Through the Mirror of Translation: Aishan Yu’s Recent Work 穿过翻译的镜子：余艾珊近作

Essay on Aishan Yu's solo show 1=0.999999999999999…at Lychee One Gallery, London, 8th July – 3rd August 2017 

A small stream of water is coming out from a tap, and yet, a comb with static electricity bends its trajectory of flow. The image in Aishan’s 1=0.999999999999999... (1) is almost a photogram—from transparent to milky-white, the gradient tones of the running water, the tap, the comb, and the hand are seemingly the result of this simple science experiment being recorded directly without a camera onto a piece of light-sensitive paper. However, traces of pencil dust dirtying the white paper on its edge elicits the truth, that it is a drawing of a black-and-white photograph inside a vintage children’s book. This is where Aishan’s translation starts. The translation is intermedial, crossing the boundary between photography and drawing and yet proceeds back to the photographic effect of negative imaging.1 The slow process that this highly detailed drawing demands bears the same qualities as the normally lengthy procedure of translation, both as means of configuring transformations within the mind’s eye and the subject’s phenomenological understanding of life. 

                       1=0.999999999999999... (1), Pencil and acrylic on card, 55 x 43 cm, 2017

Drawing calls out the unconscious, the ghost image embedded in the artist’s inner self. In 1=0.999999999999999... (1), Aishan’s longstanding interest in the phenomenon of shadow is played out, albeit unconsciously, in this photogram-like image—for the physical essence of a photogram is exactly the interplay between light and the shadows of the objects upon the photosensitive surface. Only when the pencil dust smudges out the dazzle of light from its edge will the viewer’s mind be pulled back from the phantasmagoria of this eye-deceiving trick. Operating somewhere in-between the almost right and not quite, this uncanny drawing turns the scientific truth into an enigma.

Nevertheless, the artist reconsiders the postwar strategy of using found imagery as an anti-subjective act and questions again the concept of originality by using drawing—usually considered as a highly subjective means of art making—to mimic found photographs through a process of what she calls ‘translation’. ‘I have to run my hand over these old photographs in order to understand them.’ For Aishan, drawing is like gently touching the surface of her object. Early photographs were unable to present the original scene in full due to the long exposure time and other technological imperfections of the camera, but it is precisely this blurred, colourless surface that invokes the artist’s desire to ‘touch’— through the intensity of her gaze. Drawing is a bodily experience: ‘as I draw, my pencil touches the paper, so does my hand.’2 Unlike painting, drawing is indeed a kind of creative experience that is far more intimate and personal for Aishan. It is a site of ceaseless phenomenological interchange between the object of encounter and the drawing subject via the intense gaze. Meticulously weaving her image, the artist makes an autobiographical record of her discoveries from the process of copying, and as such, the drawing becomes a powerful cure for the defect of distance. 

While the artist travels back in time, setting up a dialogue with the ghost subject within these histories by means of her replicas, she makes a mark on the edge of the black-and-white imagery as if to reclaim the presence of herself. These coloured marks don’t lament distance, instead, they are traces of the here and now. They function as footnotes, at once adding information to the imagery at the centre and interrupting the viewer’s reading of the work. The marks signify the author-translator’s agency within the work. The semiotic structure between the marks and the translated imagery mirrors the act of translation as a hermeneutic and experiential process. The marks operate within the works as ‘parergon’, supplementing the represented photograph but never being part of it.3 After Rousseau’s division of the drawing (the delineation the contours) as life-giving part in the work and colour as a supplement, Kant adds to this notion by pointing out the frames of paintings as parergon—a kind of marginal existence that marks the limit between the intrinsic and the extrinsic.4 Any framing device in a painting, be it the curtain, the drapery, or a window, can be considered as parergon. Hence, the green mark that seemingly imitates the trajectory of a ball hitting a wall and bouncing back (1=0.999999999999999... (4)) or the blue mark that seems to mimic the shape of the distracted water stream turned up-side-down (1=0.999999999999999... (1)), are running their parergonal function of the frame. 

1=0.999999999999999... (4), Pencil and oil pastel on card, 60 x 96 cm, 2017

Sometimes the mark functions as a dagger, putting at risk the perfection of the realistic drawings. In the 1=0.999999999999999... (3), a woman is gazing into a mirror as if trapped in this pensive moment of the ever-shifting interchange between the mirror image and herself. However, a hint of red paint startlingly invading this image like a dagger’s blade, threatens to tear apart the drawn image’s slow motion and to break the spell that the mirror image casts on the enchanted female subject. Likewise, the neon ‘marks’ that are shining almost obscenely at the very edge of the exhibition space are a pure shock to the spectator. They are like a joke, so detached from the greyish tone of the show that the viewer feels lost when discovering their abrupt existence at the corner. The sense of disorientation is a temporal one, resulting from a dramatic shift in the viewing experience of the nostalgic drawings after historical prints to the razzle-dazzle of the neon lights that register modern times. As such, the tension between the two layers of temporalities of the quick marks and the slow drawings grows outside of the frame into the exhibition space.

1=0.999999999999999... (3), Pencil and acrylic on card, 43 x 47 cm, 2017

Exhibition view

But are the marks really ‘quick’? They may have actually come after the long meditative process of drawing, as the result of this pensive accumulation. Aishan’s art asks us to interrogate the problem of translation as ‘1 = 0.999999999999999…’, an act of crossing boundaries via the gaps, the fissures, and the interstices that are situated in between. Especially in the process of cultural translation for the artist as a migrant inhabiting a non-native cultural environment, the uncertainty of whether meaning has been successfully conveyed and transferred always comes with communication. The marks bear the struggle and weight of translation. Aishan’s work is an analogy mapped by this specific method of human communication. It is also an effort to bridge art with an unexplainable quality and the laws of nature proven with varying degrees of mathematical rigour. The painting Translation 1 may have been created to be a mirror image of its drawing counterpart or vice versa, however, something is lost midway. Aishan’s work is a signifying structure: after all, everything is bracketed under the umbrella of 1 = 0.999999999999999…

References:

1. The term ‘intermedial translation’ means translating across media. See Mieke Bal and Joanne Morra, ‘Editorial: Acts of Translation’, in Journal of Visual Culture, April 2007, p 7.

2. See James Elkins’s email exchange with John Berger in Berger on Drawing, ed.Jim Savage, Ireland : Occasional Press, 2005, p 106.

3. For more on parergon, see Jacques Derrida, ‘the Parergon’, in October, Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 3-41.

4. Craig Owens, “Detachment from the ‘Parergon’, in October, Vol. 9, 1979, p 45.

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穿过翻译的镜子

一股细细的水流从水龙头出来，带着静电的梳子伸向它，弯曲了它的流动轨迹。艾珊的作品《1 = 0.999999999999999 …（1）》中的图像效果几与感光照片(photogram) 无异，那其中的流水、水龙头，志梳子和手所产生的由透明到乳白色的渐变似乎是在没有相机的情况下，将这简单的科学实验直接成像于一张感光纸上所形成的。然而，它那被铅笔灰弄脏的边缘揭露了事情真相，即它实际上是一张依照一张老式童书中的黑白照片而作的素描。艾珊的翻译从这里开始。她的翻译回环于媒介之间（intermedial）、穿越了摄影与绘画的边界，却最终回到了负成像摄影的效果。如此精细的素描与翻译一样需要一个漫长的过程，它们均是一种对在脑海中所发生的千般变化及主体对生活的现象学理解的呈现方式。

 绘画召唤出艺术家内心深处的幽灵。艾珊对影子这一自然现象的长期兴趣在《1 = 0.999999999999999 …（1）》这张如感光照片的素描里显露无疑，即便那是无意识的。感光照片的原理恰恰是光线透过物体在感光纸的表面上留下阴影而成像。而只有当铅笔灰的印记抹去绘画边缘那令人“晕眩”的光线时，才能把观众的意识从这欺骗眼睛的把戏所营造的幻境中拉回来。这些作用于似是而非之间的吊诡素描似将原本客观的科学真理变成了一个谜。

即便如此，艺术家对战后艺术中使用现成图像以达到反主观性目的问题进行了重新审视：她用素描这一通常被视作高度主观的创作手段，经由她所言之的“翻译”过程来临摹一张现成照片，再度质疑了艺术原创性的概念。“我必须抚摸这些旧照片，才能理解它们。” 于艾珊而言，画素描就好比轻柔而细致地抚摸照片的表面。为以前相机所需要的长时间曝光及其他技术缺陷所限，早期的照片无法充分呈现原始场景。但正是这种模糊、黑白的表面激起了艺术家去“触摸”的欲望，这种欲望来源于对绘画对象炙热的凝视。素描绘画是一种身体性的体验，即 “画画时，我的铅笔触碰了纸张，我的手亦如此。” 艾珊认为与油画创作不同的是，素描的确给人一种更亲密、更私人化的创作经验。纸上素描是绘画主体透过目光的凝视与其所遭遇的对象之间不间断地进行现象层面上相互交换（phenomenological interchange）的场域。这些细细编织的图像是艺术家对她所发现的事物的自传性纪录，素描也就因此治愈了时空距离所产生的缺陷。

在艺术家通过她的素描临摹回到过去、与这些历史文件中的幽灵主体发生对话的同时，她在这些黑白图像的边缘迅疾地划上几笔，似乎要重申她自身的存在。这些彩色的痕迹并不是对距离的叹惋，而是此时此刻的印记。它们发挥着注脚的作用，一面向作为作品主体的素描图像增添信息，一面又打断了观者对作品的阅读。这些痕迹标示着艺术家在作品中作为翻译媒介的存在（agency）。被翻译的素描图像与其边缘的痕迹之间的符号性结构照映了翻译本身是基于解释与经验的行为这一事实。这些痕迹在作品的作用是“parergon”，即对照片的表现物进行补充说明却不成为其一部分。在卢梭把绘画（对轮廓的勾勒）看成赋予作品生命的重要部分与把色彩视作作品的附属这一区分之后，康德指出绘画中的框架为“parergon”（辅助装饰、附属物），即一种标示着内在与外在之分的边缘存在。1 绘画中的任何边框机制，无论是窗帘，帷幔还是窗户，都可以被视为parergon。由此可见，那条像在模仿小球击中墙壁并弹回轨迹（《1 = 0.999999999999999 ...（4）》）的绿色画痕，或似在模拟那股被吸引水流颠倒过来形态的蓝色画痕（《1 = 0.999999999999999 ...（1）》），都在整体作品中起着边框附属物的作用。

有时，这些画痕就像匕首，向那一部分完美的写实素描刺去。在《1 =0.999999999999999 ...（3）》中，一个女人正对镜凝视，仿佛被困在镜像与本体不断交汇变幻的沉思中。然而，一丝红色的油彩，宛若一叶刀片，威胁着要去撕裂这幅静态画面、打破镜像在那沉迷的女人身上施加的魔咒。同样，在展览空间边上那“几笔”带着些许色情意味闪烁的霓虹灯“画痕”对观众来说是纯粹的惊吓。它们突兀地挂在展厅的角落，就像一个笑话，让经历了整个展览安静的灰色调后的观众感到错愕、不知所措。它所产生的是一种时间上的迷失，因为从基于老照片所画的怀旧素描到标志着现代时间的刺眼霓虹灯，这中间的观赏体验转换得太过突然、剧烈。画痕的“快”和素描图像的“慢”这两层时间性间的张力从绘画框架内延伸到了展览空间之中。

但这些画痕是真的“快”吗？它们很可能是经过素描那近似冥想的漫长创作过程之后积累而就的结果。艾珊的创作希望我们去将翻译的问题与“1 = 0.999999999999999…”这条数学定律进行比对思考，两者均是对不同媒介边界之间的缝隙、差异与间隙来进行跨越的尝试。对于栖居在异乡文化环境中的艺术家而言，翻译本身就是文化性的，交流过程中意思是否成功传达总是具有不确定性，这些画痕背负了翻译的重量与斗争。艾珊的作品是对这一不同族群间交流方法的比喻，它亦是在在无法言喻的艺术和已被各种严谨程度的数学公式证明的自然规律之间搭建桥梁的尝试。油画作品《翻译 1》或许原本是被当成其素描版本《1=0.999999999999999...(1)》的镜像而进行的创作，可有些东西还是在中途丢失了。艾珊的作品本身就是一个表征结构，在翻译与指代之间，1 = 0.999999999999999…这条定律关照着一切。

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余艾珊， 1981 年生于中国重庆，目前工作生活在伦敦。2008 年她毕业于斯莱德艺术学院，取得艺术硕士学位。毕业之后，艾珊连续获得了伦敦圣安德鲁教堂订制大奖和摩尔美术馆FBA Threadneedle 英国新锐艺术家大奖。近期展览包括 By Popular Demand, 摩尔美术馆, 伦敦；Paper, Publication, Performance, 荔枝一号, 伦敦；A Zoo for Chris Marker, Tenderbooks, 伦敦；Solo show, MOT International, 布鲁塞尔；Dog Days I, MOT International, 伦敦。