At the beginning of this year, Beijing was still cold. Remnant snow was everywhere, and the city was in a depression. I got a text message from Lu Peng, in which he used the words, blue sky, white cloud, beach, palm trees, sunshine and short sleeve T-shirt, to describe our upcoming gathering in Sanya. Names on the invitation were old friends that I have known for decades. For many years, gatherings had happened occasionally in different places around the world, but these people are always the focus of discussion. Lu's new art history of 100 years brings us not only memory, but also numerous questions. The three days in Sanya passed by quickly, but fortunately the past, the current and the future life of Lu Peng's art history remains. If these spontaneous ink play and graffiti works can do something for the past, the current and the future life of our art history, I am more than happy to see the results. -Ye Shuai (Ye Yongqing) June 17th, 2007 Beijing.
Work in brush and ink on xuan paper (70x140)
Ye Yongqing was not sent down to the countryside as an 'educated youth' (zhishi qingnian) and after middle school was classified as 'unemployed' (daiyezhe). In the two years or so that followed, he variously worked as a construction worker, animal keeper, cook, substitute teacher and farm watchman. In the city, he had more opportunities than 'educated youths' in the countryside to read and to listen to Russian classical music, such Swan Lake and The Nutcracker Suite, as well as Chinese traditional music like the romantic suite Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai. In a historical period characterized by uniform 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 part of my youth'.
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Beginning in the summer of 1980, Ye Yongqing joined Zhang Xiaogang, Mao Xuhui and several others on a trip tracing the Yangtze River from Wuhan to Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai, and eventually ended up in Beijing.
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Beginning in the summer of 1980, Ye Yongqing joined Zhang Xiaogang, Mao Xuhui and several others on a trip tracing the Yangtze River from Wuhan to Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai, and eventually ended up in Beijing.
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No one came to the defense ofthe artist, and Ye Yongqing saw that in the '85 period artists had to defend themselves. Once the question of ideology was thrown open, the old standards and benchmarks immediately became an obstacle. Mao Xuhui, Ye Yongqing's friend, attended the '85 Youth Art Trends: Large-scale Slide Exhibition and Academic Symposium in Zhuhai (otherwise known as the Zhuhai Forum) in the summer of 1986. This was a modernist gathering organized by a group of young critics and artists who declared the event to be historically significant. After Mao Xuhui brought his modernist 'revolutionary forms' (geming xingshi) back to Kunming, his circle of friends began pushing southwestern art to a new level. But they asked: Who will speak for us? What concepts and issues must artists from a fringe city express? When other modem artists speak lucidly about their artistic views and concepts, how should we respond? These and many other issues brought about the birth of the Southwestern Art Group:
The Southwestern Art Group that I founded and organized with my friends in 1986 brought me more directly into New Wave Art. We spent night after night discussing manifestos and concepts, planning exhibitions in Kunming, Shanghai and Beijing. writing articles for magazines, and explaining to other enthusiastic people the meaning of our 'new figurative images' (xin juxiang). It was a really charged time. People like us who had been culturally baptized in the early eighties will never forget that lively scene. Although there were various pretensions and inflated egos, it was basically an era of cultural aspiration”.
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As an artist, Ye Yongqing continued to paint on canvas and use oil paints, but he also tried out acrylic and mixed media. He even took up the calligraphic brush and Chinese ink and color. In his early works, Ye Yongqing liked using thin colors that produce an effect reminiscent of watercolor and traditional Chinese painting. He felt this reflected his inner character, and even with his early 1983 landscapes of Guishan reminiscent of Cezanne he paid attention to Cezanne's understanding of the structure and abstractions of nature and used very light strokes rather than following Cezanne's lead with thick brush strokes. When he was inspired by Picasso he also did not imitate that artist's unbridled expression. A long period of experimentation led Ye Yongqing to follow the path of brush and ink expression of traditional scholars that had appealed to him much earlier. He did not study brush and ink painting, but he had a feel for the taste and character of China's ancient ink and wash artists. The dilemma for Ye Yongqing was how to pursue his own art against a backdrop where expressionism, surrealism, installation and performance art had become the norm.
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As an artist, Ye Yongqing continued to paint on canvas and use oil paints, but he also tried out acrylic and mixed media. He even took up the calligraphic brush and Chinese ink and color. In his early works, Ye Yongqing liked using thin colors that produce an effect reminiscent of watercolor and traditional Chinese painting. He felt this reflected his inner character, and even with his early 1983 landscapes of Guishan reminiscent of Cezanne he paid attention to Cezanne's understanding of the structure and abstractions of nature and used very light strokes rather than following Cezanne's lead with thick brush strokes. When he was inspired by Picasso he also did not imitate that artist's unbridled expression. A long period of experimentation led Ye Yongqing to follow the path of brush and ink expression of traditional scholars that had appealed to him much earlier. He did not study brush and ink painting, but he had a feel for the taste and character of China's ancient ink and wash artists. The dilemma for Ye Yongqing was how to pursue his own art against a backdrop where expressionism, surrealism, installation and performance art had become the norm.
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During his half year in London, (1999) Ye Yongqing experienced the inspirational power of distant cultures, which more effectively changed his consciousness, than concepts gleaned from books. In 2000, Ye Yongqing began to reduce the content in his works, choosing pieces and individual symbols from his graffiti, and choosing a path between two extremes: Duchamp's firm stance and the elevation of his image style to that of the classical Chinese scholar's studio. He took particular symbols and forms, often the birds from his graffiti works, first sketched them out in paper and pencil, and then projected them onto the canvas, filling them out along the lines. He emphasized the coarse details and overall forms, invariably using the most pared-back approach. He synthesized Duchamp's clear concepts with the ancient Chinese dualities of 'many and few' (duo-shao) or 'complex and simple' (jian-fan), even using the ancient concepts of 'something' (you) and 'nothing' (wu) to explain the reasoning of Duchamp. The resulting 'bird' (niao) became the 'non-bird' (jeiniao), because the artist brought together the cultural and philosophical notions of 'bird' and 'nothingness'. Relying on a shared historical context, we can appreciate his 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 here that I began the creation of the works I have continued to this day. This was definitely linked to the influence of Duchamp, although the logic was inverted. It looks very quick and simple, but in fact it was a very slow and complicated creative process. This was also a conceptual thing, using techniques that the general public is familiar with, as well as being a satire on painting. I'm preparing an exhibition titled Painting a 'Bird' (Hua ge 'niao'), although I'm not really painting anything in particular. You see this approach in Duchamp. Later on, when he felt that there was no longer any need to play with art and, with nothing left to do, he would go and play chess. The life of a person is an art in some respects; no one is more importantthan anyone else. Everything interacts.[23]
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Ye Yongqing's 'bird' has a long history and its own 'path'. It was conceived during the 'conceptual liberation movement', which endowed the image with the space for romanticism and expressiveness, as well as spiritual preparation. The bird was born in tumultuous and chaotic times, the reality of which drove it into the storms of ideas and concepts and gave it a tenacious adaptability. Later, the bird lived against the backdrop of globalization, which allowed it to appreciate mental distractions and the dust of individualism. But eventually the 'bird' realized that was merely the manifestation of the artist's unique psychology of his times, just as Duchamp's Fountain is the physical record of conceptual transformation. An understanding of the 'bird' need not be burdened by so much aesthetics. It fits comfortably into any space, and the audience can understand or explain the 'bird' in any way they wish. But, with our deep understanding of the bird's history, we must bear in mind that it is important to understand the flight path of the bird, otherwise we can never understand that the bird is a symbol of the artist linking the past, present and future.
Artists in Art History. Lü Peng.