Spot the tennis ball
an interview by Time Out Magazine
Han Qing, Tennis Ball on Lawn No.2, 2015, Oil on canvas, 135 x 240 cm
On meaning
‘Blow-Up is a film made up of suspicion and inquisitiveness, suspense and mystery. Faced with the expanse of an empty field, at once tranquil and mysterious, a sensitive intellect is prone to fantasize; confronted with a form that is at once vague and familiar, one starts to invent, to imagine a concrete reality. It’s like déjà vu, an illusion that we commonly experience, the feeling of having already experienced something that in reality we have not.’
On adaptation
‘This painting emerged from an idea to portray a scene from Antonioni’s Blow-Up in reverse. In the final scene of the film, the protagonist Thomas arrives on the lawns of a public garden to continue to pursue a murder [that he believes he has unwittingly photographed]. There’s a group of people at the tennis court in the park, playing tennis with an imaginary ball.’
‘In my version of the scene, my gaze is fixed on the lawn. I imagine myself suddenly discovering the tennis ball in the underbrush. The tennis ball you can see in the grass in the painting isn’t there in Antonioni’s film. The painting depicts a paradox—the reality of a fantasy, and the fantasy in reality.’
‘The tennis ball is the main subject of the painting, that which doesn’t exist in the film, but does here.’
‘I put the tennis ball and the tennis court in opposite corners in the composition to expand the void, the emptiness, to make this distance and this vacuum an emotional state.’
‘Does the tennis ball actually exist? Each person can only answer this for themselves.’
On colour
‘Antonioni emphasizes the green of the lawn. In the painting, I used emerald green and peacock blue to convey an illusory quality. This fantastical shimmering, bluish green agitates the visual nerves, giving birth to a hallucinatory, dreamlike mental state.’
On stroke
‘The dappled dots make up the painting—each dab of the brush is like a leaf or a feather, reinforcing this sense of fantasy. The entire painting is made up of green and white dots. When the light is strong, the whites float to the surface, creating a sort of optical illusion in one’s visual field.’
On impression
‘The upper-half of the painting is a green thicket of trees. I used very crowded brushwork.’
‘Gazed at from afar it looks impressionistic, but scrutinized from close, they look like real leaves and feathers. The film suggests that to look at something from up close [or ‘blown-up’] is deceptive, and that reality can only be seen from a distance, but in my painting, it’s the opposite. To look from a distance, it doesn’t seem real, but to look from up close, it seems very real.’
On philosophy
‘Illusion and actuality, reality and fantasy, materiality and immateriality, the psychological phenomenon of déjà vu, these are entanglements that have puzzled and preoccupied people for the longest time. The reason they continue to occupy us is because they deal with the reality of the objective world and the subjectivity of the fictive world, revealing our world to be constructed in equal measure of both reality and fantasy. The closer we are to reality, the closer we are to a fiction.’