쩡판즈의 작품에서 나타나는 권력으로의 성찬

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 예술과미디어학회
· 수록지 정보 : 예술과 미디어 / 14권 / 2호 / 9 ~ 34페이지
· 저자명 : Christine VIAL-KAYSER

초록

The work of Chinese contemporary artist Zeng Fanzhi (b. 1964 in Wuhan, who lives and works in Beijing since 1993), is marked by an acute sense of the loneliness of the individual confronted with all powerful institutions when collective life (gong) invades personal life (si) and forces everyone to conform to social norms, or collective dark forces, a situation enforced in China during the Cultural Revolution, but still largely in place despite the economic reforms of 1978 onward. It is not surprising then that eyes and masks figure prominently in his works, either as the large eyes on the still faces of onlookers, in the Hospital series of the early 1990s, or as puppet eyes, marked with a cross on a white mask figure, in the Masks series of the late 1990s. The motif of the mask in Zeng’s painting emulates the actual strategy of Chinese people, both during his childhood and in contemporary China, to eschew social exclusion by melting into the crowd, by making one’s opinions invisible, but also the neurosis that this induces, between facial harmony and hidden violence. His work The Last Supper is a striking example of this concern. With its focus on the table of the banquet and on the masked figures’ emphatic gestures, it foregrounds this psychological split. Conflating markers of a classroom (figures wearing school uniforms and walls covered with blackboards) with that of a conclave, taken from the construction and historical meaning of the Last Supper mixed with the settings of the Chinese Communist Party’s congresses, it suggests that this neurosis is at play both within individuals and within institutions and is instilled through the emotional manipulation of gullible people.
This essay will consider how the artist has used this Western representation of a crisis (a betrayal that leads to the death of Christ) to express a sense of inner crisis which origins stem from the internalization of official lies. It will be argued that in his transformation of Da Vinci’s Last Supper the artist displays a profound understanding of its spiritual meaning during the Renaissance. Zeng also aptly coalesces this representation with the mundane meaning of the banquet, as a locus of power struggle, a symbolism that is alive in Chinese culture, in multiple ways: through that of the banquet offered as a gift, related to guanxi practices, through the congress of the Communist Party, captured by the medias through the image of party members seated together behind wooden tables under the golden stars of the Congress ceiling, and even through the mythical image of the “Banquet of the king”, related to the founding of the Han Dynasty.
For all its political underpinning, the work also manifests a questioning of the concept of individual self, separate from the collective, its aim and psychological implications. The presence of multiple Christian references in Zeng’s works suggests a Nietzschean refusal of the spirit of sacrifice in favor of an hedonistic individualism, combined with a sense of malaise regarding the meaninglessness of this individualism that can be related to Kierkegaard’s, as expressed in his own In vino veritas, yet another work in which the theme of the banquet is convened….

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