The regression of the progression

The idea would be to preserve oneself, though the passing of time is insensible: despite the frantic search for quibbles to hold onto, in the popular tradition or in literature as in its unfolding, the evolution runs its course and it thunders as a dogma to which we are doomed.

A catastrophe, that of the world that inexorably changes, which leaves behind the causes but it belches the consequences, which forgets the clumsiest people, the less sensitive to culture, able to ease the trauma of transformation of the things that surround us.

Yang Yongliang has been improperly defined the artist of the apocalypse, able to create, through the overlapping of photograms, outstanding works that hide a looming implosion, that recall the Celestial Empire by Hokusai, even if to the watchful they reveal a modernism of cannibal and disquieting architectures. Those that, at first sight, look like imposing mountains, interspersed with rainfalls, torrential valleys and pylons, are actually industrial cathedrals that look at the sprawling growth of Chinese cities over the last decades. This introduction is meant to dismantle the theory, whereby the young Yongliang, born in 1980, would be an artist of the apocalypse whose etymological meaning is revealing hidden things to the prophet: Yang doesn’t reveal anything, and he doesn’t commit a sin by telling something that is unknown to the people, instead he illustrates a lightning turnover of situations and states of mind. He does it by cheering us up and hiding the urban reality behind clouds and streams.

The leaden restlessness of his art hides itself in such dichotomy and in the close and intensive dialogue with catastrophe. It rests as a feather on the gap of such opposition and it fills his artworks with literary ethos as an escape. It is not by chance that Yongliang has been one of the featured artists of the recent art exhibition “Shanshui” held in Lucerne, featuring 1500 works including his View of tide, from the Ulli Sigg collelction, considered the most influential collector of Chinese contemporary art worldwide.

Literary translated, Shanshui means Mountain Water, it is an art with a strong reference to the Taoist imagery, which relates the mountains with the uplifting and the purification of the soul, though it has its roots chiefly in the cultural heritage, referring to the man’s emotional aspects: nature can be understood only by knowing and expressing ourselves.

Yang Yongliang stays at the very centre of this point of observation, between frailty and danger, beauty and cruelty. And he depicts a suspended, eternal, unchanging dimension, which coercively compares itself with an ultramodern social model. So something is left. Something ominous is in his paintings, he knows that and so he provokes it. In his paintings there is the silence of the revolt, the smell of war. There is a motionless breeze, buzzing people ready to sacrifice themselves in order to find themselves again.

And if getting lost among millions of people is not a catastrophe, I can’t imagine anything worse.

Ilaria Giordano