ESCAPE ARTISTS ANTHOLOGY: The Art of Fan Dongwang
By Ruth Skilbeck
Today’s featured artist from the Escape Artists Anthology is Dongwang Fan, whose exploration of the differences in perspective between Chinese art traditions and the modern one point linear perspective in Western art history is presented in a
chapter from his research as an artist in the ‘third space’ zone in-between
cultures, after he left China and moved to Australia in the 1990s.
The ‘Escape Artists’ PostMistress Press Anthology will
present Dongwang Fan’s chapter “The Western Vision” from his work The Dancing
Shadows: Shifting Perspectives and the Body (2013), and his series of paintings that put his new theories of shifting perspective into practice.
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Fan Dongwang, Descendant Bodies #1 (Blue) 1996. Acrylic on canvas, 178 x 254 cm
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Fan Donwang's essay, and paintings such as Descendant Bodies #1 (Blue), above, visually and conceptually explore
perspective, in cultural and aesthetic practice, as a methodology and as a
metaphor for fluidity and mixing cultural and bodily identity, with other
cultures, times, and machines of technology- encouraging us to consider how Postmodernism
shifted perspectives of gender, and the bodily self, in many ways, or sought to.
As we are living out that computer linked
virtual reality now that is one of the themes of the 'Escape Artists' anthology. We
are living in the future of virtual reality shifted perspectives and screen
cultures imagined by science fiction, and the future painted by Fan Dongwang,
in the 1990s. How does this mixing of images and fragments in ‘posts’, ‘tweets’
of short attention spans and the scrolling flood of images in virtual
communication affect concepts of selves, body image, and identity? These have
been major cultural identity questions that have dominated and continue to
dominate our lives.
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| Fan Dongwang, Descendant Bodies #2 (Green). 1996. Acrylic on canvas 170 x 280 cm. |
Fan Dongwang’s essay explores ideas in the history of
perspective, from Egyptian art and the Renaissance, to the Modern one point
linear perspective, to the modernist return, and changes in our Postmodern era.
This is a fascinating essay grounded in deep knowledge
of traditions of perspective in art in China that has much to say to us now as
so many are using social media without necessarily reflecting very much about
what we are really doing, and how this new screen culture is affecting our
images of our selves, how we interact with others, and how others see us.
Reading Fan Dongwang and studying the images of his paintings, opens up a new
context for us to think about how we are communicating and representing our
selves- online, and mixing of images and texts, and how this is shifting
perspectives, of selves, others and of the dimensions of time and space in
virtual reality.
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Fan Dongwang. Shifting Perspectives and the Body #1- Double Screens. 1998. Acrylic on canvas, 244 x 180 cm.
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This anthology project, and founder Ruth Skilbeck's author publishing
projects of her books, that she has sold mainly via communication with people
on facebook, have attracted and drawn together a strong, supportive, creative
movement of artists and writers whose works are in the anthology.
Ruth Skilbeck, PhD, is a widely-published author, art writer, and photographer, and has lectured in several Australian universities.
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