Ran Kai likes to gaze at the sea for a long time.
This comes from the love and nostalgia caused by the separation between him and his parents during childhood. At that time, Ran Kai lived in a minority-inhabited area in Hubei, China, while his parents worked in the coastal regions of southeast China for a long time. In the 1990s, China's transportation was underdeveloped. Whenever the holidays came, Ran Kai travelled with his family from the mountains of Hubei to the coast of Fujian for many days. A short vacation means getting closer to their parents and watching the sea together, which has also become Ran Kai's long and extravagant hope in his childhood.
In the novels of J.M. Barrie, "Neverland" stands in the quiet and magnificent sea, as the place where Peter Pan, a representative character of idealism, grew up. Neverland is an illusory and graceful dream world and a romantic utopia isolated from the world and forever young. In J.M. Barrie's works, it means ideal, innocence and eternal innocence, but in Ran Kai's eyes, it has become an unreachable shore across the sea. In his journey towards "Neverland", the artist uses "looking at the sea" as a clue, presenting his comprehensive material creation practice since 2014 through a fluid image. Unlike the peaceful and leisurely atmosphere commonly associated with the sea, Ran Kai uses "the sea" as a clue to present the complex emotions of joy, hope, longing, waiting, and adventuring in his subconscious in the fluctuating and changing the texture of his works.
Ran Kai likes to stare at the black screen, just like staring at the sea.
As a combination of the two, in the "Looking at the Sea" series, the screen represented by the black base in the picture often overlaps with the magnificent sea surface, running through the flashing wave texture on the canvas, becoming Ran Kai's clever way of dealing with the coexistence of "screen and sea". As the main channel for the artist to understand the outside world during his childhood, the screen and images became an extension of his eyes. With a gorgeous appearance and complicated arrangement, these edited screen signals constructed Ran Kai's naive understanding of the world during his childhood and deviated from the values established by the artist in the real world in turbulent times. Therefore, the black screen became the object of Ran Kai's criticism and a tool for reflecting the actual situation in exquisite social cases. Although the concept of "landscape" was repeatedly mentioned and discussed after Guy Debord proposed it in the last century, it is more intuitive today in the context of information explosion and screen flooding: media information and communication technology have become scales that fundamentally measure and shape social, personal, and bodily existence, and also have a significant impact on the public's reception of external information and the shaping of emotional values. This continuous change of subjective perception is symbolized and supported by the evolution of photography, film, television broadcasting technology, and digital media and appears in objective expression and social existence practice, all of which constitute the public's cognitive system. In Ran Kai's creative thinking and practicing, technological progress has not only deconstructed our subjective perception and existence but also constructed our subjectivity as "human". When people immerse themselves in the sensory world created by the infinite virtual space and landscape, those who lose their sense of reality, subjectivity, and reflective ability ultimately become accomplices of technologists under the intervention of screen ripples and wrong signals. The waves and geometric compositions flickering on the black screen are no longer synonymous with exquisite social landscapes but have become the source of Rang Kai's repeated struggles between passive adaptation and active choice.
At the same time, Ran Kai's painting practice also attempts to subvert the limitations that "painting-ness" brings to the artist. In the "Looking at the Sea" series, all the works are covered with a layer of the acrylic board with a reflective texture. These acrylic boards naturally adhere to the surface of the unpainted canvas without any external force, also imaginatively challenging the "moment of painting completion". Contrary to the characteristics of oil painting, which can be repeatedly modified and stacked, Ran Kai chooses to use acrylic materials to seal the surface of the canvas at the "moment of painting completion", which also represents his suppression of the individual's purposeless but fanatic desire itself. This kind of introspection and restraint makes the artist no longer pursue the infinite perfection of the picture. Instead, it turns the discussion of painting-ness to a critique of the relation of production and value attributes in industrial society. The smooth and sharp reflective surface brought by acrylic material makes his works appear like the unboxing scene of perfect industrial products, all of which point to the subjective presuppositions of the audience bred under contemporary consumerism, popular culture, and capitalist ideology; this dilutes all traces of handwork and physical labour, and becomes a characteristic of the era that overrides all "works/products".
Eternal childhood, media reflection, and consumer society observations have contributed to Ran Kai's experiences of the surrounding situation and his own life. They also make 'Neverland' seem like an obvious but unattainable endpoint, pulled back and forth in the game between idealism and reality. This has made Ran Kai's trajectory as an individual flickering, confused, and ambiguous while also profoundly affecting the artist's specific feelings, thoughts, and actions - in the game of control and being controlled, leading to the eternal island in dreams.
Chen Junyao