and lines against a surface of glowing color. Technically, this is achieved by applying an under painting` of one or more hues across the canvas, then covering the entire surface with a second, darker tone. Working like a Renaissance fresco painter with the surface still wet, Leigh scratches away the dark paint with a stylus to reveal the colors underneath. Tens of thousands of these scribed marks resolve finally into an image that, by turns, suggests silverpoint drawing, etching, graffiti, stray hairs, and arcing electricity. Correcting mistakes is nearly impossible; each painting contains the risk and courage of a live performance, not unlike the improvisation of a jazz musician.
This mark-making touches Leigh Wen’s Chinese heritage, where traditionally calligraphy was the foundation of all art. In this sense, she “writes” the waters into existence with her sinuous, spontaneous lines. Other characteristics of her work are essentially Chinese as well. Her sense of limitless distance, uninhabited but charged with consciousness, echoes back to the great Tang and Sung painters, which in turn evokes the Taoism of Leigh’s childhood, the unity of contrary forces embodied in the taijitu, the yin/yang circle of opposites in harmony. Leigh Wen’s work is driven by this energy: for all the water (and even her mountain paintings evoke the ocean, particularly those derived from a pattern on certain seashells), there is an equal presence of fire. Leigh’s flames, summoned first from ceremonial pyres lit for her deceased father, are at once destructive and purifying. Their proximity jars the senses into a state of alertness. No matter how far you stand from them, the flames always seem bent on engulfing you. Their rage makes the monarch butterflies that approach their bright center in some of the later fire pictures all the more poignant and beautiful. We cannot tell if these fragile beauties are about to be consumed, or if they have somehow entered a state of grace that protects their papery wings from being even slightly singed.
Leigh’s work, taken together, is a catalog of irreconcilable differences, the poise, and counterpoise of solid and liquid, light and dark, heat and cold (in one painting, a comet, an astronomical “dirty snowball,” streaks through a firmament of burning stars)—but the bipolar force that strikes me most in her work is that of space: distance and proximity, retreat and advance. We look down at her oceans as if from above and see them extend into infinity with no sign of ship or shore. We are midway on some long journey, without companions or guarantee of reaching land. This psychic tension is accompanied by a feeling of liberating weightlessness, of gliding, swooping, soaring like the bird of the ancient mariner, coursing alone above the waves. All of her landscapes, not just the waters but the mountain ranges, clouds, heavens, galaxies as well, leave us in the same state, suspended between ecstasy and awe.
There are various explanations for this recurring motif of opposites in balance. It reflects the artist’s biography, specifically two of the defining events in her life: her 1983 journey across the Pacific from her home in Taiwan to the United States, and the death of her father in 1997, for whom the first fire pictures were made in honor and homage. In the water pictures, we find the pervasive yearning that marks Leigh Wen’s art, the sense of ache for a home that, whether she is in Asia or North America, is always an ocean away. And just as the death of a parent can reshape the life of the child, the fire paintings can be read as a metaphor for artistic practice, its purification, transformation, combustion, passion. These personal references are present in Leigh’s work, but they only touch the “lifelikeness” of what drives her. The “reality” of her paintings lay in their spiritual foundation, the field of force that governs the world. Call it God or the Tao, science or source, there is some overarching power that pulls the strings of the universe. We feel it at once intimately and vaguely; it seems very near even as it remains a mystery. Leigh Wen’s paintings manifest this sense of things known and unknown, perceived but out of our grasp. With her elemental heart, she takes us deep inside ourselves and out beyond the heavens.
—Timothy Cahill, March 2012
Timothy Cahill is a writer and artist in New York, USA. He has known Leigh Wen for nearly twenty years and has written extensively on her art. This essay is adapted from an earlier one published in 2000.