Fuzi - No Line on the Horizon

Book Details:

Title: No Line on the Horizon

Artist: Fuzi (Beijing, China)

Hard Cover – Yellow

90 pages, W25.5 X H34

Published May 2019

Bennus Art Institution

All Images © Fuzi

Editor: Wu Zefeng

Producer: Yi Yanning and Qian Xiaomei

Graphic Design: Moo Design

Printed in China

‘Surprises tend to rest in that you never know what will appear’. So Fuzi describes his new technique of Polaroid-painting, which is traced in “No Line On the Horizon”, from the first time he applied watercolour to a Polaroid photo, to the large-scale solo exhibition held at BENNUS Art in 2019.

Enchanted by the glossiness and instantaneity of the Polaroid camera, Fuzi initially sought a way to reuse ‘wasted’ photos that didn’t turn out as expected. However, when he first started to apply watercolour to these Polaroid photos, they opened up a whole new world for the experienced artist. Up until then, Fuzi had mostly been working on large formats, yet now he started painting on small, 8.8 x 10.7 cm Polaroid photos. As his friend Gao Jin recounts, Fuzi emphasises drawing ‘a small picture with a large pen’. Shifting from large to small formats, he has managed to boil down the qualities of his formerly preferred formats into the 8.8 x 10.7 cm format, making the Polaroid-paintings small windows into the larger, mysterious world of the artist.

In addition, as discussed in the interview between Fuzi and Feng Xi, the process of creation of the Polaroid-painting is entirely different from that of normal painting. Both are media that rely on uncertainty, and gives surprises to both artist and viewer, never quite turning out as expected. And contrary to facing a white canvas, onto which an artist can apply any pre-conceived ideas, Fuzi meets an already finished work when he starts a Polaroid-painting. By analysing this work – the Polaroid photo – Fuzi decides how to approach it, and how he can make the automated, realistic content of the photo work in harmony with the manual and abstract qualities of the watercolour. Painting on both his own photos, and ‘waste’ photos brought online, Fuzi consciously engages with the worldviews of others, combining them with his own through the appliance of watercolour.

Catalogue released as part of an exhibition at BENNUS Art in 2019. The catalogue includes eleven photos of the artist's studio, as well as 142 photos of his works. It further includes an introduction by the artist, and two articles, by Zhang Xi and Liu Yiping, a dialogue between the artist and Feng Xi, as well as three texts, one by the artist's childhood friend, Gan Jing, the second by a fellow artist, Wang Haiying, and the third by the artist's daughter, Liu Xiaolong.

For more information about the artist: https://www.artsy.net/artist/fuzi-1

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