Liang Yue, In a Chinese Daze
Pauline Doutreluingne
I couldn’t remember where this was,
I’ve also forgotten this place.
I could only feel the pain in my head.
Many rays of light were moving
my body was floating
as if floating on many coloured rays of light.
They all hurried away,
floating
I was wondering where they were going,
and where I was going…
Stop Dazing, Liang Yue
If you thumb through Liang Yue’s oeuvre, the first thing you’ll notice is her fascination with light; such as the uncountable small lights that give a fairy-like character to the Chinese megalopolis at night, or the bright blue daylight on a busy street corner. Liang Yue plays with light, she adds some or takes it slightly away according to her interpretation, and in this way creates new poetic spaces that drag the viewer inside her perception of the world.
She says: "It’s like I get into a space and blow a very big balloon, which attracts people into this space. It is what potentially exists in this space that I seek to express. Other people may see the specific objects in everyday life, but I don’t pay attention to them, or would never see them in relation to one another and experience them thus. So I observe the objective world with my eyes, and construct this space for the viewer with the elements I discover."
From July until September 2004 she took part in an artist-in-residence program at Gasworks in London where she created a video work, Stop Dazing (35 min., 35 sec.). It is her most explicitly personal and narrative work so far. The video draws the viewer through a meandering track of dream-states, memories and distracted imaginations. This approach shifts the viewer forward and backward in time so as to occupy some space other than the present, a temporal non-space. In the video she uses a very diverse artistic language: close-ups, a realistic documentary style (which lacks some professionalism from time to time), children’s drawings, subtle portraits, photos and text.
The tempo is also very variable. As a viewer, you are pulled to her rhythm through the video. In this work, Stop Dazing, Liang Yue creates distance, as if she wants her world to be looked at through a glass (literally) and on the other side, when she awakes from her dazing, she puts us very close, face to face, with her reality. The reality in which she lives is apparently the untiring 24-hour economy in a Chinese metropolis, but in contrast with her former work, this is surprisingly hard to display. The hectic daily life is barely taken into consideration. She creates her own dimension, showing the security, the familiarity and what little nature you may find in the megalopolis. In the background we hear the gentle voice of the artist making the whole experience even more intimate.
In 2005, she made a series of photographs, titled Wood and Grass, displaying a typical approach to Chinese landscape paintings. The resemblance of a wash and ink painting—where after careful observation a tree is painted with a single brushstroke of monochrome ink, is striking. Under the clear light of a full moon, she takes close-ups of trees. Mainly bald winter trees in urban settings. The urban aspect is only visible in small details: street lighting and façades of living quarters in the background. Her intervention with light (or would it be the full moon who generates this impact?) again ensures a splendid colour palette in this sober but intense work.
Liang Yue lives and works in Beijing. Yue’s work is part of the permanent collection of MUHKA in Antwerp, Belgium. In the spring of 2004, her works were featured in the exhibition "All Under Heaven" and in autumn of that year in "Presentation of Collection X by means of Gagarin, The Artists in Their Own Words." Her work was, among others, also in the much-talked exposition "China Now" at MoMA Film, Gramercy Theatre in New York. At the end of June 2005 ShangART Gallery presented her solo exhibition "Stop Dazing: Liang Yue photos and videos in 2003-2005."
