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Formerly given to creative pursuits more or less defined as belonging to documentary schools of photography, the artist has in recent years achieved a transition in his work due to exposure and the incorporation of conceptual stances in art: a transformation of visually static and normative means of photographic representation is replaced by the dissimulation of images, forms, movements and nuances where sensorial orchestration substitute the synthesis of captured moments or constructed narratives.

Fluidity and lyrical compositions of a subtle manner illustrate the stylistic continuum of this experiment whose aspiration lies beyond the parameters of photography and video alone- mediums which the artist has delved into in the attempt to secure a subjective voice in the field of contemporary art in the past- executing instead, an initiative where the “innocent” voyeur encounters random scenes which are subject to his subsequent, highly conscientious editorial process.

“For Screenplay” insinuates the necessity of abandon before the subject, the subject unforeseen, as a valid approach to the creation of pseudo-literary occupations in contemporary practice. An unwritten script, the desired “end” of his interrogations through his virtual wanderings, oscillates as an unattainable action/result and the pre-emptive in this “auteur” whom has come to translate experience. Visual evidence demarcates the artist’s lucid contemplation on his actions as being the formulate truth, the actual script carried in the waking moment as he correlates the investigations and self-reflexive truths of his fusion of diverse medium.

The artist is “For Screenplay” and embodies the screenplay within him, the sequential fragmentation and broken narratives, which are poetically resolved in a coherency of solely atmospheric instance doubtlessly make for immediate references to neo-literari tendencies and the influence of the Nouvelle Vague upon this relatively young artist. The attempt to weave a filmic fabric from these diverse and diametrically opposed literary directions is courageous, failing where the artist’s own attempts to punctuate the realization of the inter-disciplinary oeuvre with a contextualization of from: his conscious mind insists on justification amidst the wandering and randomness, divesting from the conceptual coherence.

Aesthetic and imagistic strengths are manifest in the work, their acumen the promise of this artist to date, and attempts to elucidate on technical components and devices are welcome “pivots” in the odyssey which returns to itself. Thematically, we are absorbed in the life depicted by the narration of the path and the forms which broaden and infuse photographic, print, visual, sound, space in their final derivative of experiential contemplations, technically, a detractive element appears as the language of radically different medium distorts the message, rather than enhancing the dislocation and isolation of the spectator- the atmosphere “painted” by the artists in words and visual representation is one of minutiae and angst- certain aspects of multiplicity and layering sabotage the aesthetic absolute which he appears to be in quest of.

Sub-contextualization occurs in an inevitable fashion, falters with the use of papers often used for letters- sheets where geometric squares of green ink are printed so that local Chinese may write within clearly defined spaces their words to the recipient: the static photographic series is subject to prints made upon photographic paper, “xuan zhi” (exquisite handmade natural paper), and the composition on these diverse formats appear in random sequences of collage, ordered bi/tri print mounting, occasionally taped and which related the transfixed images drawn from the voyeurs accounts of ephemeral travels.

“For Screenplay” insists on an analysis of our synaptic reflexes in the face of ambiguous concepts and visual interpretations of imagery. The sequence absolves polemical considerations, in place, offering intuitive ruptures with the anticipation of either a narrative return in form or manner being impeded upon as the artists’ references oscillate rather than vacillate; the logic is spiral rather than linear.

As an experiment, while occasionally derivative of literary and filmic creations which have embedded themselves in popular, “subversive” contemporary art, this work is poignant and renders a powerful, subliminal testament to atmospheric conditions and the permeation of fragmentation in non-narrative visual as being not only means of a “common” means of referentially essential terms, yet further, a “dictum” which resounds with the absence of hope, poetical retreat and philosophical refuge with which we have come to illustrate an era.

The chapter is written in China by one of its sons, while the theme of universal language is challenged and linguistic and visual transmutation is revealed in a lyrical abstraction of what has been, and may be, documented in an intrigue of strata whose source is as much the experience as the author.

The artist between disciplines, auto-didactic research and aesthetic vagary instills audiences with a philosophically attenuation; melancholia, nostalgia, pretext and subliminal echo appear individual nuances throughout his oeuvre. The “punctum” of Barthes is rendered trans-lateral, the neutral morbidity of Berger…”all that remains of our hope is a long despair which shall engender itself” remains as a referential sub-current in this artistic direction which has sought to devoid itself of literary mechanism and the mechanical in technical performance.

Cao Mengqin escapes a prevalence of cynical and disaffection with the naïve sincerity in his employment of diverse media in the execution of a conceptual, thematic voyage where place and time are replaced with instance and situation: imagined, perceived & announcing the frailty of illusion. Save for the minor obstructions of a counterpoint to thematic effluvium and poetical ambiguity, manifest in the attempts at visual multiplicity and layering papers of different origins and qualities which act to denote cultural production, the orchestration of concept, content and composition is lyrical in its entirety. Scope would be the zenith of this perpetual transgression of form, insight the actual deliverance from the visual binds of its progression.

R A Suri
Shanghai
01/13/2010