Ye Yongqing

signed in Chinese and dated 1984, framed

China Guardian, Beijing, 22 November 2006, lot 220
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Singapore, SooBin Art Gallery, China in the eye of scholar artist, 1996, p. 13

The 6th National Fine Art Exhibition The People's Republic of China: Selected Works Failing to Be Chosen, Shaanxi People's Art Publishing House, Xi'an, China, 1987, pl. 57
Approach to Guishan, SooBin Art Int'l Singapore, Red & Grey Art Contemporary Chengdu, Singapore, 2006, p. 16

This work is generally in good condition. There are hairline craquelures on the top and bottom areas of the work, with the most visible being in the sky. There are some gentle wear in handling marks around the edges. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be some areas of intervention work, mostly concentrated along the left and bottom edge, as well as across the tree. All such intervention has stabilised the piece. Except for the work performed on the tree, all such intervention work is not visible under natural light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

A Poetic Introspection
Ye Yongqing

Ye Yongqing painted The Shepherding Sisters (Lot 1065) in 1984, in his early Guishan period. An extremely rare large-scale painting, it represented the artist in the National Art Exhibition of the same year and was his most important work before the founding of the Southwest Artists Group. Ye Yongqing and Zhang Xiaogang both graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Against the emerging trend of Nativism, they were two of the very rare artists who insisted on exploring modern art. In an article reviewing his art in the 1980s, Ye Yongqing writes, "Between 1980 and 1984, I traveled across half of China 'looking for clues,' searching for the 'plain truth' and an inner 'reality' and 'substantiality' in the Guishan (Xishuangbanna) ethnic minority area in Yunnan... In fact I was yearning for an image of my subjective emotional experience in the external world."¹ This description points to Ye Yongqing's first source of inspiration: Guishan, a Sani village over 100 km south of Kunnan. In this otherworldly paradise, Ye Yongqing and his friends escaped their ennui and solitude and found spiritual comfort in painting.

Painted in 1984, The Shepherding Sisters is one of the representative works of Ye Yongqing's Guishan period. After graduating from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 1982, he stayed there to teach. Compared to his hometown Kunming, Chongqing's post-industrial urban landscape and the bureaucratic atmosphere of its art circles were inhospitable for him. He longed for the "Bohemian," worry-free life of an artist. In an autobiographical account, Ye Yongqing mentions the reason that he and his friends like Zhang Xiaogang and Mao Xunhui would frequently go sketching in Guishan: "From that time (1983) onwards, I lived in faraway Guishan in Yunnan for a while almost every year. This was a Sani sheepherders' village where my friends and I went together many years ago. At first we saw its tranquil and simple rural environment only as a practical object of our rehearsals of Barbizon-school- and Poussin-like pastoralism. After repeated visits, I came to recognise it as a paradise for recluses and a way to cleanse the dirt and dust of the mundane world...In contrast to the uncomfortable city of Chongqing, Guishan, my native place, with its red earth and hills, the lush forests of Xishuangbanna, nourished and sustained my creativity. Such themes and variations of them frequently appeared in the works I created. Every time I recounted and relived my experience, I reflected and reexamined myself. Every escape was the beginning of a new state of being."²

Antithetical to urban life, this poetic feeling is perfectly expressed in The Shepherding Sisters, which depicts a scene of everyday life in Guishan. With a restrained and highly refined painting style, Ye Yongqing captures the red-earth topography unique to Yunnan. The brownish-red hills in the background, the houses in the middle ground, and the clothing of the Sani women in the foreground harmonise with each other chromatically and enrich the sense of layers in the scene. In the centre, a lone bald tree breaks the overlapping horizontals and enlivens the composition. Figures in Ye Yongqing's Guishan-period sketches are often without clear facial expressions. The nine figures here are compositionally intertwined, but each seems immersed in his or her own thoughts. But narrative is not Ye Yongqing's concern at this moment. For him, the simplicity of the Guishan way of life was only a means to express his personal emotions and find an inner truth, just as Gauguin searched for ultimate answers in life through the indigenous inhabitants of Tahiti. Indeed, during this period Ye Yongqing was very fond of Post-Impressionism: "All this was like the 19^th century. Here we felt a mystery, a primitive and uncomplicated spirit. For me personally, these 'sketches from life' in fact had another purpose, which was to re-experience the style and method of the Post-Impressionist masters whom I admired in this natural and real environment... During that period, I was more under the influence of Cézanne, Gauguin, Chagall, and others. One may say that at the time I was conducting experiments in a very lonely manner, ill-fitted to the artistic mainstream."³

To make his brushwork more freely expressive, Ye Yongqing during the Guishan period often used thin layers of paint or diluted paint with turpentine. In his emphasis on the direct relationship between painterliness and personal expressionism, he was conceptually closer to modernism, which made him different from contemporary academic painters. Li Xianting writes, "When Scar Art was all the rage, Ye Yongqing was already showing himself to be a painter with superb formal sensitivity and control." ⁴ Similarly, the art historian Wu Hung comments, "An important characteristic of the Ye Yongqing's works of various periods is the clear stylistic differences between them. The artist does not only avoid the dominant melodies of the art world like the plague, but also consistently refuses to let himself become programmatic or stereotyped."⁵ In China in the late seventies and early eighties, the stylistic mainstream in painting was Scar Art, which the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute exemplified. Ye Yongqing's own classmates Gao Xiaohua, Cheng Conglin, and He Duoling were major representatives of Scar Art. Mostly influenced by Soviet Social Realism, they actively reflected on the social issues brought about by the Cultural Revolution and pictured the dilemmas faced by young intellectuals of the past generation. Their award-winning streak in the 1979 National Art Exhibition and the 1980 National Youth Art Exhibition cemented the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute's influence at the time. On the one hand, Scar Art did not deny the major social themes and dramas current in the art of the Cultural Revolution. On the other, its acceptance into the official exhibition system made it increasingly bureaucratic, causing artists increasingly to prioritise awards over artistic creation. This was the fundamental reason that Ye Yongqing felt out of place at the Sichuan Institute.

In 1984, the conservatism of the judges of the Sixth National Art Exhibition and the tightening of the government's cultural policies displeased many artists and critics. This time, representatives of the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute almost uniformly failed, and The Shepherding Sisters was also not selected. However, Zhongguo meishu bao [China Art Newspaper], a publication that introduced avant-garde art and served as a counterpoint to the official exhibition system, published Ye Yongqing's painting. The Sixth National Art Exhibition was a turning point that made artists realise profoundly the ossification of the official exhibition system. After 1985, Ye Yongqing and classmates like Mao Xunhui and Zhang Xiaogang co-organised a "New Figuration" Exhibition and established the Southwest Art Research Group, which injected themselves into the '85 New Wave avant-garde movement. It was precisely because of the practices and struggles of artists like Ye Yongqing that Scar Art could emerge from the influence of Soviet Social Realism and evolve into Southwest Art, a distinct current that emphasised spiritual symbolism and expression of life experiences; and that the "Sichuan Fine Arts Institute phenomenon" of the eighties could broaden into the "Southwest phenomenon." And these seeds of avant-gardism had already taken root in these artists during their solitary quests for meaning in Guishan.

1 Ye Yongqing, "On my basic thoughts during the various periods of my creative practice," in Wu Hung, The Flow of Fractures, Zhongguo huanqiu wenhua chuban she, July 2011, p. 48
2 Ye Yongqing, "A Journal of the Heart," in A Fortunate Survivor of History: Documents of Ye Yongqing's Art, China Youth Press, November 2012.
3 "'I don't want to walk old paths, I don't want to return to old places'—An interview between Wu Hung and Ye Yongqing," in Wu Hung, Ye Yongqing: The Flow of Fractures, p. 21
4 Li Xianting, "'The Sichuan Fine Arts Institute Phenomenon' in the Intellectual Currents of the Past Decade," What is Important is Not Art, August 2000, p. 276
5 Wu Hung, "The Flow of Fractures: Ye Yongqing and Ye Yongqing's Paintings," in [Refer to 4] "Ye Yongqing: The Flow of Fractures," p. 8