WU JUNYONG - THE EMPIRE'S LEFT FOOT
Improvisation is key to Wu Junyong’s work, where the individual and space clash to form a new energy. For him, drawing is like winding through a memory palace. A partial image grows as imagination takes flight, soaring to the edges of the available picture plane. As artist wrestles with imaginist, the unpredictable outcome forms the ground from which Wu Junyong’s ever-morphing style launches itself. The intangible link between language and image draws Wu Junyong, urging him to create works full of puns that unearth the hidden languages in images. He turns the abstract written word into the more direct image, imbuing both with new meanings, and bringing viewers into his realm – pictorially absurd at first glance, but revealing a literary realism after a double take. Recent ink wash paintings connect contextually like an iconographical game of Patience. More ideological than before, these works signal Wu Junyong’s search for freer artistic conditions beyond geography and time.
即兴是吴俊勇创作的关键要素，通过个人和空间的碰撞激发出新的能量。绘画之于吴俊勇，是一种罗列记忆迷宫的循序渐进的方式：图像开始于某一个局部，伴随想象力的天马行空慢慢生长，最后结束于画面所能达到的极限。艺术家和幻想家的不同身份间的角力，让吴俊勇无法在创作之前就预设作品的最后形态，这种不确定因素也使得吴俊勇的风格一直发生跳跃式的变化。
语言和图像之间不可言说的关系是吴俊勇比较关心的话题。在早期项目中，吴俊勇利用充满双关的画面挖掘了许多被隐藏在语言中的图像。当抽象的文字转化成直观的图像时，两者都被赋予了新的语义，观看者也被带入他的语境——初看是一种图像上的荒诞，再看却是一种莫名的文字写实感。最近两年的水墨作品则更像是一种图像学意义上的接龙，作品之间带有段落式的语境联系。相比以往作品带有的强烈意识形态，吴俊勇开始寻求一种超越地域和时间，更为自由的艺术语境。
