Yang Jiechang

signed in pinyin



Executed between 1998 and 2004.

Generally in very good condition. Each piece with some scattered patches of cracking to the black paint. The first panel with a small indentation to the bottom edge, approx 1cm. Some minor abrasion to the bottom left corner and top right edge. The second panel with stretcher marks along the right edge measuring approx 10cm each along the inside edge of the stretcher. The third with minor abrasion in the top left and right corners. The fourth with some minor abrasion in the top left corner and very slight stretcher marks along the top edge. The fifth panel with an abrasion in the top left (approx 23cm) and bottom left (approx 7cm.) corners.
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Yang Jiechang trained in traditional calligraphy and ink painting from his early teenage years; he subsequently studied at the Folk Art Institute in his hometown of Foshan (from 1974-78) where he continued these pursuits; and from 1978-82 he studied at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, remaining there as a teacher of the meticulous fine line (gongbi) style of ink painting until 1988 when he emigrated to Europe.  The following year his monumental, black-on-black ink paintings were installed in Jean-Hubert Martin's groundbreaking Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and his international career began.  Today the artist splits his time between residences in Paris and Heidelberg, Germany, an engaged citizen of the European Union who remains steeped in traditional Chinese artistic culture.  While Yang is best known for his innovative, wholly contemporary contributions to the ink painting tradition, his diverse body of work—which also includes sculpture, video and installation—has established him among the leading artists of his generation. 

 

Yang's profound engagement with history—and the intersection of personal paths, national identity, and artistic culture—is powerfully in evidence in the two works offered here, both grand gestures that also reveal the formal diversity of the artist's painterly practice.  Another Turn of the Screw (Lot 1155) consists of five large panels, each three meters high by almost two meters wide; the horizontal expanse of the work as a whole extends almost nine meters.  On each of the panels Yang has recorded the names of various people who played some role in his life, whether in a memorable chance encounter or a more extensive professional engagement.  The names are recorded in a thick, black script by a brush loaded with ink, which drips down the paper as the names run horizontally across it.  Yang's powerful, almost awkward calligraphy is a well-considered stylistic trait that runs through his work; having mastered traditional calligraphy at a young age, the artist began to write upside down in order to achieve a more personally expressive and forceful calligraphic style.  Both in form and content, the work is a highly personal diary of the artist's travels and interactions; there are sections in which Chinese characters dominate, others in which various European names suggest a specific location, and still others in which personnel from the international art world seem to have been congregating in a location that today might be anywhere. 

 

For those inside the art world, Another Turn of the Screw is an interesting game of hide-and-seek recognition.  For example, the first panel begins at top left with Jerome Sans, now co-director of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.  Karen Smith, the Beijing-based Chinese contemporary art historian appears a few lines below, as does Alice King, whose foundation in Hong Kong assisted with the artist's presentation at the Shanghai Biennale in the fall of 1998; Toshio Shimizu was one of that exhibition's curators.  The now Hong Kong-based art historian Jane Debevoise was Deputy Director of the Guggenheim Museum at the time of its China: 5000 Years exhibition in New York in the spring of 1998.  Richard Vine, Managing Editor of Art in America, has long been an engaged and eloquent voice surveying Asian contemporary art.  Alice Pauli is the Swiss gallerist with whom Yang Jiechang works.  Charles Merewether is an international curator, now with many important biennial exhibitions to his credit, who recently took up a post in the United Arab Emirates.  And so the story of Yang Jiechang's life unfolds through its interactions and encounters from panel to panel:  Canadian artist Jeff Wall and Russian artist Ilya Kabakov make an appearance in the second panel, as does the German hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was already 98 when the painting was begun.  Curator and now museum director Jean-Hubert Martin is recorded in the third panel along with several members of Yang's wife's family, surname Köppel; Shanghai-based gallerist Lorenz Helbling, an early enthusiast of Chinese contemporary art, appears in the fourth panel, as does the late Jonathan Napack, a much admired journalist who passed away tragically young in January of 2007.  In the fifth, where the artist has signed and underscored his own name at right, one finds Barbara London, long-time curator of video and new media art at the Museum of Modern Art, beside Melissa Chiu, then curator at New York's Asia Society, now Director of the same institution's museum.  In the upper right of the fourth and particularly fifth panels, the names begin to thin, revealing a ghost-like under-layer of further written records, suggesting this vast litany is but a small segment of the palimpsest of experiences and interactions of which the memories, pivotal moments, and personal commitments of a life are composed.  As a model for remembrance and appreciation, Another Turn of the Screw is a poignant embodiment of our common humanity and passage through life together. 

 

Ich hab'noch einen Koffer in Berlin (I still have a suitcase in Berlin) (Lot 1156), by contrast, presents a panoramic scene of modern Berlin in which Yang Jiechang fancifully surveys the eastward view from the Lustgarten (Pleasure Garden) in the central part of the city on Museumsinsel (Museums Island).  Pointing our way into this grand expanse from the left is the Lion-Slayer (1858) by German sculptor Albert Wolff (1814-92).  We are thus positioned on the north side of the Lustgarten on the steps of the Altes Museum, Berlin's first museum building, built by the great German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) from 1824-29.  We do not see this Neo-Classical masterpiece in Yang's painting, nor its steps upon which we presumably stand, but it is Wolff's dramatic sculpture that flanks the right side of the Altes Museum's entrance—and the left side of Yang's composition.  Just to the right in the background, rising like the lion-slayer's spear is the Berliner Fernsehturm at Alexanderplatz, the red and white-striped television tower whose spindle is poised upon a silver ball; intended to be East Germany's "sozialistische Höhendominante" ("Socialist vertical dominant"), this powerful symbol at the center of then-East Berlin began transmitting in 1969.  Next to the right, we see the imposing façade of the Berliner Dom, which sits on the east side of the Lustgarten and dominates the left side of Yang's painting.  Built from 1894-1905 by Julius Carl Raschdorff (1823-1914), this architectural icon was heavily damaged during World War II; its restoration, however, was completed in 1993 following Germany's reunification.  To the right of the Dom and expanding from the center of Yang's painting towards the right is the Modernist Palast der Republic, completed in 1976, which once stood thus on the south side of the Lustgarten and across Unter den Linden, historically Berlin's most beautiful, grand promenade.  A small statue stands on the corner of the Palast nearest the viewer; through the beautiful clouds dominating the uppermost part of the panoramic expanse, a strange spiraling swirl connects this tiny statue with the figure at the upper right of the composition, identifying them as one and the same.  The tiny statue is this casually-dressed, masked figure, a surrogate for the artist, who, as is declared here, still has a suitcase in Berlin. 

 

Yang Jiechang's Ich hab'noch einen Koffer in Berlin would be a masterpiece of contemporary ink painting simply for the massive, exquisitely-wrought floral still life that expands across the center of the composition, unifying the rather disparate sculptural and architectural elements in the background.  Encircled by a darker, cream colored area, similar to the coloration of the spiraling wind upon which the upper right figure stands, this beautiful spread of exotic forms grows from the realm of nostalgic imagination.  For more than anything, the painting considers the transformations of history and the passage of time.  Like the song made famous by Marlene Dietrich in the early 1950's and from which the painting takes its title, so Yang Jiechang reflects upon "the joys of days gone by"—or in this case, the pending demolition of the Palast that was the center of East Berlin life during the GDR and a principal symbol of East German social and political culture.  Following Germany's reunification, the building was shut down in 1990 because of asbestos hazards.  Throughout the 1990's and up to the time of Yang's painting, the fate of the building on this historic square became a political hot potato, with former East Germans decrying the erasure of their Socialist heritage and way of life and some West Germans suggesting that the Prussian Kaiser's Palace, which stood on the site before World War II (badly damaged then, this edifice was demolished in 1950), should be rebuilt with historic exactitude, never mind the exorbitant cost or uselessness of such a building in the contemporary world.  The artist's surrogate seems to enter the fray as an advocate for the GDR's architectural legacy, positioned as a sentry on the corner of the building.  It is a complicated image, full of the historical complexities of its famous site.  Two years after Yang completed his painting, demolition of the Palast der Republik began in the spring of 2006, thirty years after its inauguration.  As such, the painting remains a testament to the Berlin that once was, if briefly, and to this erudite and peripatetic artist's impassioned engagement with the contemporary world around him.