The “Manifestoes” Exhibition, currently being presented in Shanghai by Julian Rosefelt, enacts twelve “-isms” of the twentieth century. Upon hearing of this, Tu Hongtao’s humorous response was “nowadays, the only ism left is capitalism.” For the past six years, aside from creating landscapes, Tu has attempted to describe our dreary world by means of portraits. His motive grows from his trenchant perceptions of reality, not from a political stance that applies labels. The dreariness has come about because human desires, having been limitlessly magnified by capitalism, have led to the emptying of people’s inner worlds. Our way of life dictates that nobody dares to fail, and as a result we have become one-dimensional human beings.

The first angle he adopted was to present a panoply of human types in a nightclub setting. For example, he would paint a bar girl stifling a yawn, a woman squinting through cigarette smoke, or a drunken man howling into a phone receiver. This angle was to some extent reminiscent of what Toulouse-Lautrec did in Paris in the late nineteenth century. But the series eventually presented by Tu Hongtao, only retains a few pieces related to this theme. Tu broadened his choice of subject matter to include his circle of friends, along with members of the intellectual and art fields, or even intriguing faces he encountered on the road. Taking such a “multifocal perspective” to his subject matter would seem to be a lax, fragmentary approach, but it helps him to illuminate more layers from the societal framework. What is more, he draws on this to cancel out his tendency toward excessive narrativity and theatricality. One could even say that he goes as far as possible within pictures towards de-pictorialization.

Unlike Toulouse-Lautrec, who placed emphasis on mis-en-scene narrative, Tu Hongtao uses a compositional style akin to Mondrian. He filters out details of his figures’ clothes, hairstyles and backdrops to accentuate their fleshly bodies: puffy eyes and faces, receding hairlines, drooping mouth corners or deep shadows under the eyes, with bony limbs placed at awkward angles. From the face, body build and pose of each figure he hopes to convey an all-round message about the maladies of our era: pain, tension, anxiety, flightiness, euphoria, contrivance, hollowness…With respect to language, he renders lines strongly, not making them free-flowing and definite but undermining their fluidity with indecisiveness and entanglement. With respect to figuration, we see a corresponding retreat from the sculptural volumes of classic modernist portraits: instead, he has moved closer to the “shallow relief” favored by Francis Bacon.^[1] As Tu Hongtao himself puts it, in his flattened treatments he is pursuing the effect of a weathered wall or rock, and he even finds beauty in painted surfaces that are “almost scraped away.” During his creative process he heard opinions that his painting was not sufficiently “cruel,” but his orientation toward traditional Chinese aesthetics served as a basis for balance.

Candid and posed photos served as source material for most of these painted works. Attempts were made at painting from life in the studio, in the manner of Lucian Freud, but the painter and models apparently had difficulty getting into an ideal state. If we look for the reason, we find that Tu Hongtao wants a sense of everydayness in his characters. Though posed photos may seem to detract from this aspect, yet compared to the constraints of painting from life he finds more room for reconfiguring and altering when he paints from a photographic image.

Behind this minor problem is lurks a more pressing crisis: when use of photos as subject matter becomes prevalent, painters seem to lose ability to gaze at the world directly and capture it in paint. They are likely to lose abilities of interchange, memory and imagining. Tu Hongtao is not totally unmindful of this. In fact, what drove him to paint this series, aside from wanting to highlight the theme of our hollowness as persons, was his deep awareness that picture-producing modes of the digital era have led to the absence of true portraiture. Digital techniques have supplanted human creation, just as Jules Regis Debray discussed in his Life and Death of Image. ^[2] Today’s production by visual machines is sufficient to isolate our authentic gaze from bodies, blood, and events. Speaking from this angle, we can view Tu Hongtao as a member of the group that has been harmed and limited by this. By painting these portraits he engages in reflection and self-rescue: by means of “re-exposure” through painting, a bit of breath and vitality are injected into the corpse of the digital image. Thus the “iron wall of the image” has a chance of being restored to its status as a “window on the world.”

However, the window he evokes through painting still opens upon a dreary world. This fact is fraught with paradox and irony. In other words, he has merely succeeded in making the dreariness more genuine. In this glaring, compelling panoply of human types, we can see no new solace or salvation. Aside from the pleasure we can take from expressive language, we can appreciate Tu Hongtao’s wit and humor. These personal qualities determine that as an artist he is not the heroic type who endeavors to anatomize social pathology. Instead, he is a lover who experiences pain and pleasure on the bed whereon human nature has collapsed.

Nevertheless, he has been infected by a sense of time’s ravages, and he is aware of even larger reasons for fear. His decadent brushwork and conceptions are giving way to observation and insight in a mode of resignation. Precisely because he is making such a transition, Tu Hongtao’s “Clouds Dispersed” does not highlight Dou Wei’s status as a ruined genius. Instead, Tu shows the ordinariness of a middle-aged man, an ordinariness that keeps us from dwelling upon the disparity between past and present, or between rendered image and reality.