Es Muss Sein

Hao Lin

Jan 12, 2015 ~ Feb 28

For years, LIN Hao has been developing his language to depict the “three-dimensional” space through graphic paintings. At first, he embarked on his experiment on one-square-meter canvases with oil, acrylic and ruler as his key instrument for painting. But now, in his latest three-meter-long series, the fighters that he portrayed is seemingly soaring into the inaccessible sky, yet can hardly slip away from the restriction of the space.

Literally, the title “Confined Space–ES MUSS SEIN” refers to a variety of tiny and limited spaces in underground or cabin and etc. While in LIN’s work, blue, white or yellow lines construct a virtual space against a dark grid-background, regulated and confined. Such perspective put the viewers under pressure, as if their breaths are stuck by the thinner air, resulting to a sense of autism and confinement from physical to psychological. Depression, tension, and contradiction are all there, permeating the space.

Due to his excellence in realistic depiction, LIN has been tough on himself with rigorous criterion. In his works, the well arranged numbers and lines demonstrate a contemporary mechanism; the calm, constrained and moderate colours assist to form precise compositions that show phenomenal visual order.

Usually, clouds are seen as among the lightest and most liberal material in nature, they are supposed to fly freely in the air. But in LIN’s view, they exist in an interspace that between this mundane world and the isolated “Confined Space—ES MUSS SEIN”; the flame is to flash in outdoors, now in order to follow the transient moment of blasting, people are trapped into a sense of claustrophobia …All the way to fatalism and contradictions look like a flash which pinches the barrier from the material world. Between “being or not being”, “lightness and heaviness” and “freedom and imprisonment”, minimal abstraction is chosen as the way of expression to form a virtual scene that reflects the context of “ES MUSS SEIN”.

“Muss es sein? “ “Ya, Es muss sein. ” Beethoven inserted an ordinary dialogue with his friend into his quartet. While in the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera applied a sarcastic tone on the protagonist Thomas about his flippancy of his love toward Teresa, a “Cest La via” attitude, in the end, for he could not bear the weight that loses its “heaviness”.

Today, when looking at the world we dwell in, we find it is approaching to an infinite freedom, yet there is still an invisible boundary. It has transformed from the specific contradiction to a virtual, plural and obscure limitation. It could be a prejudice, an orthodox mindset, or a sense of void generated from the boundless freedom, an inner conflict.

“ES MUSS SEIN” comes from German, a grammatically strict language, a linguistically tough tone. Divorced from a “giff-gaff”, “Es muss sein” develops into a dedicated announcement, a pathetic exclamation and a metaphysical truth; while what is to be left after this exhibition is a duet by the real and the virtual spaces, an attempt to break through and to reconstruct the destiny from those absurdities.