The powerlessness of so many contemporary images
An accidental visit to the New Contemporaries Exhibition, 2025
For a long time my fascination with the idea of ‘the power of images’ was mostly a sense of direction, a mysterious pull, which I only half-understood. I was compelled by the idea that paintings could have real effects in the physical world. To even think this was so different to what I had received of the possibilities of art in my own culture.
Dragons that could roar off a wall and disappear into the sky, mice painted by a prisoner which chewed through his bonds, the descent of the power of the universe into a statue carved from stone. Stories, and practices, from China, Japan, and India showed me another way of seeing, and a different purpose for art.
I have some notes in a sketchbook from around 1983, copied from a book by Simon Leys, a Sinologist from the 1970s (can’t find the source now). Talking about Chinese painting, he said:
[In the Chinese tradition] …painting is an act of creation, not of imitation. In the West, both classical antiquity and Renaissance culture considered that art possessed an essentially illusionist nature.... While Western artists applied their ingenuity to deceive the perceptions of the spectator, presenting him with skilful fictions, for a Chinese painter, the measure of success was not determined by his ability to fake reality but by his capacity to summon reality.
... not the painting’s illusionist power, but its efficient power – it achieved an actual grasp over reality, exerting a kind of ‘operative’ power.
... The relation between the painted landscape and the natural landscape is not based on imitation or representation; painting is not a symbol of the world, but proof of its actual presence.
.. The purpose of painting is not to describe the appearances of reality, but to manifest its truth.
I still read these words and experience a mysterious resonance; like a voice whispering too low to hear, in answer to a question I didn’t even know I was still asking.
If a painter’s works ‘lack breath’, all the other technical qualities they may present will remain useless. Conversely, if they are possessed of such inner circulation, they may even afford to be technically clumsy, no formal defect can affect their essential quality.
If you’ve read any of my articles over the last few months, you’ll know that trying to find my own relationship to these ideas became the basis of my studies and of my art practice over many decades. I still find a lot of contemporary art offerings very difficult to relate to, because they seem to be so far away from my own interests and understanding of what art might be.
A couple of months ago, I accidentally found myself in the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition here in Edinburgh. Huge white walls, high ceilings, filled with light. I imagine that being represented here must be the goal of many artists. The New Contemporaries was a selection of 64 art school graduates from the 2024 end of degree shows.
I don’t really know how to describe my feelings as I walked around the various rooms of this place. My overwhelming impression was of ugliness, perhaps even deliberate ugliness. A massive tent frame covered in dark sheep’s wool laughed out loud at the idea that I came in here looking for subtlety, mystique, intrigue, beauty, surprise. Bits and pieces of stuff taped to the floor, everyday objects stuck to a doorway in the middle of the room, a room with a computer in it and flashing lights. Paintings on the walls; garish colour, uninteresting copies of 50s adverts, badly-executed figures in misproportioned landscapes. I felt heavy, abused, disregarded, flattened.
I’m not saying that there might not have been interesting work in the exhibition. I vowed to look at all of the artists online and see if I could get my head around what they were doing. Unfortunately somehow I haven’t got round to that. I’ve never got beyond writing what I felt as I stood in the gallery feeling assaulted by the work that shouted the loudest.
I don’t blame the artists. They’re in the culture that they’re in, and they’ve just been through four years of assessed perception/intention re-education. They want to be artists, they wanted to pass, they want to survive.
Installations, everywhere. Why are they still seen as cutting edge? Why do I need an explanation of the concepts behind them in order to receive them? And why is the most common interpretation of the role of art still only to challenge, confront, or shock? Figurative painting has been allowed back (perhaps it always has been in Scotland?) but the use of paint in this exhibition, the execution, and the types of subject matter were thin, uninteresting, and totally depressing to me.
I walked downstairs to the Scottish Colourists in an attempt to recover my spirit. Does not being able to see anything apart from its historic context make me romantic/nostalgic?
Francis Cadell’s Portrait of a Lady in Black found me. The shapes, the composition, the choices... I looked at the light brushstrokes on the edge of the white glove, the minimal use of paint to suggest the eyes, and imagined the excitement of trying something so new, in 1921. Even without this context, the painting itself is strong. It affects me.
Is this image alive with something I might call power? At first the question confused me. I couldn’t find a way to hold the Chinese idea of a painting ‘summoning reality’ alongside the way that the shapes and brushstrokes and colour affected me as I stood in front of it. But I think this is a version of the power of images, within my own tradition. It has aesthetic power; it made me stop, it moved something within me.
I think it does summon reality, not in the illusionist sense of trying to perfectly reproduce the features and clothing of the woman standing by the mirror; I’m guessing that it makes me feel something about her presence precisely because the artist was not trying to copy her faithfully, but instead wanted to communicate something about the living, breathing experience of her.
I’m hoping that as I’m now looking at more art from my own tradition, and am connected to many more artists through their writing here, that I’m going to find more art that has the power to reach out to me, to move and surprise me. A contemporary artist whose work does do this is Marina Roca Díe.
Marina recently published a series of paintings that, for me, unquestioningly achieve what the Chinese artist philosophers were talking about. Though she has phenomenal ‘illusionist’ skills in both drawing and painting, in these works she’s not interested in using these to represent literal forms (in this case, human bodies) as they exists in the world.
In this series, for me, she’s painting/suggesting/creating/giving form to what being in the world can actually feel like.
In these paintings, which she describes as ‘plant-human fucking at night’ (seriously, now go back and look at the images above again!)…
…she has somehow made work which, for me, actually summons the experience of erotically charged bodies moving silently in the depths of night…
… with the added ingredient for my imagination of human-plant erotic communion...
I can’t help but wonder if the reason Marina can make such extraordinary work is precisely because she somehow managed to escape a traditional art school training, and instead put together her own personal programme of thousands of hours of practice and study under a range of different teachers from numerous different traditions. She found her own path, and it became a path of power.
Thanks so much dear Tamsin for this wonderful analysis, I'm so excited that you see all that in my work!!
I totally understand the feeling of going to this recently graduated contemporary art shows, I think there is a myth of the young artist doing super new revolutionary art that is completely innovative and strange and original... This myth I always had hard time to believe, cause in painting the voice of reason and age is normally what becomes more radical: you need practice for thousands of hours... Normally paintings by young artists are simply not as good, maybe they can have potentia, or look fresh, or clumsy in an innocent way and you can see as spark. But revolutionary or radical.... It's not common. I just don't think the technique gives that, it's like playing piano, you will need at least a few years of practice before you are able to break its language.
I believe now young people are all the time on social media and they are just repeating what they see there, which corresponds to the cultural paradigm that we have now, zero revolutionary and very conservative. Since algorithms are ruling our lives and our views and our art, if you do something a bit weird, a bit out of touch, a bit new or a bit different, you are punished by the algo with invisibility. So young artists, being aware of it or not, are facing this dichotomy, do I want to be good or seen? They prefer to be seen and trying to please that instead of listening to their cultural needs and the needs of others... It's hectic neoliberal times, ruled by money, and that's the enemy of artistic practices.
As you say, it's not their fault. It's the fault of how we have organized as a collective, and the lack of resistance we have put (at the beginning it seemed like a good idea for everyone, but turned into something else).
Last but not least, I wanted to recommend you a book called Principles of Chinese Painting, by George Rowley. It has chapter titles as suggesting as "tradition and originality", "simplicity, emptiness and suggestion", "the unity of consonance" or "sequence and moving focus". It's a fascinating book, analyzing Chinese painting from a formal and aesthetical point of view.
(My god, this got long) Cheers! And again, thank you so much!!!
What a terrific analysis of a problem I only feel as I have no background within art and its teaching. It parallels the problems of education that I do know, where something that started out as new /real/ connected ends up being copied and distorted, crowd following. thankyou