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| Yang Yongliang, Doe, 2021, giclee print, image courtesy the artist and Sullivan & Strumpf |
So here is the
essay:
Travelling Among Mountains and Streams: Yang Yongliang’s Imagined
Landscapes
“...Clouds darken with darkness of rain,
Streams pale with pallor of
mist.
The Gods of Thunder and Lightning
Shatter the whole range.
The stone gate
breaks asunder
Venting in the pit of heaven,
An impenetrable shadow.”
Li Bai
(71-762 CE), ‘Tianmu Mountain Ascended in a Dream’
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| Yang Yongliang, Goose, giclee print, image courtesy the artist and Sullivan & Strumpf |
Each time I have visited
Shanghai, speeding in a taxi along elevated freeways from the airport or the
high-speed train station, I am reminded of the ‘Jetsons’ cartoons of my
mid-twentieth-century childhood. Gleaming towers with strangely Gothic spires
stuck on top, neon flashing through smog, terrifying spaghetti junctions and
abrupt dives onto off-ramps into congested streets of half-demolished houses –
the city seems to represent a modernity in the process of becoming, an
unrealised, shining, technicoloured future that never quite arrived, a promised
future of robots, airborne cars and monorails.
This urban spectacle is the
source of multidisciplinary artist Yang Yongliang’s paradoxical homage to the
past thousands of years of China’s cultural history, and simultaneously an
expression of deep foreboding about what the future holds – not just for China,
but for the planet. Home to more than twenty million people, Shanghai is a
modernist dream of unceasing transformation – and also a nightmare. Its skyline
is ever more dramatically vertical, and its streetscape undergoes constant
demolition and reconstruction. The past is erased anew every day. Hints of a
different history remain; a wall surrounds a demolition site with one ‘nail
house’ still standing, a few neighbourhoods of ungentrified traditional lilong
lane houses are filled with hanging washing, leaning bicycles, and gossiping
neighbours. But the tower blocks and new roads are always visible.
Yang
Yongliang’s melancholy digital works are his response to life in this urban
palimpsest: he applies new media in an adaptation of Chinese traditions of
landscape painting, appropriating the shan shui (literally mountain, water)
idiom to represent the contemporary world. Now, living and working between
Shanghai and New York, he looks back to China’s artistic heritage – to Song
Dynasty landscape scrolls in particular – for inspiration, adapting ink painting
techniques to digital platforms. In Yang’s work the past, transformed, informs
the present and issues a warning about the future. Yang Yongliang was born in
1980, at the dawn of China’s period of seismic change under the ‘open door’
economic policies of Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping. Over the next thirty years
China was transformed, becoming an urban nation of mega-cities. Yang’s
birthplace, an ancient water town, was a place of traditional southern white
houses with upturned eaves, a famous pagoda, and old humpbacked stone bridges
over quiet canals. Gradually, though, Jiading Old Town was subsumed by the
ever-expanding Shanghai suburbs. So much so that when Yang returned to his
hometown from university, everything he remembered had vanished. This sudden
change, experienced as a traumatic erasure of personal history, lies at the
heart of his work.
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| Yang Yongliang, Tiger, 2021, giclee print, image courtesy the artist and Sullivan & Strumpf |
China’s headlong rush towards modernisation brought many
benefits, and much wealth to some, but along with it came a deep uncertainty and
anxiety. The unceasing expansion of metastasising cities – bulldozers tearing up
ancient villages like ravaging beasts leaving behind towering piles of rubble –
erased the landscapes of the past, replacing them with endless rows of high-rise
apartment blocks beside eight lane highways. Imagery of this perpetual cycle of
demolition and construction is buried within Yang Yongliang’s landscapes. At
first sight they appear like backlit, digital versions of sublime literati
paintings. But look a little closer and you discover they are made up of
thousands of photographs, seamlessly layered to reveal a very different world.
Giant cranes loom through the clouds and mist, electricity pylons march across
the countryside, and tumbledown houses are replaced by steel and glass towers.
It is as if Yang is constantly revisiting his moment of shock, returning home to
find the familiar become utterly strange.
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| Yang Yongliang, Boy, 2021, giclee print, image courtesy the artist and Sullivan & Strumpf |
The years he spent living and working
in Shanghai, watching it become a shining, hustling, globally connected city,
underpin his laboriously constructed still and moving images. Yang is at once
fascinated and appalled by this transformation, and his work is a paean to what
has been lost in the process. Perhaps that is why he turns so often to Song
Dynasty master painters like Fan Kuan and Guo Xi for inspiration. In a period
following dynastic upheaval, political strife, and conflict depictions of
beautiful landscapes represented solace. The mountains were an escape from the
troubles of the world. Song Dynasty shan shui paintings were expressions of
Daoist and Buddhist belief in the interconnectedness between humanity and the
natural world, and the mutually reciprocal relationship between yin and yang.
With deft brushstrokes and subtle tonal gradations of ink on silk, these scrolls
create a place, as Guo Xi wrote in his treatise on painting, ‘Lofty Record of
Forests and Streams’, in which the viewer could immerse themselves, taking an
imaginary wander along mountain paths beside gushing waterfalls, climbing up
into the high mountains, the home of the Immortals.
Yang Yongliang’s
appropriations of Song Dynasty paintings may appear at first sight to be
faithful reinterpretations of the originals. But in Travelers Among Mountains
and Streams (2014), for example, the soaring peaks of Fan Kuan’s famous scroll,
painted around 1000 C.E, have become mountains of towering apartments stacked
one behind the other, the fir trees replaced by electricity pylons, scaffolding
and cranes. Yang fills the foreground with derelict white houses like those of
his childhood hometown, but they appear to be tumbling into the churning waters
of the ravine. Early Spring (2019), Yang’s adaptation of Guo Xi’s 1072
masterpiece, retains the mist-wreathed crags and claw-like trees of the Song
Dynasty landscape with its hidden message of neo-Confucian universal harmony,
but adds a note of warning. Hints of human rapaciousness alert us to how
differently we see the natural world today – as a resource to be exploited.
His
digital landscapes oscillate between sublime beauty and dystopian horror.
Intricately layering images of rocks and waterfalls shot in various parts of
China – and in other parts of the world – with photographs of mining sites,
construction zones and land clearing operations, Yang Yongliang makes us look at
Chinese painting traditions and at our fragile planet in a new way. Yang
Yongliang is celebrated internationally for his monochrome works that evoke in
digital form the nuances of tone achieved by master ink painters. He has now
ventured into colour for the first time in a series that recalls the delicate
palette found in paintings by Ming Dynasty master Lan Ying that feature pine
trees, bamboo, fantastical twisted rock forms, and sometimes a tiny figure
seated in a pavilion, observing the mountains. Drawing on these pictorial
conventions, Yang’s series depicts similarly vertiginous ‘mountains’ wreathed in
mist rising from water, but on a closer examination we see they are not
mountains at all, but impossible clusters of high-rise buildings.
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| Yang Yongliang, Monkey, 2021, giclee print, image courtesy the artist and Sullivan & Strumpf |
Each image
hints at some impending disaster – ruined buildings have collapsed into rubble,
derricks are moored offshore and the earth has been stripped bare by machinery.
Unusually for Yang Yongliang, each work in the series contains a solitary human
or animal, rendered as a small, insignificant presence in an utterly indifferent
world. A lonely dog stares out to sea, a monkey clings despondently to a rock, a
white horse stands precariously on a cliff, a flock of geese take flight. A man
attempts to fish in a shallow pool, ignoring the misty ocean below him. Tiny
human figures such as wandering scholars or hermits were often featured in
Chinese paintings, representing the relationship between humanity and nature in
Daoist cosmology. Yang’s are weighted with different meanings. They seem like
the sole survivors of an environmental catastrophe. The waves crash, and the
mountains, denuded of vegetation, seem about to slide into the ocean.
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| Yang Yongliang, Five Dragons, video, image courtesy artist website |
Yang Yongliang’s work asks us to face uncomfortable truths, to view the world that human greed has wrought. Endlessly innovative, in recent years Yang Yongliang has ventured into new technological realms, exploring the creative possibilities of Virtual Reality and 3D video animation, reinventing traditional analogue photography techniques and introducing colour to his immersive video installations and digital images. He continues to riff on Song Dynasty paintings and Chinese mythology, yet his work is also imbued with twenty-first century allusions to video game design, inviting audiences into an enticing imaginary world. Described by the artist as a “multi-point perspective mind journey through the eyes of the dragons”, 4-channel video Five Dragons (2020), for instance, was inspired by a Southern Song Dynasty painting by Chen Rong from 1244 that depicts the symbolic beasts writhing through swirling mists. Yang notes that historically the dragon was a symbol of imperial power and stability, wisdom, benevolence and good fortune. Today, however, it is often associated merely with prosperity, in yet another sign that economic development and material consumption trumps all.
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| Yang Yongliang 'Imagined Landscapes' installation view, Sullivan & Strumpf Sydney |
In Glows in the Night (2020), a development
from Journey to the Dark, a 4-channel video work shown at Sullivan & Strumpf
Sydney in 2018, Yang provides audiences with an immersive experience that
recalls the (pre-pandemic) experience of flying into a big city at night,
looking down at an apparent wonderland of twinkling lights, neon signs, and the
golden ribbons of car headlights on highways. We see fairy lights on boats,
flashing screens on skyscrapers, mountains in the distance, and in the
foreground, glimpses into apartment windows. This sprawl of habitation is like a
human anthill, glimpses into the lives of millions of strangers, inhabitants of
this megalopolis. It could be anywhere in the contemporary world. Glows in the
Night reveals the paradox at the centre of Yang Yongliang’s practice: the
seductive allure of urban modernity and the simultaneous knowledge of its
fragility.
You can do a wonderful virtual walkthrough of the exhibition HERE
And read the essay in its much more beautiful layout version in the gallery magazine HERE
