philip tinari

This essay was originally published in the catalogue accompanying the artist’s solo show Memoire at Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing in February 2009.

Nie Mu, Digital Painting No. 70, 2008.

The epic year of 2008 has finally drawn to a close in Beijing, and now we are left to ask what it has wrought. Modernist architectural masterpieces dot the fringes of the city, temples to a new urban condition, a new stage of socialism, a new governmentality that has not quite yet been named. A new consumer infrastructure has been set in place, its restaurants and hotels and shopping centers churning in attempted oblivion to the chaos beyond. The people of the capital rub their eyes, awaking from the latest in a sixty‐year progression of ideological reveries. In a boxy grey‐brick studio in the village of Caochangdi, Nie Mu sits at her digital drawing board, in front of her MacPro computer, making paintings with a plastic stylus and the latest version of Adobe Illustrator, as she has all year. Outside, the giant village dogs bark.

Titled simply “digital paintings,” Nie Mu’s 2008 works do not immediately reveal themselves to the curious. What appear from afar as tense, expressionistic compositions in a fragmented palette are-and this is the main thing-compilations formed from layer upon layer of digital freehand drawings, each a day’s work, each completed separately. These individual layers draw their source material sometimes from news photos she sees while browsing the Internet, sometimes from childhood memories or cultural and generational commonplaces, sometimes simply from her own discrete sense of design. Colors, likewise, may come directly from other digital images, or she may select them with a click at the digital color wheel. “Black is always 000,” she says, “and every other shade has a number; the relations among them never change.” She varies the size, which is to say the resolution, of each drawing, altering the digital scale of each day’s work even as her physical parameters never exceed this A4‐sized plastic board. Sometimes she reproduces her own elements across a single composition with the simplest of digital tactics: Ctrl‐C for copy, Ctrl‐V for paste.

Nie Mu likes the definitive brush strokes that a computer seems better suited to make than a human. “People have their judgments,” she says, “but the computer is unsentimental.” She likes the play of perspective among images of different resolutions, the way it echoes classical questions of illusionistic gamesmanship and compositional acumen. She likes the bricolage of potentially infinite reproducibility, which takes her back to her Central Academy training as a printmaker. She likes the way that even once pieced together into larger compositions, each component image still reveals the traces of its making in the jarring vertical and horizontal edges it retains from the day she drew it, alone, on the plastic board. She likes how the possibility of accidental deletion, data loss, looms over her every brushstroke. She likes how these paintings exist only when she says stop, deciding based on some ineffable alchemy of aesthetic criteria and arbitrary principles that a given work is “done.”

But it is in the deceptively simple step of organizing and ordering the component layers for printing is where the digital paintings reveal their stakes. This final act of layering is the stage where the composition takes shape, and it is here that Nie Mu plays out one of the key tensions of recent art, between individual will or taste and some external set of criteria, in something like what critic Jörg Heiser has called “the painting of decisions.” And yet the tension seems to go even further than the sphere of contemporary art. Each marking totally obscures everything below it, but every image is only that: a floating image, completely lacking what traditional painting knows as support. Nie Mu’s digital paintings are amalgamations of other paintings, each full of holes. They are paintings of memory and control, paintings about what is and is not allowed to show through and appear on the final, single visible plane of the surface. And so the act of layering becomes an exertion of will, a verdict about what is allowed to cover what else, in a process that begins to seem-perhaps appropriately for Beijing in 2008-a lot like writing a history or planning a city.

Nie Mu has ultimately decided to respond to this tension in two distinct ways, creating some paintings that consciously foreground a recognizable figurative gesture, and others that serve as diaristic records of the passage of time. The former are relatively straightforward, structured according to principles she knows from an older standard of painting, something that has to do with balance and beauty, something that rests finally on the artist’s judgment. In these smaller works, the layers below serve mostly as adornment, an abstract background to a central, meaningful flourish. The latter, time‐based works present more difficulties. “I want to arrange the layers without any choice, without any contrivance, such that if something is gone, it’s simply gone,” she muses, but quickly turns to say, “and yet I hope the key elements don’t disappear. Those are the two tendencies of this language.” Even if the conceptual impulse is to organize these diaristic paintings with recourse only to chronology-creating, say, a suite of four paintings each compiling a season’s efforts, spring, summer, autumn, and winter-other factors cannot but enter into play. She cites the example of one particularly strong Peking Opera mask, painted in vermilion late into the summer. If that painting were arranged chronologically, it would become nothing but a painting of a mask. And so the mask is inserted into the flow earlier, and compositions that technically predate it obscure it. “In the end,” she concludes, “there are still choices.”

Finally, Nie Mu decides to abandon the seasonal framework and organize her paintings based solely on an ascending number of layers: 11, 29, 70, 100. The final “100,” shown in this exhibition, is both the summation and the obliteration of everything that has gone before it. A now imperceptible diary of shifting emotions and interests, this is one woman’s 2008.