Yang Jiechang

signed in Chinese; signed in pinyin, titled in English and dated 2000 on the reverse, mounted on wood panels

Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris pour Escale, December 2000 - February 2001

Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, China Onward, Denmark, 2007, pp. 354-355, illustrated in color
Pompidou Center, Alors, la Chine?, Paris, 2003, p. 405, illustrated in color

The paintings are mounted on wood panels and are generally in very good condition. The installation uses two pieces of fake grass/astro-turf, and various tree roots, branches, and trunks. In very good overall condition.
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Transformation and the Mirage of Impossible Beauty: Works by Yang Jiechang

Among the group of Chinese artists to have joined the international art arena in the past two decades, Yang Jiechang is a paradox: he is one of the most radical thinkers of them all, yet his training was the most traditional. From his early formal artistic education in Chinese brush painting and calligraphy he learned rigorous discipline and acquired great technical skills. As he subsequently widened the scope of his practice to include performance, installation, and video, Yang also adapted Chinese brush painting to express concepts previously alien to the field. The two paintings shown here, 100 Layers of Ink (Lot 78) and Eye of the Storm (Lot 77), demonstrate the extent of Yang's innovative work with Chinese media. The former belongs to the artist's very important 100 Layers of Ink series, in which he took a fundamental artistic medium—Chinese ink—as the basis for an investigation of simple abstract forms and profound concepts. The latter work is a major installation based on current events—the great storms that whipped through Europe in 1999—and incorporating an outsized meticulously executed fine line painting in ink and color.

While in his early teens, Yang Jiechang was apprenticed to a prominent local calligrapher, Lin Junxuan (1908-1997), who at first required him to perform only mundane tasks such as preparing tea and grinding ink. Two years later Yang finally was permitted to choose a calligraphy model and begin his studies. Remarkably, this extremely retrograde educational process took place against the backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, when all art was expected to serve the ongoing revolution, and when those who persisted in "feudal" practices—such as the art and training method practiced by Yang and his teacher—were likely to be persecuted. When China's art academies reopened at the close of the Cultural Revolution, Yang was admitted to the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied Western drawing and painting techniques as part of the Chinese painting curriculum. Following graduation, from 1984 to 1986 Yang set aside his personal art practice to study Daoism under Master Huangtao at Mount Luofu, and Chan Buddhism at Guangxiao Temple, both in Guangzhou. He emigrated to Europe in 1989 when he was invited to participate in the highly influential exhibition, Les Magiciens de la Terre, at the Centre Pompidou. He now lives between Paris and a small village near Heidelberg.

The extensive exposure to Daoist thought inspired Yang to cultivate simplicity in his art: the 100 Layers of Ink paintings are the pinnacle of his pursuit of this goal. Works in this series are built up from layers of ink—itself a most basic material both in terms of its role in Chinese art and in its derivation from pine soot—often mixed with other materials and applied atop a layer of gauze to create an abstract form with an uneven surface. In applying layer upon layer of ink, the artist erases all traces of his exhaustive training and of the centuries of art history in which the expressive quality of the brushstroke was of prime importance. The unrelieved dense blackness of the ink alternately absorbs and reflects light, which can be interpreted as expressing the opposing duality at the core of Daoism. Presenting abstract forms in black fields as they do, however, these paintings have elicited a wide variety of interpretations that reflect their audiences' varying concerns, ranging from the mainland Chinese criticism that they "darken socialism" to a French statement that the "Oriental Black" represents Nothingness and Nihilism and a Japanese view of them as expressing a romantic sensibility.

In December 1999, a series of storms devastated broad swathes of Europe: winds reaching 173 km/h (107 m.p.h.) wrought havoc, and tore huge numbers of trees up by the roots. Yang decided to commemorate the storms with a set of very large fine traditional ink (gongbi) paintings exhibited as an installation with large tree branches and artificial grass: Eye of the Storm. Gongbi painting is an ancient technique employing fine brush lines and areas of vivid mineral pigments, generally reserved for small works due to its labor-intensive nature. Yang had recently exhibited a series of large gongbi paintings at the Venice Biennale, and he determined to work on an even larger scale for Eye of the Storm. Emphasizing the possibility of great beauty and fresh understanding to be gained in the aftermath of dislocation and destruction, Yang has stated: "The Eye of the Storm is a place of ghostly stillness. Objects, disparate elements spin around the immobile centre; mixed and remixed they drop into a momentary stage . . . dissociated from its origins as well as foreign to its current context, the Eye of the Storm is the mirage of impossible beauty."

-Britta Erickson