Image Decomposition And Reconstruction In Urban Landscape Painting

With the accelerating process of urbanization in contemporary China,things around us have been changed tremendously.We are experiencing all of this,and losing ourselves in terms of not only real-life but also soul consequently.In the cource of urbanization,historical buildings are forced to be demolished and replaced by high rises,high way,shopping malls,railway stations and so on.The struggle for survive and interests intensifyed the nervousness and alienation among people,resulting the dispensable of passion and intimacy,distancing people around us who are also lack of love.Therefore,the urban landscape can be termed as the "Lost City".This paper is aimed to analyze the emergence,social significance,and the image transformation pattern of paintings portraying the “Lost City”,specifically through investigating Julie Mehretu`s works,which can be regarded as the representative of new abstract painting in the 21 st century.The process of urbanization and the ever changing living situation affected Mehretu`s artistic creation fundamentally,similarly,those changes have impacted my own work and stimulated me to introspect the nature of art,as well as human condition in contemporary world.My artistic approches and methodology shared some basic ideas with Mehretu,her unique method of image-deconstruction and image-reconstruction is quite illuminative and apply to me.No matter what nationality they are,artists living in themodern society are faced with the same issues about the urban space and living environment.This paper attempts to elucidate the artist’s several works and the societal context,combined with the motivation and methods of my own working,in order to contribute some new ideas on abstract painting.Through discussing the ever-changing urban life in modern society and the devaluation of people`s spirit,this paper tries to figure out how the artist deconstructs the city landscape and reconstructs a spiritual world.As we shall see,in her paintings,the real world is highly generalized,and the spirit of objects is accurately extracted,and finally,the image and the spirit are integrated.This paper is divided into four chapters.The first chapter presents the context,content,and initial ideas of my research.The second chapter concentrates on analyzing the painting language of the artist’s works,as well as the social and cultural factors that affected her career.In the third chapter,by interpreting the “tangible” and “intangible” "Lost City" caused by accelerating urbanization combined with the analysis of some representative works of Mehretu,I attempt to untangle the mode of transformation of images,namely the deconstruction and reconstruction,in her works.I will accentuate the method and content of such a kind of deconstruction,and the geometric images adopted to reconstruct the spiritual world.In the last chapter,I will expound on why Mehretu`s works are illuminative for me.and how my works are related to her images.