Time: 2007.06.30-08.10
Website：Http:// www.funartspace.com

The Path of the “Bird”
Ye Yongqing’s Artistic Journey

Lü Peng
Translated by Jeff Crosby


A lonely tree stands in the winter
Who knows when
Those birds began to disappear
One by one.
I can’t say what love
Has come and gone;

I only know that once in summer
My heart did sing
Now, she has already
Gone silent

When the “New Image Painting Exhibition” was held at the Yunnan Provincial Library (October 1986), Ye Yongqing wrote this poem next to his painting. Maybe he was trying to let the audience know that those paintings on display were also poems telling of the artists’ journeys of the heart, though they were expressed through images. The poem is of a dejected mood. Such words as ‘lonely’, ‘winter’, ‘disappear’ and ‘come and gone’ rarely elicit excited or positive responses. They’re tied to the personal environment and the things that restrain people. But in the early days, Ye Yongqing hadn’t gone deeply into the minds of the ancients, and he was expressing a preconceived joy that he had found in western books.
Ye Yongqing (b. 1958), came up in Kunming, where the seasons are always mild. Unlike Mao Xuhui, Ye Yongqing didn’t have an angry cynical appearance or demeanor. In his 1993 The Heart’s Travels, Ye Yongqing wrote a detailed account of his youth, describing his natural sensitivity to painting: “Aside from a few scribbles in the mud with a lump of clay, there will never be anything that possesses me to paint like a stand of trees under an overcast sky or a sunset burning across the shores of Lake Dian.” In his writings he also explained that such foundational books as A Letter to Beginners, How to Sketch, and The Early Rising Sun served as his maxims. “In those old, poorly printed and almost illegible pages, I picked up a murky idea of the wanderer school and the Renaissance.” Like the majority of those born in the 50’s, his most lucid memories occurred during the Cultural Revolution. Hence we will see that the content of Ye Yongqing’s visual memory would become the source for his imagery, and that his training in painting also began in just such an environment.
Back then most of the images I saw were the likes of those propaganda posters and magazines such as Workers Peasants and Soldiers Pictorial. At the time, the big criticizing headlines of the model operas and propaganda posters were all tools, red and glorious political myths. All forms and methods of art were molded to the common culture of the masses, and painters of my generation are all critics and subversives raised in this mass culture. At Kunming No.1 Middle School and in the local exhibitions I started to paint the big character slogans, holiday columns and propaganda posters, basically things like men and women with heads held high, Tiananmen Gate, Sunflowers and red lanterns. Though there’s not much in common with the current way of art or my personal experience, in some ways it would still pull me in on a certain level, to the point that I would feel the joy of a game if I could copy an eight meter propaganda poster all by myself. It was in front of these blackboard notices and big posters that I really started to walk down the path of a painter.
Ye Yongqing didn’t go through the “educated youth” experience. He was slated for employment after middle school. In the roughly two years that followed, he worked as a construction worker, animal keeper, cook, substitute teacher, farm watchman, etc. In the city, he may have had more opportunities than the educated youths in the countryside to read and hear Russian (Swan Lake, Nutcracker, Mazurkas) and Chinese (Liang Zhu) traditional music. In a historical period marked by monotonous tastes, such music full of melodic changes and complex emotional states had a profound effect on people: “I can never forget those times and that music; they became a piece of my youth.”
Ye Yongqing has a detailed sensitivity to his experiences from this period. In his memoir we read a lot of trivial nouns and phrases: tomato, hot pepper, chopped celery, tofu, sweet potato liquor, cricket, pine forest, water celery, hazel tree, photinia tree, “the annoying old duck”, “warm excrement on an ancient bird’s nest”, “In the blue summer night, I stepped on the low grass, following the path, the grains stabbed at my feet”… In reality, these different details had a definitive influence on Ye Yongqing. They would become the spiritual content and formic details of the artist’s works.
Ye Yongqing tested into the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in 1978. He traveled to Mt Guishan for the first time with Mao Xuhui and a few other young artists in 1979. This is a village that Yunnan artists often visited to paint scenery. This time, Ye Yongqing journeyed there with the memories of the barbizon school and Isaak Levitan. This was right when the influence of ‘scar’ painting was becoming widespread. In the very least, the painters of the wanderer school such as Repin and Surikov were having a dominant influence over the Sichuan Academy: strong forms, literary imagery and grayish tones became the elements that young artists were interested in, as they were after painting elements that totally differed from the ‘red and glorious’ aesthetic of the Cultural Revolution. In College, Ye Yongqing became familiar with the barbizon school painters and their artistic style. He loved them, but he couldn’t understand the impressionists and Van Gogh or Gauguin, and he had an “unforgettable impression” of poor prints of traditional paintings. Nevertheless, he quickly accepted the influences of modern painting. He was jealous of Zhou Chunya’s innocent colors, and he often went with Zhang Xiaogang to the school library to imitate the masterworks of World Art Encyclopedia in paste paints. Beginning in the summer of 1980, Ye Yongqing joined Zhang Xiaogang, Mao Xuhui and others to follow the Yangtze River from Wuhan to Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai, eventually traveling to Beijing. They encountered many famous artists of the time: Chen Yifei, Yan Wenliang, Yuan Yunsheng, Chen Danqing, Sun Jingbo, Ma Desheng and Jiang Tiefeng among others. It was just as Ye Yongqing said, “This was an era of searching and an era of reading”. This was truly a time when western thought and civilization was ‘invading’ – which is how many conservatives and ideological standard-bearers see western influence – Chinese youth. Chinese artists were poring over texts including philosophy, literature, aesthetics, art history and personal memoirs: People, Years, Life, Romain Rolland, The Birth of Tragedy, Dear Theo, History of Modern Art, Book of Changes, etc… The people in these books appeared in a chain: Sartre, Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson, Chuang Tzu, Modigliani, Soutine, Picasso, Duchamp, Flamenco, Utrillo, Van Gogh, Munch, Gauguin, Malevich, Klee… It is evident that these intellectual backgrounds created a completely different conceptual realm than the cultural and political reality people knew from before. So when he headed to Xishuangbanna during his third year of studies, Gauguin’s composition style had already occupied the mainstream in Ye Yongqing’s mind. By this time, he already had hopes that his paintings should differ from the ‘living style’ constructed upon Millet, Courbet and Wise. Now, unassuming landscapes were what was complicated, and the unassuming attitude and straightforward style were what influenced the artist. It was no longer the nature that attracted the artist, but the nature in modernism that called on the artist to seek a subjective nature that was closer to his own internal nature. We can all understand; this transformation was a move in keeping with personal integrity, and not just rooted in a sensitivity of the eyes. For a long time during his graduate work and while staying on as faculty, Ye Yongqing loved traveling to Xishuangbanna, where he would project new meanings onto his reshaped mind:
The tantalizing thing about a tree is not in that it provides sanctuary or shade, or in that this whole tree is your property, but in that it slowly builds up warm sentiments in your heart, and deep within your mind it builds up into these deep green mountains and leads you to endless contemplation.
The turbulent flow of information brought chaos and overload, but a decade later, Ye Yongqing persisted in saying, “I’m still nostalgic about that period so often criticized as one of ‘imitation’ and ‘copycatting’; it was just that disorientation and confusion in front of the philosophical and cultural feast that led me to hark the warnings of history, and to understand and readjust my own narrow-mindedness and bias.” This was a new viewpoint, one that totally cast off the history of artistic utilitarianism and reflectionism. He showed that new ideas and interests were beginning to emerge.
Having graduated and stayed on in academic life in 1982, Ye Yongqing slowly came to realize that the “Sichuan Oil Painting” from two years before had begun to lose its influence, and was starting to turn into oily flirtatious painting. He didn’t like strict “realistic” painting to begin with. After being influenced by modernism, he would prefer to use the methods of late impressionism and expressionism to express the natural and familiar environment. In the piece that was accompanied by that poem, we can see Rousseau-style emotions. The sentiment shown in the sketches of nude women bathing in the river is a western one, a concept that the artist clearly knew was an infatuation with the bohemian lifestyle. In the 1983 Poet Walking, a young poet is walking into a forest. The book wrapped in leaves is definitely a poetry collection. The methods of distortion and flat scribbling are quite far from the ‘flirtatious painting’ that thrived at the time. The clumsy demeanor of the branches and trunks are reminiscent of Rousseau. Good Morning (1984) is a play on Good Morning Mr. Gauguin. The artist paints himself into the Xishuangbanna jungle. The lightly smeared paints are quite different from Gauguin’s style, and the self hiding behind the jungle appears shy, which is a far cry from Gauguin’s bold bearing. But Ye Yongqing’s true intent was not to decidedly imitate Gauguin, or even to create a deviant work. Here, the important thing was that the artist wanted to express an attitude of ‘homage to Gauguin”. In the 1985 The Horse Outside is Peeping at Her and We Who are Being Peeped at by Her, this young Chinese artist placed Picasso’s ‘horse’ into his own composition, and the girl is definitely painted in a style reminiscent of Picasso’s early years as she calmly “peeps” at us. These kinds of works are full of emotion and mental cleanliness. They are the products of the influence of early Western modernist painting and a unique personal understanding towards nature.
Having moved to Huangjiaoping after joining the university faculty in 1982, the new environment gave the artist a strong impression:
The art institute where I lived and worked was surrounded on all sides by old industrial scenery that gave me a deep inhibition. Through the boiling smoke of the giant smokestacks at the power plan and, under the dark sky, the gray streets seeped like a muddy river and the smokestacks belched with the sound of thunder, sending shivers through the night sky – as a child who grew up under the blue skies and the shade of the trees, this is exactly the world I wished to hide from!

The artist began to hide from the poisonous urban environment, hoping only for repeated trips to far off Mt Guishan in Yunnan, and enjoyment of the shepherd’s song sentiment of “barbizon”. He still believed that in the quiet and simple fields he could become one with the world, and wash away the pollution and dust. “As an alternative to the vile city life, my hometown of Guishan, the red soil hills and the dense forests of Xishuangbanna were always the wellspring of my inspiration.” Youth and imagination continued to enrich his inner poeticism, but the environment he had to directly interact with repeatedly reminded him of the falsehood of his dreams. When he painted in the gray Beijing of 1985, all he could paint were works with factories and industrial pipes. In the 1985 Lookout, he was no longer in the fields but in an industrial setting. It was an intolerable state in the face of a vile environment. The artist started to wonder whether the subjective reality was really worth caring for. “I feel that reality is the last thing that requires attention. People will never be satisfied living in reality, because reality is a contingency, the refuse of life. As for this pitiful reality, we have no choice but to deny it.”
Just as we have seen, in this batch of works the primal and expressive poeticism has been pushed into a back corner of the composition. Tree branches (Lookout) and love (Pale Moment, 1985) could only have a small refuge. Industrial smoke became the new scenery. In the winter which was neither long nor short, Ye Yongqing visited one after another stimulating and influential exhibition:
Rauschenberg’s large exhibition gave me a shock like never before. Though it differed from the ancient and modern exhibitions I had seen, Han Mo Private Collection Exhibition, 250 Years of French Art Collections, German Expressionist Exhibition, Zhao Wuji, Ge Ya and the Ke Er Wei Er Solo Exhibition, with that attentive and worshipful approach to personal details, this was really the first time I felt deeply the power of contemporary art to cut into the life around it.
Either way, Ye Yongqing had markedly different artistic views from the “Northern Artists Group” that was making proclamations and the Jiangsu Surrealist Painters who were trying to save the world’s soul. He agreed with the conceptual transformation, but instinctively rejected the philosophical distinctions; he agreed with imagination, but did not want to paint the world as a dramatic stage. He believed that painting was imbued with its own power to release itself from the false and mundane. Reality cannot be dodged, but it must be the reality that you chose to recognize. Ye Yongqing always persisted in “situational composition”; he would rather paint industrial pipelines poetically than accept that all was but a cold reality like the paintings of the “New Space” people in Zhejiang. His works of the time (including Two People Leaving and Staying on the Last Pasture, The Last Garden, Hermit and Bird Hear Picasso’s Horse Whinny and Hibernator Awakening in Spring) “were basically a chimera of people, plants and animals with factories”.
No one came to the defense of the artist. Ye Yongqing saw a universal phenomenon occurring in ‘85: artists became the defenders of themselves. But once the Pandora’s Box of thought was opened, standards and benchmarks immediately became a problem. Mao Xuhui, Ye Yongqing’s friend, attended the “85 Youth Art Concepts Slide Exhibition” in Zhuhai in the summer of 1986. This was a modernist gathering that was conjured up and declared historically significant by a group of young critics and artists. When Mao Xuhui brought the “revolutionary forms” of modernism back to Kunming, his circle of friends pushed the power behind southwestern art to a new level. But who will speak for us? As artists from a frontier city, what concepts and issues must be given a voice? When other modern artists speak poignantly about their artistic views and concepts, how should we respond? So many issues brought about the birth of the “Southwestern Art Group”:The “Southwest Art Group” that I founded and organized with my friends in 1986 brought me more directly into the wave of “New Wave Art”. We spent night after night discussing all kinds of manifestos and concepts, planning exhibitions in Kunming, Shanghai and Beijing, writing articles for all kinds of magazines and explaining to other similarly enthusiastic people the meaning of “new image” – that was certainly a charged time. The people who had been culturally baptized in the early eighties, such as ourselves, can never forget that lively scene. Though there were all kinds of exaggerations, inflated egos and falsehoods, it was in the end an era with cultural aspirations.

At the first “Southwest Art Group Slide Material Exhibition”, Ye Yongqing presented Outline on the Natural Awareness in Paintings of the Southwest Art Group. The title revealed the viewpoint of this artist from deep in the southwest, even though he had already obviously been affected by the social problems of the cities.
Nature is an object of societal existence. Changes in people’s awareness of nature are rooted in the temporal changes of social life. The point in time on which we are now situated is a vast and unprecedented moment in cultural history. This is a time where local cultures are most widely and intensively mixing with outside cultures. The call of modernization is making artists soberly aware of the backwardness of their ethnic way of life. They once meticulously depicted the uninhibited disorder of nature as shading to highlight the atmosphere of life and self sufficiency in their societal life (as with the recent “life flow” painting). At the same time, they understood the progress of history as an improvement in the fate of the people, emphasizing the power of a people in bringing history forward, and loading the exuberance of nature onto the people’s massive vitality, using this to express the complex rites of nature. This is why the development of societal awareness from closed to open is what’s pushing artists’ natural awareness from simple to complex.
Ye Yongqing introduced many southwestern artists in his thesis. Through such works as Mao Xuhui’s inhibitive and saddening Red Mass, Pan Dehai’s “chaotic” forms, and the “unbearably spasmodic” White Ghost, which Zhang Xiaogang painted in the hospital, he attempted to explain the significance which was psychologically necessary and intuitive. Even in 1986, he was still persisting in his modernist views in Synthesis: the Call and Birth of Today.
The reality that artistic imagination touches upon is equally important to the reality that more rational artistic creation touches upon. This is an important point of modernism, and a truth that modern art uses all means to explain. Ideals and intuition are two amazingly giant wings that have been bestowed upon man, and imagination can make the body’s intellect, emotion and volition move in sync and fly freely; and the presentiment and clarity of the whole object in intuition is what allows the body to fly to that living place our souls sigh for – free creativity.
In fact, the rise of new modernist art in the other cities was progressing in a wholly different way from that in the southwest. People were discussing the importance of concepts and the inherent logic of language, but no one went on to try and figure out the emotions and insight of the southwestern artists. Northern art critics were using ‘country painting’ to describe southwestern art for a very long time. It was also in 1985 that critic Li Xianting wrote his perplexing short essay It’s not the Art that’s Important. In this essay published in the 28th issue of China Fine Arts Magazine (1906), he negated the purely artistic nature of the 85 Movement, and pointed out its striking differences in social and cultural background from western modern art:The “85 Art Movement” was not an art movement. China has virtually none of the social and cultural background of modern art. The catalyst of modern art was the emergence of the subjective awareness in modern philosophy on the deep societal foundation of western humanism, which opened the path for modern art in two ways – on the one side, it strengthened the emotional essence, opening the internal level of modern people, and on the other side it strengthened the rational essence, which developed the language and symbols constructing a human-centered world; the scientific revolution, as with the development of psychology and semiotics, directly started off modern art from the corresponding relationship between the mind and symbols; the industrial revolution promoted the development of modern design, and a design consciousness is a core component of modern art language; revolutions in values gave an entire system of contrasts and comparisons to modern and traditional arts. All of this together virtually simultaneously created the conditions for the birth of modern art. But in China, be it the non-humanist feudalist tradition, or the current state of affairs with the interference of post 1949 extreme left ideology, the revival of Chinese art began in the political atmosphere of order arising out of chaos from the lowest rungs of philosophy and the economy.
Many critics and artists joined the discussion about modern art. The themes that appeared between 1986 and 1989 included the ‘big spirit’, ‘purified language’ and the ‘new school’. Defenders of various positions all considered themselves to be the true spokesman of the times. What they didn’t see was that all parties in the debate faced the threat of essentialism. Ye Yongqing recalls:

In the days that followed, the new wave’s myriad and overcomplicated cultural load made it hard to continue creating in the present state. Painting was buried in lingual and psychological definitions and explanations. In creating an oil painting during that time, Runaway, what perplexed me the most was that the form could no longer recover it pure original features.
The Runaway mentioned here was part of the 1988 Chengdu “88 Southwestern Modern Exhibition”. The “runaway” in the picture should be the artist himself. He looks like a rat trying to flee the evil industrial environment. Right up until the “Great Modern Art Exhibition” in February 1989, Ye Yongqing and his buddies like Mao Xuhui and Zhang Xiaogang never gave up their essentialist conceptual manner, and even into the first few years of the nineties they held out against the end of the eighties.
One cannot predict the concepts and understandings of people. It was only after the gun sounded on the first floor of the museum, only after the endlessly restated concepts and views were in a single night banned from further narration, were people able to think about what to do about tomorrow. Ye Yongqing saw the defeat of outspoken philosophy and saw the bubble of modernist ideals popped. Like most other modernists, this forced him to nervously examine the problems of the eighties. He admitted that “when I started to attack the cultural status quo of the late eighties and early nineties, not only did I fall into a trap of contradiction, I fell into a deep, almost wounded state of anger.”
In fact, the “anger” that was produced after June 1989 was deeply embedded in every intellectual who cared about the fate of the people and its country. They could never have illustrated the internal changes through words alone. The helplessness they felt came from the utter destruction of modernist ideals by a complex political reality. Speechlessness became universal. In Chongqing (from late 1989 to early 1990), though Ye Yongqing was still discussing ‘ideals’ and ‘concepts’ with critic Wang Lin and artist Wang Yi, the debates of this time were a refutation of the views they had held before. “In Beijing, I lived in that once heavily trafficked living room of Li Xianting’s, which was now silent to the point of desolation. Old Li and I would sit there bored day after day, smoking cigarettes and listening to the pleasant echoes of pigeons out the window. At night, we would drink and pass the time with Fang Lijun and Liu Wei.”
Though Ye Yongqing saw the freshness emerging from the works of Fang Lijun and Liu Wei, his agreement with this kind of taste is the most accurate expression of those depressing times. But in his heart he disagreed with the loss of “essence”. The conflict was in that he began to be influenced. He accepted that there were empty parts to the “ideals” and “concepts” of the eighties. He had always been a bit perplexed by those philosophical explanations. A new aesthetic attitude could surely help him in “ever hoping for that carefree and relaxed state”. At Fang Lijun’s place he read Wang Shuo’s I’m Your Father, and felt that this lofty total rejection of reality and ideals made a bit of sense. But no matter how hard he tried to convince himself to change his convictions and adapt to this changing reality, he still had to admit: culture has been defeated. The internal “indefinable panic” would sprout right back up. He admitted that he “never dropped the influence of the eighties, and always kept a target for culture. I grew dejected whenever we discussed ‘post 89 art’ and ‘post modern’, because I knew that there was no place in ‘post 89 art’ for real intellectuals to live.”
There’s nothing more powerful than reality, but Ye Yongqing was forced to continually ponder problems. In early 1991, artists were still emphasizing the importance for art to reveal social problems, stressing “destiny and resistance, circumstance and survival”, and “in hopelessness, a focus on people’s values”. But there was no shared ground between this new vocabulary and form of expression and the values of the emerging “Cenozoic”. Nor did it coincide at all with what would soon be called “cynical realism”. Fang Lijun has described this kind of thinking: having no trust in any thinking or reasoning. And for an artist who believes in “the value of man”, what should one do in the midst of new tastes and new standpoints?

As an artist, Ye Yongqing continued to spread paint on the canvas. He used oil paints, but he also “tried out acrylic and mixed media”. He even used a calligraphic brush and ink. In his early works, we have already seen one of the artist’s traits – he always uses thin colors. The effects are reminiscent of watercolors and traditional Chinese painting. Ye Yongqing doesn’t avoid this. He feels that this is a reflection of his innate character. Even with his early Mt Guishan landscapes reminiscent of Duchamp (1983), though he noticed Duchamp’s understanding of the structure and abstractions of nature, he still used very light strokes instead of following Duchamp’s lead with thick brush and palette strokes. Nor when he was learning Picasso did he imitate the Spaniard’s unbridled expression. A long time of experimentation led Ye Yongqing to follow down the path of brush and ink expression of the traditional scholars that he had felt so long before. He didn’t study brush and ink, but he got a feel for the tastes and character of those ancients in ink. But how to follow your own path against a backdrop where expressionism, surrealism, installation and performance art had become common sense? Ye Yongqing analyzed the traits of his generation in this age:Thus, our generation was culturally mandated to play an awkward double role – on the one hand, we rejected all those arbitrary and dogmatic “absolute truths” and the impossible “ultimate concern”; on the other hand we couldn’t bear the irresponsible, shortsighted and empty cultural state of affairs, and tried to extricate those human conceptual barriers. We found ourselves amidst a boundless plane with no bearings, no objectives and no paths.
Speaking in 1993 of the period after 89, Ye Yongqing labeled himself and a few friends of a similar bent as “Don Quixote without an enemy”. They discovered that the true history had not been swept away but merely “deconstructed”. What he said was that “everything had deconstructed on its own volition”. This is of course an equivocal statement; there was no “volition” involved, only force. But regardless, the “windmill” that had been raised in the mind by western thinking had really been deconstructed. That much is true. But they wasted no time in finding another “windmill”. As for Ye Yongqing, the “pop” that popped up in 1991 might yet serve as a meaningful route.
In September 1992 – this was a month before the opening of the “Guangzhou Biennial” – Ye Yongqing finally stated his approval of “political pop” in clear terms:
I think that the political pop phenomenon that’s recently appeared in China is a mark of Chinese Contemporary Art’s move towards a mature phase. The concepts of some of the artworks and artists involved have cut right into Chinese cultural issues. A deformed state has appeared in China’s popular culture, which has been determined by the reality of the nation. In the west, when popular culture reaches full purity, it becomes an intrinsic cultural form or art form, such as with the art of Andy Warhol. But in China this popular art and popular culture is always linked to the needs of officialdom, as in China, the largest popular culture is politics. So artists’ hankering for commercialization is on the one hand material desire, and on the other hand an affirmation of the implementation and benefits of the reform and opening economic policy (this is yet another result of politics).
This was not long after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, when ex-Soviet avant-garde art was making its triumphant return to western galleries and museums. The artist saw a model of the connection between politics and pop. Like the Soviet Union, China had a history of the socialist political experiment, so Ye Yongqing began to place historical and realistic symbols together. The ‘big character posters’ were once handwritten text, but now the artist was using them as a foundation for free scribbling. He even erected an “installation” of new big character posters calling history to mind for those with memories, and using this to express the relationship the current day had with history. Commerce and the market led to a complication of symbols and forms. When reality became something inescapable, something covering the world, always seen and always heard, it became imperative to welcome it straight on. The new “windmill” came together under the unchanged political background, but “politics” was not just the background of the “windmill”, it was a part of its structure. The result of this is that the sky, nature and movement lack objectives and boundaries. In his “posters”, the artist recorded everything that he saw, recalled and imagined. The language of history and the language of commerce were mixed together inside. He even placed some of his early romanticism and purity into this chaotic “big character poster” mix. People who are familiar with history and the context of China in the nineties can understand Ye Yongqing’s intent; he was determined to hold on to the viewpoints he had raised before, and he had his own distinctions and choices concerning pop art. He told a critic that he “accepts the inspirations and metaphors of the works of pop art’s new representative, Robert Longo” . He wasn’t interested in overly even strokes. He wanted to differentiate himself from those other pop artists in Wuhan and other cities. Ye Yongqing had an explanation for his delving into pop, but however you put it, the artist persisted in his previous viewpoint: caring about the situation and fate of people in reality. He agreed with Robert Longo’s view that there wasn’t much hope in the future of the world, but he still cared about existence. He used images from today’s business advertisements and posters, setting them in the format of the “big character posters”, saying that this is a historical spectacle of popular culture that is unique to China. The artist even took note of the incredibly swift corrupting influence that commerce and money had on the people – he expressed worries about the negative effects of commercialization and consumption on artists to Zhang Xiaogang in September 1992 – but he still wrote many articles about establishing the art market, and he also noted that it was the market and its concepts that brought about social change; he started to have hope for the new system. Big Poster was a public diary of a specific time; what was once a criticism of culture and ideas completed in pen, ink and paper became in the artist’s work a satire of history and reality. It was a mockery, not a criticism, because the focus of the criticism was no longer clear. Specifically speaking, the fact that the criticism of this period – if there really was one – was so lacking in a specific target (including a certain viewpoint) and direction made it difficult for people to determine the actual standpoint of the artwork. This question was answered by the “postmodernism” and deconstructionist techniques that were being debated by the concept and critique fields: the game has no chassis. But it would seem that Ye Yongqing still disagreed with this view. He accepted the rejection of an ideal fantasy reality by contemporary art, and accepted that it focused on reality, and he even came to recognize that the “new wave” or “avant-garde” artists were repeatedly showing that they searched for a new humanist spirit of the times, and that the search for a true “ourselves” was marked by obfuscation, but he preferred to accept that he was a body to be entangled in all of the problems of the historic and social environment. This self-judgment surely brought him troubles in trying to establish a new basic standpoint.
In early 1993, Ye Yongqing was planning with critic Wang Lin and artists Mao Xuhui, Zhou Chunya, Zhang Xiaogang and Wang Chuan for the “China Experience Exhibition”. This was a year after Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour, and the spiritual wounds of political conflict were gradually being covered by the market and the possibility of benefit. People could basically start living anew along a different path. Ye Yongqing told the critic that though “the mission for ‘intellectuals’ either now or in the future was all ideological”, he felt that “sweeping use of ‘intellectual’ and ‘independent tendencies of spirit’ was just too much”. Here he again points out the complexity of ideas: he accepts the role played by early “scar” art in revealing history, but he doesn’t agree much with the compromise strategy of the “Cenozoic”, saying that he wants to persist in a cohesive critical standpoint. Worth noting is that he spoke of “language” issues in critical strategy. He clearly discovered the freshness of “cynical realism” and “political pop”. So he makes use of Mao Xuhui’s words: “pronouncement should be clear and distinct”. This is the depiction of a transformation of language. Before, pondering of philosophical and human issues stopped at reading and imagination, but now the harsh reality admonishes the artist: you must correctly specify your understandings. Ye Yongqing had graphic and installation works at the “China Experience Exhibition”. In those complicated materials and images, the artist brought together information he had gleaned from books, newspapers, catalogues and other sources. He spoke of Beuys, but he also spoke of Jin Nong, in a mix of silk-screen technique and installation. What was interesting was that we saw the artist’s new “big poster”, which was just hung on the wall with no frame. This brings the audience to view it from the perspective of traditional painting. But those simply scrawled “posters” lacked lofty ambience, and had the marks of randomness. This was especially the case with the artist’s hypothetical installation, reminiscent of the “Ma Wang Dui” tombs and connected to death; this set off sparks at the conservative Art Association – how can you call this art! The transition from graphic to spatial is an obvious mark of a shift in the artist’s language. The artist gained an understanding of other artists’ works, and after gaining inspiration, decided to steer clear of any elements that he had no relation to, just like he said before preparing the exhibition:Before 1988 our art coincidentally had “formist” aesthetic leanings and had a nostalgic and narcissistic “lingering in the past humanist spirit”. This had some revolutionary effects on history, mostly as a strike against the then mainstream realist style. It was in the “post 89” period that these artists started to truly have “cultural historical significance”. Though Gao Minglu and others labeled southwestern art as a representative of life flow in contrast to rationalist painting, this kind of cultural critique in its natural state is inextricably linked to China’s social reality and previously existing traditional forms, keeping southwestern artists coincidentally stuck lingering in this past humanist spirit. I don’t want to simply talk about the good and bad of this state of affairs; I just want to point out that this cultural choice is natural and coincidental, not purposeful. In “post 89”, the object of our artistic and conceptual pondering began to cut into the specific living environment, concrete, personal historical and visual experience, and “socialization” rooted in the social reality. The goal was to subvert and deconstruct the collective consciousness of the social reality. I think that this choice reaches the level of “contemporary awareness”, and is therefore more challenging. We can clearly see the different conceptual methods in “subverting the collective consciousness of social reality” and “lingering in a past humanism”: the spirit and thinking of contemporary art can never again disengage or resume the goal of earlier art, the “humanist spirit”.

In truth, no matter how Ye Yongqing talks about his own artistic issues and his perplexity in the face of reality, he’s never had such a fast and complete linguistic transformation like such artists as Wang Guangyi, Wu Shanzhuan, Gu Wenda or Xu Bing. It’s just like he wrote in a September 13, 1992 letter to critic Lu Hong: he worried about the “philosophization of pop”. He could put the consumer concept of western pop together with the political concept of Chinese pop, and find them a “common ground”:
Our generation’s visual experience is made up of the images released by the Cultural Revolution big character posters and the billboards of today. It explains the paths of the blind expansion of political spirits in the past twenty years as well as the recent flood of commercialism and pragmatism. Both of these have the following characteristics: lacking in character, easy to understand, shallow, mass produced, ubiquitous, provocative, flirtatious, etc. Thus, I understand Big Poster as not an expression of personal feelings and events, but a comprehensive attitude of life, an exposure of the visual coding of an era. So it must be detached, must observe and analyze many specific phenomena from a higher perspective. I hope that in the end this piece can penetrate the significance of self mockery, as it is a self-examination of universal weaknesses in mankind.
The artist had no definite plans to use writing to clearly explain any certain reasoning – though he held this hope – he had no choice but to use every means at his disposal to keep painting and working. Among artists from the fifties, Ye Yongqing is one of those with a deep enthusiasm for the written word. This calls to mind the ancient scholars who waxed eloquently about their artistic tastes and methods. Of course the eloquence of the ancients has long since become history, if one must continue on the existence of the flesh and the analysis of the spirit, one must turn to reason. “Big Poster” was a process, an essay continually written by the artist in canvas, paper, silk, brushes, ink and other materials. The artist is clear on this: art must change.
In the winter of 1993, Ye Yongqing wrote the following from the ancient city of Dali:
As the fog rises, it lightly muffles the embrace of time and I hear the unending ripples of water sent by the far shore. Here I come to feel hesitant. I know what kind of emotions I should use to respond to this gentleness, but will this rare unspeakable passion once again cause my candle to be blown out by the night wind? Is it just like that, singing this song of searching leading me to stumble towards your gentle body? Is it just like that that I forget the Zen gifts and return to a homeland bathed in the first snow of winter?
It was in October of that year that the works of Chinese artists first took part in the Venice Biennial. This was a symbol that Chinese artists had already gained the support of the international society in a new historical opportunity. The market and the globalized space it brought with it gave the dying modern art a chance at transforming into the contemporary. Though Ye Yongqing’s works were part of the “Post 89 New Chinese Art” exhibition in Hong Kong, he didn’t get the opportunity to go on a “pilgrimage” to Venice, which must have stung just a little bit. Beforehand, his “Ma Wang Dui” piece, featured at the “China Experience Exhibition” had been criticized by an official of the art association. His morale dropped. His soliloquy written alone in Dali showed: the artist’s heart had returned to a past state, returned to that romantic mood he had in the face of nature: expressive, elegant and depressed. On another side, the exhibitions and international events of 1993 had tired the artist out. He was definitely fatigued. Those heavy themes and materials told him that though he was willing to give up on those overarching narratives, he wasn’t sure why he was still so entangled with the past and history. Beginning in 1993 he stopped the continued work of the big poster and started writing his own image diary. His life was already quite trivial, lacking any coherence whatsoever. In winter of that year, his students held two exhibitions, entitled “Fragments” and “Unfamiliar Circumstances”, and everyone shared the feeling that reality was just that fragmented, trivial and unfamiliar. The artist could basically do nothing but record his experience piece by piece. In a letter to Li Xianting, he wrote:
My life is often rendered fractured and aimless by my migratory flights from city to city. My paintings and writings also move around with each shot. My painting style, working habits and even my painting tools and materials are quite “amateur”, and in this profession as a “painter”, my choices are growing increasingly marginalized. In the past few years my interests have become increasingly fragmented. Sometimes I have this vision that I am gathering and piling up all these fragments of images upon silk, and when I raise my hand, it all flies up like so many chicken feathers, like none of it ever existed. Such things, Chinese or not, foreign or not, current or not, ancient or not, are the unbearable and helpless aspects of life.

None could express the artist’s state of affairs and artistic methods more clearly and accurately than himself.
For a long time, Ye Yongqing returned to the attitude of a traditional scholar, and he never tired of scribbling. While working in London in 1999, he came to experience the specifics of cultural conflict in the home of his landlord. He says he started to understand British culture, and that those “very crazy very conservative very traditional” aspects came together to form a uniquely British contemporary culture. His life abroad brought him to open up a new understanding towards life and work. He was already disposed to go with the flow; insight and emotion are the foundation of his life and work, the character of a traditional scholar nourishes his spirit, and he deeply admires the sounds from a time long past. From westerners, not Chinese contemporary life, Ye Yongqing came to understand the blurriness of the line between work and life. This is truly interesting.
Traveling around the world and spending time in faraway places really opened up a window for me. In this boundless universe, how high are the mountains, how deep is the sea, how long are the roads, how big is my heart? I slowly learned to find friends according to my heart’s various yearnings, and look at life and art through a prosaic and adaptable mindset; God never planned for me to be born as just an artist. In the twenty four hours of each day I tried to do as many different things as possible, meet different kinds of people, handle different kinds of affairs and enjoy different kinds of pleasure.
This time, during half a year in London, Ye Yongqing deeply experienced the inspirational power of distant cultures. It would seem that experience is more effective in changing one’s consciousness than concepts in books. In 2000, Ye Yongqing began to reduce the content in his works, choosing pieces and individual symbols from his scribbling, and choosing a path of two extremes: Duchamp’s firm beliefs and the scholarization of image style. He would take some symbols and forms, often the birds from the scribbled pictures, first sketching them out in paper and pencil, then projecting them onto the canvas, filling them out along the lines. He delicately emphasizes the coarse details, making the overall form seem coarse. But no matter what, the artist always uses the most stripped-down approach. He synthesizes Duchamp’s clear concepts with the ancient concepts of “many and few” or “complex and simple”, even using the ancient ones’ concepts of “something” and “nothing” to understand the reasoning of Duchamp. The resulting “bird” becomes the “non-bird”, because the artist easily follows his life and cultural experience to bring together the concepts of “bird” and “nothingness”. Relying on a shared historical context, we should be able to believe in the reliability of the artist’s confession:In the latter half of 1999, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun and I went to Dali. We played around every day, but it was in this state that I began the creation of the works I’ve continued to this day. This is definitely linked to the influence of Duchamp, just an inversion of the logic. It looks very simple and quick, but in fact it is a very slow and complicated creative process. This is also a conceptual thing, using methods that the general public is familiar with, as well as a satire of painting. I’m preparing an exhibition, entitled Paint a “Bird”, though I’m not really painting anything in particular. You can see this kind of approach in Duchamp. Later on he felt that there was no longer a need to play with art, nothing left to do, and that he could go play chess. The life of a person is an art in some respects, no one is more important than anyone else. All is interactive.
After 1997, Ye Yongqing’s territory and work content became full of variables, and he was taking on multiple identities: founder of an art space, exhibition organizer, itinerant art agent, participant in urban planning, and of course he continued with his art. Some of his friends had trouble understanding why he spent so much of his energies elsewhere than on his artistic practices. Ye Yongqing never answered to these doubts directly, however he repeatedly said that Duchamp’s ideas had a strong influence on him: was life itself not an art?

Everyone has a different understanding of history and art. More than a few artists have taken notice of the importance of “vitality”, because “vitality” is an effective testament to existence; some have gone to understand “control” more deeply than “vitality”, and they pretty much think that purity is a mark of quality in spirit. Long ago, Stravinsky said that freedom is movement within a limited range, and artists such as Huang Binhong and Lin Fengmin have used repetition and purity to present the power of the spirit. At least, this is how Ye Yongqing sees the issue. The truth of the matter is that artists from the fifties started systematically reading into western and Chinese culture beginning in the eighties and nineties. Their understanding and recognition of human issues draws more from their own experiences. A wealth of information (of course including new reading) seems to have replaced knowledge, but once we examine the artist’s work we realize that no one has escaped the basic context of their coming of age. When a complicated life leads to fatigue, the artist will run. After several decades, the artist is no longer the flighty rabbit or the panicked monkey; he can easily jump into the depths of time. And an artist who is so sensitive to the “now” won’t go and understand “the depths of time” as a sanctuary like it was for the ancients, but as an indicator of taste, elegance and refinement. There’s never been a set space and standard prepared for the artist; he has to understand the true demands of art. So filling things in without a specific schedule, though easily linked to “chanting sutras” and “meditating”, seems more “cool” due to the clarity and simplicity of the attitude; the hasty scribbles of the “bird” look extremely vivid, but it is an image that emerges only after a long time of filling in, and it’s quite a task to understand the details.
The “bird” has a pretty long history, and it has its own “path”. She was conceived during the time of the “conceptual liberation movement”, which bestowed it with the space for romantics and expressiveness as well as the spiritual preparation; she was born in a tumultuous and chaotic time, the reality of which drove her into the storms of thought and concepts and gave her a tenacious adaptability; later, she lived with amongst a backdrop of globalization, which allowed her to understand mental distractions and the dusts of individualism. In the end, the “bird” knew it too; she was nothing but the manifestation of the artist’s unique psychology in this era, just as Duchamp’s Fountain is a moving record of conceptual transformation. So an understanding of the “bird” need not be burdened by so much aesthetics. It is fine in any space, and the audience can have any understanding or explanation of the “bird” that they wish. But, with our deep understanding of the “bird’s” history, we must bear the following in mind: it is important to understand the “path” of the “bird”, otherwise how can we understand that the “bird” is a symbol of the artist linking the past, present and future?

Thursday, May 10, 2007

The art newspaper