文/陈贶怡
石玩玩，喜欢进行场域特定艺术的创作计划，也喜欢观众的参与。他的几个可以被归类为“新类型公共艺术”(New Genre Public Art)的创作计划都简洁明快且充满了趣味，例如2017年在湖南常德(陶渊明诗中的桃花源)进行的《桃花树计划》：将旧城改造的废墟中长出的小野花绘制成画，透过网路贩售，再将贩售所得在未来的新城中种植桃花树。在这样的作品中揉杂着一种过去与未来、旧城与新城、文学与绘画之间的巧妙串联，正是这种美学趣味使城市的变迁变得戏剧化，也避免落入大多数社会介入式艺术(socially engaged art)那种令人厌烦的伦理态度与道德劝说。
石玩玩的另一类作品则是从一个叙事出发，例如《胡志明的风景》，将一本越文书籍《情人》中22段描写当地风景的段落，以艺术家初学的越南语朗诵出来，再邀请一位越南人根据所听到的录音将22个风景画出来。而《望京少年》则是邀请十位北京望京街区的居民，将当地公认为是小偷的维吾尔族少年的长相描述出来，再画下来。这次在香港进行的特定地点创作计划也相当类似，是以画廊所在街道(荷李活道)命名的《荷李活小姐》，他选择了曾羁留香港的作家张爱玲写的第一部小说《沉香屑·第一炉香》中描写一位香港女子外貌的段落，再邀请自愿参与计划的香港女性观众，根据这段叙述将张爱玲笔下的这位少女画出来。
这种有趣的创作方式，首先可以被视为是一种“艺术的换位”(La transposition d’art)，亦即使用另一种艺术形式来“誊写”(transcrire)一个已经存在的艺术作品。波特莱尔常常醉心于此类创作方式，他常试图将绘画作品誊写成文字，他笔下的波西米亚人可能来自于Jacques Callot的版画，而盲人则是以Pieter Brueghel的画作为蓝本。最著名的是他对画家Constantin Guys的推崇，并从而发展出他的“现代”(modern)美学理论。对波特莱尔而言：“美无可避免的永远是一个双重的构成(...)美是由一个永恒的、不变的元素，和一个相对的、因时制宜的元素所构成”如果诗人常常游历于艺术史上的名作，并不只是因为它的历史价值，而是因为“历史发生在现在”。而波特莱尔还表明Guys令他最为折服之处，在于他总是凭着记忆作画，如此一来，画家精神中的事物所产生的印象，就可以被观众的思维所重建。这种记忆的创造与重建的过程，将会召唤出观众与艺术家最重要的一种能力：想像。
石玩玩将张爱玲1940年代的小说在2019年以绘画的方式进行换位，启动的无疑也是这种穿越时空的记忆、重建、想像，终至创造的过程。所不同的是他将创造的任务交给了观众：在我们因为展场中对于同一对象展现出的截然不同的描绘而失笑时，正是所有的参与者为了再现一个不存在的事物而奋力一搏的时刻，然而正因为这位荷李活小姐的非实存，让观众精神中的事物全都因为想像而活跃了起来!
或者，换个方法说，如果德勒兹(Gilles Deleuze)透过“差异”(different)的概念想要告诉我们，在“重复”(repetition)之中并没有两个东西会一模一样，而“同一性”(identity)并非事物的首要原则，“差异”才是，那么石玩玩的创作方式正好引导着观众走向后现代的真实世界，因为在差异的原则之下，真实的世界不可能是一个永恒不变的存有(being)，它只能是一个存有的过程(becoming)。在对荷李活小姐的重复叙述(重复肖像)所产生的差异中，生产出的并不是一位虚拟的人物，而是整个香港的呼之欲出的真实，真实的香港，香港的真实。
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陈贶怡博士，策展人、艺评家、国立台湾艺术大学美术学院院长、博士生导师、教授
本文为艺术家在香港NIDO AISA画廊《荷李活小姐》项目展览前言
By Kuang-yi Chen
Shi Wanwan prefers to projects of field specific art and the participation of the audience. Several of his projects which can be classified as "New Genre of Public Art" are concise and interesting. For example, Peach Blossom Projectcarried out in Changde of Hunan Province, the Peach Bloosom Source in Tao Yuanming’s poem, in 2017, in which Shi Wanwan drew little wildflowers from the ruins of the old town online to get the money to plant peach trees in the new town. There is a mixture of the past and the future, the old and the new town, also literature and painting. It is this aesthetic taste that makes the changes of cities dramatic and avoids falling into the boring ethical attitude and moral persuasion of the majority of social interventionist art.
Another kind of Shi Wanwan’s works is based on narrative. Take The Landscapes of Ho Chi Minh for an example, he 22 paragraphs describing the local scenery in a Vietnamese book Lover were read out by a new learner in Vietnamese, and then a Vietnamese was invited to draw 22 pictures according to the recording heard. Wangjing Youth invited 10 residents of Wangjing District in Beijing to describe and paint the faces of Uighur teenagers who are regarded as thieves there.
The site-specific project in Hong Kong is quite similar. It is called Miss Ho Lee Wud, named after the street where the gallery is located (Ho Lee Wud Road). He choosed the passage depicting the appearance of a Hong Kong woman in The First Censer, the first novel by the former Hong Kong writer Eileen Chang, . According to this account. And Hong Kong women who volunteered to participate in the project was invited to paint the young woman. This interesting approach to do art can first be regarded as an "artistic transposition" (La transposition d'art) which was to"transcribe" an existing work of art in another form of art .
Baudelaire was often obsessed with this skill and he also tried to transcribe his paintings to words. His Bohemias may have came from Jacques Callot's prints, while the blinds are based on Pieter Brueghel's paintings. Most famously, he admired the painter Constantin Guys and developed his "modern" (modern) aesthetic theory. For Baudelaire, "The beauty is inevitably a double composition. The beauty is made up of an eternal, constant element, and a relative, time-and-time element.” If poets often travel in the history of art, it is not because of its historical value, but because of "history takes place in the present". Baudelaire also showed that what Guys impressed him most was that he always painted by memory so that the impressions of the artist's spirit could be rebuilt by the mind of the audience.This process of memory creation and reconstruction will call forth imagination which is the most important ability of the audience and the artist. In 2019, Shi Wanwan transposed Eileen Chang's novels in the 1940s in the way of painting, which undoubtedly started the process of such time-traveling memory, reconstruction, imagination and finally creation. The difference is that he leaves the task of creation to the audience. When we laughed at the completely different depiction of the same object in the exhibition, it was the moment when all participants struggled to reproduce a thing that did not exist. However, it was the non-existence of this Miss Ho Lee Wud that made all the things in the audience's spirit come alive with imagination!
Or we can put it another way, if Deleuze is trying to tell us there are no two things that are exactly the same in repetition and identity is not the first principle of things but the difference through his concept of difference .So the creation of Shi is just leading the audience to the postmodern real world because the real world can not be an eternal and unchanging being but only be a process of being under the principle of difference. In the difference created by the repetition of Miss Ho Lee Wud narration ( the repetition of portraits ), what is produced is not a virtual character but the real of the whole Hong Kong，the real Hong Kong.
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Kuang-yi Chen
Doctor of Contemporary Art History, University of Paris X
Dean of college of fine arts, national Taiwan university of the arts
Professor in the department of fine arts