Fu Wenjun's latest works.

Fu Wenjun traveled all over the world, using his lens to collect moving images, from architecture to street view, from portraits to artworks. He never relies on instant snapshots to complete his works. From the beginning, I prepared for later painting by shooting. To this end, he pays more attention to those objects with strong sense of entity to make up for the virtuality of computer images. He shifted his previous interest in the comparison between eastern and western cultures to the ancient and modern changes of world culture. This adjustment made Fu Wenjun get rid of the shackles of ideology to a great extent and return to the creative process of artistic essence and cultural perception. The unusual contingency and randomness in his recent works clearly show his self-confidence and freedom from manipulation.

First of all, he doesn't care about the difference between photography and painting. His pictures are often shaped by destroying photographic images. This is not only because the incomplete relics themselves bear the vicissitudes of history, but also because there is no cultural integrity in the relationship between different cultures. This holistic requirement is often due to the requirement of cultural hegemony. In a sense, Huntington's insistence on the western culture-centered theory will lead to the conclusion that culture will inevitably conflict and the world will inevitably split. Protoculturalism, like fundamentalism, has no possibility of victory today. The fragmentation and fragmentation of traditional culture are complementary to the openness, inclusiveness and possibility of mutual embedding of contemporary culture. When we see in Fu Wenjun's works that different cultures separated from Wan Li for thousands of years are so harmoniously juxtaposed, you can feel that people today really live in a new cultural psychology.

For Fu Wenjun, the intersection of various cultures is natural, and what he has to face is nothing more than this computer video screen that gathers all the images. Photographic materials have long since left the source scene and become inspiring information. What he does is how to feel the relationship between history and today, between things and individuals. Because of the possibility of destruction and reorganization, Fu Wenjun doesn't care about the documentary nature of photography or the stylization of painting. Graffiti lines, arbitrarily hidden shapes, flickering, simple or complex colors, and various means of post-processing of photography make the picture in front of Fu Wenjun varied: superposition and transparency, high definition and obscurity, entity and ethereal, graffiti lines and digital textures, brush strokes and particle changes, etc. Fu Wenjun really entered the creative state of improvisation. This creative state is generative and procedural, and the formation of its personal characteristics is neither rational nor prescriptive, but the result of the interaction and mutual promotion between subjective ideas and potential stimuli. From the mottled, gorgeous, rich and even complex color effects on the screen, we can feel the brilliance of Fu Wenjun's creation, full of intense artistic talent and impulsive aesthetic pursuit.

The post-processing of Fu Wenjun's works accounts for a large proportion, but unlike computer painting, he never abandoned the photographic images and still lingered on the connection between photography and reality in illusory painting. His photographic works are constantly being painted and revised; His paintings can't be finished by hand. It is in the endless changes of truth and illusion, reality and nothingness that artistic creation can capture the secrets of history and people, people and history.

I call Fu Wenjun "digital photography" because he has unique creative characteristics as a photography artist.

—— Wang Lin (famous critic and doctoral supervisor)

Cultural Integration and Digital Photography Excerpts