Rear-view Mirrorの Reflection of the world and me

By Fu Xiaodong

"Watching recollection, just like the road in rear-view mirror;Street lights run back;
Sharp curves and straight roads, Rough journey,And my lonely pursuits"

——from album of Nicholas Tse My Attitude in 1997

The world in the rear-view mirror of our driving car could always be reflections of our emotional experience. High speed leads to fast disappearance of the land view in the mirror, sliding and dying away.. It's just like the extinct memories in bustling daily life that we have scare time to recall. The previous companions in life, the things happened before, and some deep-hearted feelings stop at a certain period of time and leave us gradually when we never notice. Someday when we are looking back, everything there in the memory has already gone and leaves us only regrets of not being able to catch.

The images caught in the rear-view mirror must be the most beautiful view we have in this world. It is visionary, illusive, glamorous, and transiently flowery. Zhang Lun is trying to use her soft and delicate strokes to keep those moments down on her drawings, holding them and making them alive. A paradox of time exists in her paintings, between the reflection that crosses over the transience and the illusive and dreamy emotion frozen at one moment to be played with.

Another paradox exists in sense of space. An isolated, sealed and forwarding vehicle has formed an open, reversing, and backward world. The physical sense of body move is intruded by another feeling which is relatively illusive, and then forms a self-deviated space without any clear directions. A world of truth contains also the opposite side of itself, like the little fixed oval driving mirror which sees fast moving in it.

Rene Descartes 's "I think, therefore, I am" regards people’s heart as an internal mirror reflecting the external world, and "mirror stage" is also the core conception of Jacques Lacan's split subject. To tell who I am from the mirror is a conception to recognize "myself" and then form the relation between the internal and external world. The world reflected in the rear-view mirror also reflexes Zhang Lun's view about the outside world as a female. The powerlessness to be involved in and the transcendency of emotion are always going between the anxieties of seeking freedom and defense, saving and letting go. The world in the mirror is an upside-down, isolated, repetitive, dismissing and transplanting world, more from the angle of the subject’s self mechanism. All these have been fixed upon by Zhang Lun 's paintings one by one and illustrated through the artist's fragile sensible system. The main subject of ego reflects the outer ego by defending for itself, and the world in the mirror in Zhang Lun's paintings is the outer reflection of her internal ego as well.