• Yang Jiechang Review

    Date posted: June 28, 2011 Author: jolanta
    Yang Jiechang’s artistic path is both exemplary of the globalization of issues in contemporary culture and part of the long-term heritage of the extraterritoriality of art and the destiny of artists. Born in a region of southern China strongly marked by poverty and a nomadic lifestyle, he opted very early for art as a personal activity, but above all as a way of relating to the world.

    “Mountain Top is a celebration of love and métissage, in a spirit of the ancient fables and myths; but it is also a metaphor of the order – or disorder – of the world.”

    Yang Jiechang, Mountain Top, 2011. Courtesy of the artist.

    Yang Jiechang Review

    Christophe Domino

    Yang Jiechang’s artistic path is both exemplary of the globalization of issues in contemporary culture and part of the long-term heritage of the extraterritoriality of art and the destiny of artists. Born in a region of southern China strongly marked by poverty and a nomadic lifestyle, he opted very early for art as a personal activity, but above all as a way of relating to the world. Thus while still very young he acquired the traditional skills he would set about transcending in an oeuvre that began to draw attention in the late 1980s, notably with his contribution to the famous Magicians of the Earth exhibition in Paris in 1989.

    Leaving China in the wake of TienAnMen–like other artists including Huang Young Ping–and hoping for changes that have still to take place, he spent time in Germany before deciding to settle in France. His work then developed the enormous freedom displayed at the leading biennials and triennials–Venice (2003), Moscow (2009), Liverpool (2006), Istanbul (2007), Lyon (2009), Guangzhou (2002, 2005, 2008), Shanghai (1998); at various exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art; at MoMA, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and in Hong Kong; and on many occasions in Beijing, at the Tang Contemporary Art Center and the UCCA-Ullens Foundation.

    Ink on paper, sculpture, painting, installations, video, and performance: in the many languages he adopts he shows no qualms about mixing contemporary styles and issues with traditional techniques. In his exhibition, “Stranger than Paradise,” at the La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art in Rennes, Brittany, in May–June 2011, he took over the space with Mountain Top, a forest of museum stands on which were placed two hundred ceramic sculptures made in the traditional way in China. The works showed all kinds of animals having sexual intercourse, but with an intermingling of species that included an elephant with a monkey and a stork with a puma: Mountain Top is a celebration of love and métissage, in a spirit of the ancient fables and myths; but it is also a metaphor of the order–or disorder–of the world. A painting on silk repeated these motifs and the exhibition as a whole was orchestrated by a gong struck at regular intervals by the artist in the video Gong (2011). In his exhibition, “The World Belongs to You,” at the Palazzo Grassi in June–December 2011 a large, seven-panel painting reuses the title Stranger than Paradise and the same sculptural theme as in Rennes: a strange paradise indeed, whose joyously uninhibited animal population is given a legendary aspect by a classical Chinese pictorial approach. But behind this outward play with tradition Yang Jiechang’s oeuvre has a political dimension: the independence and radical freedom of his way of seeing find expression in irony and humor, but also in a meditation on the superficiality of the world and on spiritual rigor as the sole form of resistance. In this way he maintains a firm distance from the opportunism and wheeler-dealering that underlie a certain form of internationalized Chinese art, and sets out to prove that art can speak to us about the world in its own language: the language of symbolic creation.

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