Yang Shaobin

Xindong Cheng ed., Yang Shaobin, Beijing, 2004, p. 60, illustrated in color

Originally affiliated with the Cynical Realist movement in early to mid-90s China, Yang Shaobin is known for his rough-and-tumble portraits of Chinese society. The artist often paints figures in some sort of emotional or physical distress.  His “Red” series in particular, which pictures enlarged figures with rounded heads and bloated features, suggests a private torment exposed to public scrutiny. Lot 31 is a quintessential example of this body of Yang’s mature work.

Yang regularly looks at psychological struggle with a jaundiced eye, one that absolves no one of responsibility-- artist, subject, and viewer participate and may even be considered implicit within this beautifully painted world riddled with suffering. The expressionist intensity of Yang’s art compels a broader reading, one beyond the specific scene portrayed.  The predominance of red, for example, a propitious color for the Chinese, here suggests a built-in pessimism, surely in part a reading of the historical events Chinese people have experienced in the last hundred years.

Already in Yang’s early work, such as Fun (1992, Lot 28), we see many of the characteristics he would later augment, such as the enlarged heads, the pained facial expressions, and the physical exertion exhibited by the central protagonists, a father and son who look out upon us as they are examined by their peers. The painting’s title, too, suggests the lacerating irony of Yang’s later formal strategies.

The two portraits offered by Yang (Lots 29 and 30) depict grimacing Chinese men, painted in a style reminiscent of Francis Bacon. Seen slightly from above, one figure’s head is balding, his features outlined in a bloody red, particularly on the left side of his face. In the other, the man’s eyes squint excessively as he grins in almost monstrous fashion. Yang makes no attempt to lessen the deforming brutality of these images, which comment mordantly on the human condition.  Indeed he pushes this grotesquery to extreme – and we tend to respond with the transfixed fascination of spectators viewing a fatal accident.  

In Are you embracing him? (2004, Lot 32) we see a balding, middle-aged Westerner wearing a suit and tie and roaming amidst bare trees in the blue-gray twilight.  From his expression of perturbed confusion he seems lost in the wilderness, his anxiety revealing a sense of impending doom.  One wonders if the resemblance to Jacques Chirac was intentional or, indeed, if a photograph of this leader in distress might have provided a source image for the painter’s imagination.

Yang’s technical facility, idiosyncratic style and profoundly pessimistic message concerning human nature rank him among contemporary China’s most important – and most interesting – artists. 

-Jonathan Goodman