Once Qi Wenzhang turned thirty, he began painting himself with increasing frequency — painting himself as a painter. Unlike conventional self-portraiture, Qi does not use painting to reveal his interiority, to expose the unique inner world of an individual. He does not, as typical portraiture attempts to do, seek to reproduce an abyss of obscure existence through an outward body — that is to say, he does not try with all his might to delineate an inner soul. On the contrary, he paints his external life: his condition as a contemporary painter. What he depicts is something visible, stable, and even inherent to artistic tradition — a lasting artistic reality. In this sense, such self-portraiture departs from the conventions of the self-portrait genre and becomes a sociological inquiry. In other words, the goal of the self-portrait is not the utmost faithful rendering of one's own likeness. Qi Wenzhang is indeed painting his own image, yet in a certain sense, he is also painting the image of a group of people — the image of a group of artists, the image of a certain type of artist's career commonly found throughout art history. He paints not only his own condition, but the condition of a collective — the condition of a group of hunger artists. He paints the painterly life of artists. Thus, rather than any one individual's particular inner reality, it is the painting career of an entire community of painters, the existential state of this community, that becomes the subject and theme of his canvases.



Clearly, this existential state possesses a long, tragic, yet not entirely unromantic history — here, the face of Van Gogh immediately comes to mind. The artist's life of suffering is part of art history. One might even say that the richest and most meaningful episodes in art history are precisely the episodes of the artist's martyrdom. The most triumphant chapter in art history happens to be the artist's most failed chapter. Qi Wenzhang attempts to find a new annotation for this history of failure. He attempts to paint the history of the artist's failure in the present day. Today, when all media are desperately chasing after stars, Qi Wenzhang tries to serve as an alternative medium: he wants to paint obscure figures, to paint the history of failure, the history of obscurity, the history of the silent, the history of the clown. He wants to expose, through painting, those painters who have never made their mark on the market. He wants to paint a most recent epilogue to this melancholic history.



Here, the hunger artist meets a dead end. In these self-portraits, the painter lies collapsed on the ground — he has been killed by painting. Painting shifts from the role of an artwork to the role of a murderer — everything involved in painting, the brushes, the pigments, the canvas, the frame, all become instruments of murder. The props of art, not merely the artist, become the subject of painting, and a devastating subject at that. These props do not perform passionately upon the canvas; instead, they are strewn across the floor, becoming an alien force against the act of painting itself. Even the canvas collapses on its own, as if cursing itself. The tools of painting become an alien force against painting itself. In completing their work, they simultaneously annihilate their work. The artist lacks the power to wield them; he tries to pick them up, but they are too heavy, and they strike him down instead. The tools of painting strike down the painter, killing the artist. They are no longer objects mastered by the artist, but objects that master the artist; they are not the artist's tools, but tools that devour the artist; the props of art become props that manipulate the artist. For the artist, painting is like a drug — it can be addictive, it can make one feel well, it can heal — yet its powerful side effects can also distort and kill.



Why is the painter defeated by his brushes, by painting itself? In fact, the artist is one who sells himself. Two of Qi Wenzhang's paintings make this point with striking clarity. The artist puts himself up for sale, just like a migrant laborer on the market selling himself in the nude — and Qi Wenzhang paints himself as a naked figure as well. On the one hand, this indicates his destitute condition of having nothing; such a figure is like the proletariat described by Marx, who can survive only by selling their labor power. The artist is precisely such a person who possesses nothing but his ability to paint. Thus, he must sell his painting ability, he must seek an employer on the market — this is the painter as laborer, or, in Walter Benjamin's terms, the author as producer. His nudity also indicates that the market, too, is naked. This is likewise what Marx articulated: under the overwhelming force of the capitalist market, all human relationships are transformed into market relations and monetary relations; the market tears away every veil of tenderness from the past. For painting today, the market is even the sole objective. The market is a ruthless wager — it constitutes the artist's theology of hope, and precisely for this reason, it also constitutes the artist's abyss of despair. Therefore, rather than saying that painting is the murderer, it would be more accurate to say that the market is the true murderer — or, more precisely, if painting fails to find a market, it becomes the murderer of the artist. For Qi Wenzhang, once the artist seeks a buyer, once the plan to sell himself outright fails, painting reveals its ferocious face and begins to devour the artist in return.



Here, one will observe a fundamental transformation in the very concept of art. Once unsold, a work loses all its aura. Or rather, once a work of art has not been tested by the market, it is nothing at all. Art can no longer be interpreted or defined through its past array of myths. Art can only be defined through the market. This is the art system of today — a system entirely dominated by the logic of capitalism. Qi Wenzhang attempts to paint this. He attempts to make the current system, in which painting is dominated by the market, itself the subject of painting. In fact, he tries to paint the rampant advance of capitalist logic within the field of art. As a young artist, he has experienced this deeply. He paints how he himself has been drawn into this logic of capital, how he has been devoured by it — yet once he has painted this logic, he tries to free himself from it. That is to say, on the one hand, he is deeply enmeshed in this system of painting, while on the other hand, he tries to detach himself from it in order to see it clearly. He both earnestly seeks the market and mocks the absurdity of such seeking. He is both an active participant in the system and an outsider who does not fit in. He is a dialectical spectator. As spectator, he mocks himself as artist; as artist, he mocks himself as spectator. Here, Qi Wenzhang watches himself, regarding himself as an other. Through painting, he turns himself into his own other, thereby making himself the object of his own gaze. The self as painted object expresses Qi Wenzhang's social identity — he is an artist, a hunger artist, a destitute artist. But Qi Wenzhang the painter, Qi Wenzhang as observer, has shed the identity of the artist; although he is painting, he seems not to be a painter, but someone standing outside the affairs of painting, someone watching painting, someone gazing at this age of painting. He has detached himself from painting precisely in order to observe painting. Conversely, the figure in the painting, though merely an object of depiction, though already prostrate on the ground, though seemingly dead, is without question a living painter — an exemplary painter of our era. In this way, Qi Wenzhang splits himself into a dual role: he plays both the protagonist of the painting system and its audience; both the hero of this age of painting and its clown.



The artist becomes the clown of this age. Just as the definition of art has changed, so too has the definition of the artist. Qi Wenzhang's self-portraits also include clowns; he juxtaposes the clown and the artist. The two appear to have nothing in common. Yet both sell themselves cheaply, both seek an audience, both disguise themselves, both speak against their true feelings, both desperately promote themselves, both try to attract attention, both court favor, both show off their cleverness. All of this serves their shared objective: to seek the market and the buyer. The clown and the artist inhabit a common backdrop — as Benjamin said, "Both the prostitute and the book can be brought to bed." These two utterly unrelated objects can occupy a shared space, and today, the clown and the artist — who by no means resemble each other — coexist in harmony precisely within this shared space of the market. Both can be brought to market.