Shape, Body, Subject

Shape, Body, Subject

Shape, Body, Subject

Shape, Body, Subject

——The sculpture creation in recent ten years by Dong Boquan

Duan Jun

Observing the creation in recent ten years by Dong Boquan, it can be seen that she makes great effors in building the sculpture shape, especially in the associative perception of the sulpture shape and the orgazition and connection between every parts of shapes, which all have a clear appearance. Meanwhile, her works have the strong female quality, revealing kinds of feeling and emotion in living and life, such as the pursuit of happiness, the aspiration of communication, a lack of safety and the fear of secular pressure. If culculating from the year of graduation in 2006, it has been an entire decade in terms of the relatively complete creation by Dong Boquan. During the ten years, themes and tricks in her works are consistent. While, we still can find that there are slight changes and the promotion of creation in her each priod.

The series of A Gift to Youin 2006 shows the moment that the body sends a gift with raised hands. The patina in the surface of the sculpture strengthens the the wizened and haggard degree of the body. Though it is a plump flesh which can also lead the attention of viewers to the spiritual world that the body indicates. In general, the works in 2006 express a condition of trepidation and contraction of innerword. After her graduation, the social element in the work of Dong Boquan starts to be enhenced, and the material and the scene are increasingly extended, like traveling, being out of favour and so on. In 2008, there are several brilliant works in Dong Boquan’s creation, such as A Wooden Loverand The Lost Favour. She introduces the element of surrealistic sculpture in her works, which makes the emotion expression more astonishing, and promotes the perceptual passive emotion to the irrational self- consciousness.

In later years, Dong Boquan established a romatic creation style. She mixed Gothic aesthetics to the shape of classical sculptures, for example, Ballet of the Windwhich was created in 2009 and showed that a naked girl with wings danced in the wind. Though the work did not clearly demonstrate the place or space- time backgroud, the gril’s relaxed facial expression and natural posture of body made people expect that she did not be in a wilderness without people but in a noisy downtown. Thus, the emotion force of the work can be magnified.

The emotion expression is definitely a consistent element in Dong Boquan’s creation of sculpture, which benefits from the sharp perception of women. The change of the sculpture shape and the final form are always accompanied by the exploring and expressing of the emotion to a full state both in sentiment and shape. In addition to the sentiment to the form itself in the shape builting process, Dong extentes the range of the emotion expression to a broad external world, especially the feeling and experience of women from the perspective of ego and inpidual in society.

Since2011, Dong Boquan’s creation has entered in a better circumstance, and the shape of sculpture is getting perfect, for example, The Innocent Bondage. It builds a complete shape, but the body of the object is slant in the air, which seems the body loses the balance. However, a belt symbolizing the innocence holds the slant body. The existance of the belt makes the sculpture balanced and stable visually on the one hand, and gives a high symbolism to the work on the other hand. In order to keep the symbolism of the sculpture in a constinuous height, Dong Boquan expresses less specific times and scene but the existed experience and common emotion as a woman and a linear spacetime that is unwilling to be limited.

A series of actions, like holding objects with hands, lifting hands and whisking hands, form different postures— it just like the action of dance. This kind of creation approach makes the work stretching and lightsome. The formation of sculptural language of Dong Boquan comes from Carl Milles, a Swedish classic sculptor. His works often present in wriggled shapes which therefore are different from any point of view. Dong Boquan receives systematically academic training in Department of Sculpture, Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University. Sometimes, teachers in the department asks the model that he does not need to keep a fixed dynamics or posture for a long time, but is allowed to be in the most relaxed state freely. Thus, the shape in eyes of students can be in a continuous changing state to break the habit of accepting a rigid shape passively. At the same time, because students are not to judge the shape building of the sculpture relying on a fixed shape, the feeling and the subject processing to the shape starts to play a role in the creation of the figurative sculpture.

Carl Milles is also pay attribute to the body and object, the relationship between bodies. We can find something through the whole creation way of Dong Boquan that since 2011, she positively and consciously showed the relationship between bodies, such as the female nude and other creations. In the masterpiece of Warm, the female who did not ware any cloth hugged the sheep to take warm, which presented the warmness of Dong Boquan’s masterpiece. And the change of warmness can also represent the lonely and desire of this woman.

Afterwards, Dong Boquan subsequently present two objects in one sculpture, such as a human and animals, or human and human, especially two women. For Dong Boquan, two women just represent one woman’s two situations, that is dissocialization and leave. In the circumstance of dissocialization, as a object of mediation, she intended to find the self-consciousness, which can get rid of the ordinary through sculpture and surpass selfness. At the same time, the works took the way of self-gazing which effectively resists the prevalence male gazing in the art world.

But in recent years, some of her work is not limited to the expression of two bodies but the performance of a single person. However, the focus is still concentrated on the spiritual level, such as the "Cloud" in 2015, the "Plumage" in 2016. "Cloud" is a manifestation of the girl sat on her balloons and continued to blow balloons which can reflect "false consciousness." In fact, not only others, selfness is also built up by false, and factors of building are changing as changes in society. Dong Boquan ‘s sculpture usually derived from her own body, she put herself into objects as being viewed, this kind of method often lacks body subjectivity. So for Dong Boquan, the sculpture is the creation of a body to confirm and to find the body of process.

Since 20th century, although the creation of figurative in art world has lost its dominant position, but the figurative form of expression in modern art is still made significant success. Dong Boquan’s creation undoubtedly belongs to figurative sculpture, but she furthers her figurative sculpture creation towards the deep field, such as shape, body, subject and etc. Through physical creation, Dong Boquan develops the body to become the site of subject’s struggle: self-fight with others, the fight between subject and object, and the fight between inpidual and society.

June, 2016

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