对寓言、神话、奇闻轶事的讲述和复述可能同时勾起既美好又可怕的意象。通常，奇幻会变得怪诞，神秘变得恐怖，而现实变得超现实。吴俊勇的展览就尝试了一次误读寓言可能造成的恐怖的愉悦。艺术家有意将被践踏的小丑、鹤、无字书、笛子和尖嘴帽置于一个弥漫着血与火的他方世界。这些符号置身于一片荒芜之境，尽管有时候过于简单，但却揭示出一种愤世嫉俗姿态下的思考—这是一个坚持对思维和形式进行探索的年轻艺术家的态度，如同他优雅地向我们摊开了他的速写本。展览整体上虽然未做到尽善尽美，但也不乏亮点。
吴俊勇学版画出身，但是研究生阶段在中国美术学院转学新媒体艺术，他现在也在该校任教。他提到自己有受到老彼得·勃鲁盖尔，以及绘画、版画大师丢勒的影响，尽管在形式上他与两位大师大异其趣。勃鲁盖尔的寓言画和丢勒的木版画在构图上都是饱满而精确的。而吴俊勇的画面是凌乱的，笔触是急促的，没有大师的丰富色彩以及框架。然而在主题上，两位大师却为吴俊勇提供了很具体的学习对象：勃鲁盖尔的《尼德兰格言》（1559）是一张绘有约一百个当时格言的图解的画作；还有丢勒肖像画中典型的深色背景以及丢勒著名的弥漫着恶魔意象的木版画系列《启示录》（1498）。我们更不要忽视，勃鲁盖尔的《盲人领着盲人》（1568）里面的农夫和吴俊勇画中人物的相似性，尽管后者刻画得更灰暗些。
吴俊勇并没有试图像他所崇拜的荷兰画派大师一样对大量对象作大手笔的铺陈，他选择了每次只集中表现一两个著名的中国寓言。农夫、龙、蜘蛛以及日常物品出现在他的画面里，看起来像是西洋画片。绘画总的来说为吴俊勇的动画作品《鸟兽散》提供了一个切实的背景。动画采用了与画作相类似的对象和符号，但是在动画中，角色变成了黑色的剪影。人看起来像是飘浮在密云满布的天空：有人拉扯着风筝一样的器械和长线，有人戴着不知道代表巫师还是智障的帽子，有人坐在有长腿且能走动的椅子上。有成群结队的动物陪伴着人：猴子、蜘蛛、无头马、公鸡、鹳。有时候人骑在这些动物身上，有时候他们相互厮斗。有时候人体像皮影一样移动，操控他们的那根线清晰可见，黑鸟从他们头顶飞过。动画还包含了一个诺亚方舟的意象仿佛是天空中一次动物大爆炸之后，一张冒着烟的，空荡荡的椅子在飘浮，接着从空中落下。
吴俊勇的动画是奇丽的但称不上完美。对他来说，绘画是一种帮助他暂时摆脱枯燥繁复的动画制作的活动。然而他所探索对象的沉重性一种对国家和民族的社会批判似乎能更好地通过绘画这种媒介体现出来。与卡拉·沃克的生动有力的剪影作品不同，吴俊勇的剪影可以说是漫不经心的，我们不知道那些人物所为何事，身处何地，也无法与他们感同身受，与绘画并置时动画的力量略显单薄，因此我更欣赏彩色的忧伤马戏团。
玛拉·格莱斯顿

The telling and re-telling of fables, tall tales,and mythologies can conjure visions at once delightful and terrifying. Too often the fantastic becomes grotesque, the mystical monstrous, and the everyday surreal. Wu Junyong’s recent show dips into the horrible pleasures of the misread idiom, deploying image-symbols of downtrodden clowns, cranes, textless books, flutes, and pointed hats into otherworldly realms potted with blood and fire. When situated within vastly empty landscapes, this iconography, if at times simplistic, suggests a contemplative albeit cynical perspective—one of youth, perhaps, or of an artist still playing with ideas and forms who has graciously opened his sketchbook to us. The result is a gallery showing that, while not entirely convincing, is at moments compelling, and should signal Wu as an artist to watch in the years ahead. Wu Junyong was trained as a printmaker but pursued his graduate work in new media at China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, where he is now an instructor. He mentions being inspired by the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Albrecht Dürer, masters of paint and print. Formally, though, there is an utter disconnect. Bruegel’s allegorical paintings and Dürer’s woodblock prints are compositionally full and rendered with precision.
Wu’s paintings are messy and hastily executed, lacking the lush colorwork and use of the frame of the masters. Thematically, however, the artists offer Wu very specific objects of study: Bruegel’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559), a painting loaded with illustrations of perhaps 100 idioms used at the time; the blackened backgrounds of Dürer’s portraits; and the demon-laced imagery in Dürer’s famous woodblock print series, Apocalypse (1498).
Let’s not forget the peasants, either, though Wu likes his a bit dim, akin to those in Bruegel’s The Blind Leading the Blind (1568). Wu Junyong does not attempt to address his subjects in the broadly masterful way of his Flemish idols, and instead focuses on his idiomatic explorations of Chinese parables one or two at a time. Peasants, dragons, spiders and everyday objects populate the purgatory of Wu’s canvases and diorama-like reliefs. These painted figures are familiar. The men with pointed caps—are they wizards or dunces?—play big roles in Wu’s animations, as do brainless, sad-faced clowns, dead deer, impossible two-player flutes, and long, pointed objects, like the beaks of cranes,walking sticks, and extended fingers. They exist in hellish terrain, though, both as depicted (think blood-soaked tile floors and headless dragons writhing on long-legged chairs) and as rendered (the brushwork is decidedly fast, the color mixing almost absent, the painted surface thin, and the woodwork choppy). Collectively, the paintings offer a tangible context for Wu’s animated piece Cloud’s Nightmare.
The video uses similar themes and symbols as in the paintings, but in the video these figures are blackened silhouettes. The human figures are by and large men floating through a cloud-filled sky: men at work, pulling kite-like devices and ropes, men wearing dunce-wizard caps, men sitting in chairs with long legs that walk. The men are accompanied by a surge of animalia: donkeys,spiders, headless horses, roosters, spiders, and storks. Sometimes the men ride these creatures,and sometimes they spar. At times the human figures move like shadow puppets, their puppet strings visible, while dark birds fly overhead.
The video concludes with an ark-like explosion of animals in the sky, and a smoking, empty chair,which floats, then falls from the sky.The animations are beautiful, if imperfect.For Wu Junyong, painting serves as a momentary escape from the tedium of digital animation. But the dark weight of the subjects he investigates – which portray a social critique of his country and his brethren—seem somehow better served by the visceral nature of paint and the dimensional surfaces of mounted canvas and carved wood.Unlike the vivid, forceful detail of, say, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Wu’s are aimless, wandering figures, and we do not know their purpose, their place, nor do we have any sense of their feeling.Juxtaposed against paintings clearly awash in the latter, I think I prefer my melancholic circuses in color.
Mara Gladstone