The Terrain of Portrait

This series of works is a synthesis of the researched contents of the last two years, combining the use of the concepts of ‘Semiotics’ and ‘Deterritorialization’ in painting.

Two prior questions: how to find the frontier of the painterliness of the portrait? How to find the conceptual frontier of the symbol?

Here the portraits are no longer representative head images, but a symbolic field of ‘being seen and seeing’. The painting is both a viewing machine and an object to be viewed; this generative tension is the core proposition of contemporary identity perception, involving the dialectic of ‘difference’ and ‘unity’.

This is a deconstruction of ‘subject recognizability’, emphasizing the fluidity and non-centrality of individual identity. The ‘portrait’ detaches from the visual template of the human face, becoming an ever-generating structure of perspective—not depicting any specific person. Thus, the portrait no longer adheres to the face but transforms into an abstract mechanism of observation. Its form can drift, disintegrate, or even vanish, leaving behind only the act of seeing itself.

In contrast to the ‘Indicator’ series, the symbols in this series are not presented as fully closed image units. They lack formal structure, engaging in mutual referentiality with the portraits while breaking the expectation that images must be read and understood.