Yang Jiechang

Perhaps a drawing or painting does not begin with the first mark on the surface, but already exists within the paper or canvas that bears the fibers, watery marks, and shadows that become the eventual work’s very essence. The present work, Yang Jiechang’s expansive and important series of ink works on paper 100 Layers of Ink (1993) evokes such a sense of connectedness between things material and immaterial.  In these six giant sheets, surface, marks, colors and form unite as one.

Yang’s life and praxis have been deeply informed by the philosophical and religious principles Daoism: the intertwining tension between opposites; the boundary between subjectivity and transcendence, inside and outside; and the notion of the void that underlies and forms the entire universe.

First exhibited in Silent Energy, an early group exhibition of six diasporic Chinese artists at the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, Yang’s enormous installation in the bright, sky-lit upper gallery made for an intensely dramatic first impression. This impressive and rare series of black monochromatic paintings is an outstanding example of the sort of complicated works on paper for which Yang has since become known. Composed of four large wall panels and two double-sided hanging works about suspended in the middle of the floor, the sheets appear vast even beyond their actual, immense size. Massive yet serene, the white paper that borders the irregular square-like forms appears as if floating or oscillating in space.

Deceptively simple, it is impossible to take these works in at once, which is precisely the artist’s intention. Rather, the viewer is forced to move around and in-between the stretched frames with their dense yet reflective ink surfaces. Their apparent lightness belies the weight and volume of their stark materiality, as the multiple layering of ink forms a rugged, crumpled surface. The structure of the paper, infused with medicinal herbs, further impacts upon the effect of the ink, imbuing the surfaces with unexpected lines and patterns that resemble rivers or streams running through mystical terrain.  These surfaces eventually give way to shimmering, undulating silvery marks, with an effect similar to that of the special Buddhist genre of black thanka paintings—a connection the artist makes himself with folds resembling the clothes of Buddhist monks (jiasha), made from many pieces. This multiplicity of folds is especially important to an artist who prefers to create a dynamic tension between coverings of ink wash on paper rather than use regular brushstrokes or marks that lack volume. Despite their bulk, the works exude a discreet, minimalist aura, but one that is put to maximum effect in the gallery.

Yang is a master of ink painting technique, having worked in this tradition for more than thirty years. Yet he is less concerned with links to the great Chinese traditions of painting and calligraphy than with articulating a liminal space of expression that does not fit comfortably in either Western or Eastern artistic practices. He always surprises with his ability to translate materiality into an extreme moment of self-consciousness, one that cannot be articulated in terms of meaning, or iconography, but can, nonetheless offer an immensely pleasurable aesthetic experience. His is a sense of physical abandonment, a vertiginous falling into the paintings that ultimately ends in a stillness at the center of being.

As the artist has said, “I have to walk on the works to paint, like entering into a room. It is even more like this as they are made from so many layers…I enter into a black space when I close my eyes, then when I start painting, the space will become grey, and if one is at a high level, one can sometimes see a purple light. Black and grey are the most original colors. It is the colours, which are symbolic: in Daoism grey comprises everything: combining black and white it has all possibilities"

In the present work, we confront the void of immateriality through the artist’s unique articulation of the Dao: a path through the shadows, marks, and surfaces that impact upon daily life.

(Sotheby's is grateful to Pamela Kember for her contribution of this essay.)