節選自法國著名批評家菲力浦•拉古拉巴特《指示》 我看過明姬myonghi作畫，兩次。每一次當然都站在遠處；不是“偷偷地看”，也不是“不請自到”，只是不引起注意地觀察；盡管如此，我還是站在不太遠的地方，以便每次都能夠準確地知道她在畫什么，猜想或隱約看出她為什么畫這個，我琢磨的不是她怎么畫，而是她必須在什么樣的情形下才這樣畫，而不那樣畫。 因為明姬是“依據實物”而畫，或者，如塞尚時代的人們極為喜歡說的“室外寫生”。她的畫本身就說明這一點，標題里注有：一個地點，一個時間，或者一個地名和對一個事物的指示。明姬所畫，是她選擇的極為精心尋求的“風景”（或者說組成風景的部分）：總是一些經過優選的地點。為此她多次旅行，有時候非常遙遠（Patagonia巴塔哥尼亞，Mongolia蒙古）。她帶回的畫——事實上也總是很遙遠，就算它們來自法國鄉村或故鄉韓國——任何一種現代眼光都會認為這些畫是“抽象”的，實際上它們卻具有我們所說的“表現性”。更具體地說，是“對自然的表現”。雖然風格上有某種連貫性，盡管極難定義，但“對自然的表現”是如此的真實，因而塞熱斯特（ségeste）（西西里島上帶廢墟的風景）與塞里農特（sélinonte）（同為西西里島上帶廢墟的風景）毫無相似之處；戈壁灘上的峭壁即刻區別于Alps阿爾卑斯山區的斷層；the Strait of Magellan麥哲倫海峽的海水也不同于朝鮮海域上Chejudao濟州島周圍的海水。還有，法國多菲內地區的梨樹枝，既不是臺北橡膠樹的樹枝，也不是巴黎圣日爾曼大街上某一栗樹的樹枝。 面對明姬的一幅畫，除非事先被告知，否則，誰都說不出：這是巖石，這是樹，這是大海；更說不出：這是西西里島，這是智利，這是東方或是西方；甚至也說不出：這是一處風景，或是“什么東西”。如果我們把“表現”甚至“具象”image理解為平常認為的概念，把它看作是對“現實”的“美術化”，那么明姬的畫什么都不表現。甚至連標題——從這個角度來看，都派不上用場：人們至多只能憑其文字來理解它。然而確實有某種東西被表現出來，因為“表現”這個詞的本義就是使展現或者當下化。我還沒看明姬作畫的時候，她給我展示過幾幅作品，每一次，都非常精確地向我解釋畫的內容：“那兒，”她對我說，“是在巴塔哥尼亞，一條條狗追逐著鳥雀；那兒，是在阿爾卑斯山區，一條展開的路；還有那兒，是急流，冷?！彼脑捳Z完全是“現實的”，有實景的，幾乎是面面俱到的。的確，聽著她的講解，我看到（隱隱約約地看到）了她所看到的，看到了我可能永遠看不到但終于通過直覺準確感受到的，看到了她所能看到并這樣描繪出來的東西。這確實是在表現。但對我們來說，這與摹仿是分不開的。明姬服從摹仿自然這一在我們看來完全西方的“美學”指令。我們自然而然地認為“抽象”破壞了摹仿的合法性。但是，這一摹仿所呈現的與傳承給我們的imitatio（摹擬）的教條——甚至當我們追溯其源頭，與mimèsis（摹擬）無懈可擊的必要性——關聯甚少。而且，這也與其簡單的對立面關聯甚少：所謂的不具象，反映的永遠只是主觀感受的無限力量。 明姬的藝術，如今，就是這樣一個謎。我力求弄懂的，就是這個美妙的謎。 Designation Excerpted from La Designation, written by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, notable French critic I used to watch Myonghi draw and every time, of course, I would stand in the distance, not peeking or paying an unexpected visit, but observing from a distance unnoticeably. Still, I would not stand too far so that I could know exactly what stuff she was drawing, and at the same time try to guess or figure out why she chose to paint this. What I consider was not how she produced her art pieces, but under what circumstances she would paint in this but not that way. Myonghi draws by imitating concrete objects, or what people at Paul Cezanne’s time prefer to call “sketching from nature”. This was made clear by her painting itself, whose title may be a location, time, the name of a place, or the denotation of stuff. What Myonghi painted were the landscapes or parts of the landscapes she has carefully selected; always well-chosen places. For this reason, she traveled a lot, sometimes even to remote countries like Patagonia and Mongolia. And the paintings she brought with her—which also traveled a long distance from remote areas, even when they came from certain French village or Korea, Myonghi’s motherland, they would be thought to be “abstractive” by any modern eyes—actually possessed the quality of what we called “representation”, or to be more specific, “the representation of nature”. In spite of certain continuity which was hard to define in the styles of her paintings, Myonghi’s “representation of nature” was so real that in her hand there were no similarities between Segeste and Selinonte, both of which belonged to the sceneries with relics in Sicily, crags in the desert were instantly recognized to be distinctive with faultage in the Alps, and the sea waters surrounding the strait of Magellan are different from those round Chejudao in the Koran maritime space. To be more, twigs of pear trees in Dauphiné, France were not those of rubber plant in Taipei, nor are they those of one chestnut tree on boulevard Saint-Germain of Paris. Looking at Myonghi’s paintings, no one was able to tell, unless being told in advance, that this was a rock, that was a tree or the sea, nor could he/she tell that this was Sicily, Chile, the East or the West, or even a scenery or “some stuff’. But if “representation” or even “specific image” was understood to be the concept that we normally accepted, that is, artisticalization of the reality, Myonghi’s pieces represented nothing, even the titles couldn’t help (normally with whose help people could at most understand them). But something has really been represented, because the word “represent” itself originally means “display” or “show”. Before I ever watched Myonghi draw, she used to show me some of her pieces, and every time she would explain to me precisely what was in the picture, “That”, she told me, “was in Patagonia where dogs were chasing after the birds; and that was in the mountain areas of Alps, an expanding path; and there was the torrential currents, very cold.” Her descriptions were “realistic”, relating to actual sceneries, and virtually comprehensive. Indeed, her explanations made me see (though indistinctively) what she saw, what I might never see but felt well and truly through intuition, and what she was able to see and describe. This was a kind of representation, which for us was undetached from imitation; Myonghi obeyed to the aesthetic instruction of “imitating the nature” which was for us totally western. And meanwhile we took it for granted that abstract form destroyed the validity of imitation. But what Myonghi’s paintings represented through imitation was hardly related to the doctrines of imitatio that we inherited, even when we traced back to its origin, the mimesis, it was the same. Neither was it related to its simple opposite; the so-called non-figurative painting represented merely the boundless power of individual’s subjective perception. This is Myonghi’s art, a great enigma that I have been striving to understand.