Yang Yongliang: In Detail

Yang Yongliang is a master of transformation, turning skyscrapers, office towers and factories into bucolic scenes from traditional shan shui (mountain, water) ink painting. Trained in traditional painting and calligraphy before studying at the China Academy of Art in Shanghai, his work tells the story of China’s recent rapid economic transformation but tinged with nostalgia for a slower, simpler time.

By Susan Acret

China’s transformation from a largely agrarian, poor and uneducated population into an urban, upwardly mobile, educated society has wrought massive change over the last three decades, producing opportunities for many, but leaving millions behind. The economic boom and its skyscrapers, office towers and factories have swept away much of old China and its traditions with breathtaking speed, a little like one of Yang Yongliang’s surging, threatening rivers. Yang’s practice takes up the recent story of China, and indeed the contemporary world, calling into question ideas of progress and looking back nostalgically to a slower, simpler time.

Yang Yongliang, A Bowl of Taipei No.4, 2012, UltraGiclee print

Courtesy Yang Yongliang Studio

Yang’s digitally collaged photographs, his lightboxes and videos, virtual reality pieces, ink paintings and immersive installations often take as their foundation scenes from traditional shan shui (mountain, water) ink painting and its stories. Trained in traditional painting and calligraphy before studying at the China Academy of Art in Shanghai, Yang transforms the ideals of the literati genre, with its retreat from society and quiet contemplation of nature, through his use of digital media and the imposition of urban scapes.

High-rise buildings, construction vehicles, and powerlines now scar once untouched natural vistas – we glimpse a site of industry in the pristine mountains, rivers dammed or diverted. Environmental destruction is a key concern in Yang’s works, and while the artist might implicitly acknowledge the impossibility of the literati ideal today, he seeks to bring the meditative balm of its philosophy into our fractured, difficult present. In acknowledging the loss of an artistic practice and cultural tradition, and of the natural realm that has long been a source of inspiration for artists, a wistfulness lingers alongside concerns for our present and future.

Environmental destruction is a key concern in Yang’s works, and while the artist might implicitly acknowledge the impossibility of the literati ideal today, he seeks to bring the meditative balm of its philosophy into our fractured, difficult present.

Yang Yongliang, Vanishing Landscape Shanshui No.1, 2016, mixed media on canvas

Courtesy Yang Yongliang Studio

In Yang’s transformed landscapes he warns that the human world has exceeded its boundaries: in Artificial Wonderland II – Taigu Descendants, 2016, once rocky mountains have become a collage of precarious skyscrapers that threaten to topple over, while in the distance—in the past—unspoilt mountains can be glimpsed through cloud. In the series Heavenly City, 2008, everything has been swept up like a magician’s trick in a tornado held together by whirling cloud and dust.

The city strains towards the heavens until its inevitable destruction in something that resembles a nuclear explosion. Artificial Wonderland II – Wintery Forest in the Night, 2014, features digital replicas of two Song Dynasty master paintings – Travelers Among Mountains and Steams by Fan Kuan and Wintery Forest in the Snow (anonymous). In Yang’s Wintery Forest in the Night the forest is now one of seductive sparkling city lights among skyscraper mountains. Despite the artificial nature of the scene – a geographically impossible collage – it evokes the contemporary metropolis: beautiful but unsatisfying in its promise of material satisfaction.

Yang Yongliang, Beneath the Sky, 2017, painted vintage Japanese silver paper

Courtesy Yang Yongliang Studio

Despite the artificial nature of the scene—a geographically impossible collage—it evokes the contemporary metropolis: beautiful but unsatisfying in its promise of material satisfaction.

In referencing the literati painters of the past Yang also draws on centuries of Chinese culture, stories and myths where gods ruled in a hierarchical and structured world. Rather than critiques of modernity, Yang’s works appear as philosophical ruminations on the folly of human traits such as greed, bad judgement and selfishness, which create imbalance and sometimes destruction. His vistas illustrate the human world in vain competition with nature and often hell-bent on their own demise too.

Yang Yongliang, Heavenly City—A Cloud on The Horizon, 2008, ink-jet print on Epson fine art paper 95 × 100 cm

Courtesy Yang Yongliang Studio

Yang’s digital reworking of master paintings and their mystical, symbolic landscapes also highlights ideas around the aura of the original and of reproduction as homage. Traditional Chinese painting students would copy master painters’ works as a form of study and a mark of respect. Yang’s referencing of this practice adds historical layers and meaning while his use of other traditional cultural touchstones also make connections with the past. Work such as Beneath the Sky, 2017, an ink painting on silver paper, is presented in a large-scale traditional concertina-book format. In Bowl of Taipei, 2012, the artist serves up Taiwanese scenery resembling the scholar’s rock in traditional porcelain bowls, linking the physical and cultural spheres in a satisfying meal. For Vanishing Landscape, 2015, Yang mixes cement with acrylic paint, evoking the landscape painting tradition through a distinctly contemporary material: in a reversal of his video and digital image narratives, here the mountains are revealed through the use of concrete.

As a contemporary artist, Yang works with contemporary media and with a postmodern mindset, but the thread that tethers his work to the past is an ink line that creates a depth of perspective and time beyond the glittering surfaces of his dark twenty-first century visions.

EXHIBITION: YANG YONGLIANG, 7 – 15 JAN 2023, S+S SINGAPORE

+ EMAIL ART@SULLIVANSTRUMPF.COM TO REQUEST A PREVIEW