The composite pattern of Pu Jie’s "two kinds of phenomena" is to juxtapose the images of different eras before and after the transformation of Chinese society, so that the meanings are self-evident, in the hope that the mutually opposed relationships and memories may show the fragmentation and incoherence of the essence of life, and the dramatic tension generated by the delay of thought and emotion may be automatically realized. The sharpness created by this confrontation and strong contrast cannot leave one indifferent. The overlap of such different intentions or natures will inevitably lead to meaningful responses from each other under this mutual observation: they are both confrontational and signify mutual review and criticism. Just like tradition and modernity, ideals and reality not only stand tall but are always seeking what is expressed by integration, to show that lacking the initiative of thought and memory will not have subjective thinking. What Pu Jie’s “two phenomena” aims to capture is precisely this kind of subjective thinking.

 Here, the meaning of "two phenomena" is not a binary mode in the traditional sense, whereby one of them overrides the other, or is considered to be the basis for constraining the other; nor is it a simple reaction between a determining and a determined element. His "two phenomena" schema is also different from the "collage", "collocation" and "appropriation" methods that are often used in contemporary art to break away from spatio-temporal sequence. "Two phenomena" is more like the situation described by Derrida in his theory of "elongation": that anything that disappears or is invisible will delay its own trace, like the ghostly conflict of things accompanying things until its end, a more permanent and more inherent connection. Only with such a connection will it be able to give rise to an unusual sensitivity to the pain of the times and the fracture in the spine of an era. It is in this sense that Pu Jie is an artist who focuses on thoroughly expressing “now” and has always firmly practiced Baudelaire’s call from more than a hundred years ago, the contemporary aesthetic "decree": “You have no right to despise the present!” - "now" is a “now” which will control all the past “nows”, keep a distance from the times, get rid of the empty homogenization of mainstream thought, and let the excluded and suppressed aliens of the same generation squeeze in. The artist can capture the fleeting light of truth and the flow of beauty. Not only that, but in Pu Jie’s paintings, dialectical thought glints only rarely, that is, through the performance of artistic contextualization, the intersection of the current context and the phantom of time is formed, thus the reality of conflict and its potential are given a dialectical depiction in the language of painting. This is an important contribution to the language of painting art! Therefore, it has created a new blueprint for the practice of intervention in contemporary art, which deserves our in-depth study and reference.

 Art, not the artist himself or his depiction of himself, is great, whether it is describing his own pain, or happiness; the reason why art is great is because the artist’s pain and the root of happiness deeply penetrate the soil of society and history, because his art acts as a human organ of society and the times; art, which is only a pure medium, "does not have any other basis besides realizing the so-called freedom in the game - if even the depiction of subjective experience is taken as art, and based on unconstrained reality, art can only be used as an illusion of fantasy." (Jasper Johns) Pu Jie's painting art has obviously rejected the latter - this is what an ambitious contemporary artist does! 

by Guo Yin

Translation: Edward McDonald @ The Compleat Translator 老馬文通