by Luo Fei

(Excerpt from the publication ”To Start From Art”, 2014)

The Swedish artist Oscar Furbacken has worked intensively for
six weeks (1/6-8/7 2013) as a summer artist-in-residence at
TCG Nordica here in Kunming, China. In year 2000 he
participated in a short artist's exchange with the Yunnan Arts
Institute in Kunming. He obtained his Master's from the Royal
Institute of Art in Stockholm 2011, after many years of
contemporary art studies and with a practice much related to
nature and landscape.


奥斯卡早年深受西方风景画自然主义和浪漫主义的影响，对自然界宏
大漂亮的风景十分着迷。作为当代艺术家，他自觉地将这种浪漫主义
情结做了转换，他用微距镜头拍摄青苔、蘑菇等细微植物局部，使其
看上去具有风景画的特征。之后他又巧妙地将作品以多种形式（绘
画、雕塑、摄影、录像等）植入不同类型的公共空间。

From early on, Oscar has been deeply influenced by Naturalism
and Romanticism in Western landscape painting and captivated
by the grandiose beauty of the natural world. As a
contemporary artist though, he has purposefully moved
beyond pure Romanticism, using macro lenses to photograph
moss, fungi and other botanical elements in ways that make
them appear to take on the characteristics of landscape
paintings. Since then, he has developed clever works in a
variety of media (such as drawings, sculptures, photographs
and video recordings) embedding them in different types of
public spaces.


奥斯卡自觉传承了西方风景艺术的浪漫主义传统，强调光线的表现
力，对象的动感，和引人幻想的气氛。只是他在细微世界中重新表达
了这一切，比如2010年他在皇家美院的毕业个展上，将三幅描绘森林
地表菌类植物，长达13米高2米的巨大丙烯绘画《苏醒》（RISING）
营造为一个“空间中的空间”。搭配每10秒切换的灯光效果，给人一种
身临其境、充满神秘色彩的震撼效果。在那个庞大的童话般的微观世
界面前，世界再次陌生，人成了昆虫。这件作品后来在斯德哥尔摩的
卡特琳娜大教堂（Katarina Church）里配合复活节弥撒，与另一幅
描绘朽木的画作，以及表演艺术一起，重新演绎并阐释了“复活”。
《苏醒》在这里作为灵性事件，象征着复活后的新生。风景艺术从观
赏功能进入了象征性意涵。

Oscar consciously acquires the ingredients of the Romantic
Western landscape, emphasizing the expressiveness of
sunlight, the dynamism of his subjects, and the dream-like
atmospheres. But it is within microcosms and miniatures that
he embeds all this. Take the piece “RISING” from the 2010 solo
exhibition that marked his graduation from the Royal Institute
of Art. This 13-meter wide and 2-meter high acrylic painting
installation depicting some scaled up moss and lichens found
on the forest ground, is built to create a “space within the
space.” Accompanied by lighting effects that changed every
ten seconds, the piece was swathed in mysterious shocks of
color that fully immersed the viewer in its spectacle. Before
this vast, fairytale-like magnified world, reality became
extraordinary, and spectators became no more than insects.
The same work was later shown in the Katarina Church of
Stockholm, juxtaposed to a darker painting depicting fungi on
rotten wood. Enhanced by a performance of unveiling organized
during Easter Mass the work commented and reinterpreted
the Resurrection. In this specific context "RISING”
became a spiritual event, an altarpiece on the possibility of a
new life after death. Here, the landscape transcends a merely
decorative function entering the realm of symbolic meaning.


奥斯卡十分关注作品在特定场域和相关文化语境中的互动因素，这或
许跟他幼年随父母移居法国的经历有关。在昆明，他创作了三组名为
《生活溢漏》（Life Spills）的青铜雕塑。他为雕塑厂废弃的青铜边角
料做了适当打磨，搁置在平滑深色的玻璃上，通过精心布光，为一堆
斑驳的废弃物赋予了太湖石一般的禅意。太湖石是中国古典园林中常
用的园林石，又名窟窿石、假山石，是一种石灰岩，它们一般是由长
年风化、岩溶作用形成的千姿百态、玲珑剔透的碳酸盐岩。这类石头
尺寸较大，一般布置在皇家园林、公园等户外场所供人观赏。奥斯卡
的这几组形似太湖石的微型青铜雕塑本来被工人丢弃，却在艺术家手
中“复活”（RISING）。在当代中国，那种充满禅意和远古意味的风景
画面在工业化道路上已经荡然无存，这些作品唤起了人们对山水的记
忆。

Oscar seems particularly attentive to the way in which the
subject of his work is influenced by the shifting of context, a
sensitivity that was probably awaken by his childhood
experience of cultures when immigrating to France with his
parents. Here in Kunming, he has composed three groups of
bronze sculptures entitled “Life Spills.” In these works, leftover
bronze scraps from a nearby sculpture factory were given a
proper polishing and presented on smooth, dark-colored
glass. Through a meticulously chosen lighting, the pile of
mottled scrap metal is endowed with the Zen-like appearance
of Taihu stone, a type of garden stone frequently used in
classical Chinese gardens. It also goes by the name of “porous
stone.” Commonly used in rockeries, it is a type of karst
limestone that, due to years of weathering, is extremely varied
in form and possesses exquisite carbonates. Often quite large
in size, this type of rock was typically arranged in the parks,
gardens and other outdoor areas of the imperial family for
people to admire. In a similar way the metal spills that were
originally discarded by their workmen have now, under the
attention of the artist, come alive into miniature landscapes. In
contemporary China, this sort of landscape full of Zen and
classical influences has all but ceased to exist as the country
hurtles down the road of industrialization. Oscar’s work
thereby invites the viewer to recall an older forms of landscape
known in China as “shanshui (mountain and river)” paintings.


中国古代并没有风景画，只有山水画，形成于隋朝，其中最大的区别
是观看方式，一种称作为散点透视的游走式的观看方式。画面可以同
时描绘不同时空里的状况，甚至不同季节同时出现在画面中。其高远
意境如同乘降落伞从山顶缓慢下降，焦点也在变换。相比而言，西方
绘画关注对现实的再现，中国山水画注重理想中的人文情怀 。西方风
景艺术是一部艺术史，中国山水画传统是一部思想史。在这里，我们
也可用中国山水画游走式的观察方式来体会奥斯卡的录像作品《近距
研究》系列（Close Studies），他将地表植物所处的细微世界与斯德
哥尔摩社会和谐而奇妙地融在了一起，随着镜头的游走，我们惊奇地
发现两个既存平行世界互不干扰，充满诗意，引人入胜的场景。

In ancient China, there was no such thing as landscape
painting as we know it today - but the shanshui ink-paintings
were common, a technique developed in the Sui Dynasty (AD
581-618). The biggest difference between the two art forms is
the manner in which they are meant to be viewed. Shanshui
paintings invite the eye to wander freely across their expanse.
Using a form of cavalier perspective, in which diverse aspects
of time and physical places may freely coexist within the same
image, including different seasons. It’s a rather sophisticated
approach to perspective, in which the focal point shifts as if
slowly lowered from a mountain peak by parachute. So when
Western painting centers on the reproduction of reality,
Chinese shanshui paintings are mostly concerned with the
abstract ideals of human experience. Western landscape traces
out a history of art, whereas traditional Chinese landscape
painting contains a history of ideas. The logic of this
wandering mode of observation from the shanshui tradition, is
evoked again as we watch Oscar’s video series entitled “Close
Studies”. In this intriguing project he seamlessly fuses the
magnified world of low-lying ground plants with everyday
Stockholm life. These two parallel worlds are both full of
poetic enchanting scenes, but to see them exist side by side
without disrupting one another is a surprising discovery as we
follow the smooth meandering path of the camera lens.


另一件作品《山城》（Mountain City）是就地取材创作的装置，它
们是画廊空间里开会的椭圆桌，中国餐桌上随处可见的玻璃圆盘，以
及这座城市随处可见拆房子废弃的红砖。砖头被固定到玻璃圆盘上，
形成起伏变化、错落有致的景观。观众可转动圆盘，在特定的高度，
观众可以看到一个仿佛海景的景象。奥斯卡鼓励观众不断调整自己的
观看位置，或高或低，或近或远，在平凡物中收获奇异的大地景观。

Another piece, called “Mountain City”, is an installation created
from local materials: an oval meeting table with stools found
in the gallery, a ”lazy Suzan” (rotating large glass plate seen
everywhere on Chinese dining tables) and red bricks of the
discarded sort that are found all over this city as they keep
demolishing old houses. The pieces of bricks are fixed upon
the round lazy Suzan in undulating ups and downs forming a
landscape of picturesque disorder. Viewers can rotate the lazy
Suzan, and place their gaze at a particular height to perceive
what appears to be mountains in a reflecting ocean. Oscar
ceaselessly encourages his audience to shift their viewing
position either high or low, near or far in order to discover
curious landscapes in the midst of everyday objects.


奥斯卡的作品通过对细微植物的凝视，唤起人们对大地风景的遐想与
赞叹。通过对观看方式和展示方式的精心调整，将已被商业海报污染
得滥情的浪漫主义拯救，使经典的风景艺术重新“苏醒”（RISING）。
这是奥斯卡的艺术给我们的惊喜。

While focusing on the smallest of plants, Oscar’s work
activates the viewers’ imagination and perception to recognize
the greatness of nature. Paying careful attention to the viewing
conditions of his exhibited pieces, Oscar also restores the
Romantic from having been reduced to mere melodrama at the
hands of the commercialism. The “rising” of this new approach
on landscape in contemporary art is a pleasant surprise.


罗菲（TCG诺地卡策展人）
2013年7月1日 昆明

/Luo Fei

Background:

In 2013 Oscar Furbacken attended a Residency Program in Kunming, China. On June 26th Furbacken held a public seminar with local artists on Landscape in contemporary art, along with the opening of his exhibition “Landscape Reflected” at TCG Nordica Culture Center. The text above is written by the TCG-Nordica director Luo Fei who is also active as curator and performance artist in China.

This text was published in 2014:

To Start From Art - Essays and Interviews on Chinese Contemporary Art,
Luo Fei, Shanghai Joint Publishing (p.135-139) - China