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Lot Essay
‘Since the early 90s, I have expressed my concerns about human beings and environmental issues through my works. As time goes by, my ever-deepening life experiences no longer allow me to avoid contemplating on these problems. I have been attempting to embody these thoughts with some unique ways of expressions because, as a visual artist, this is the reason for my existence.’
- Shang Yang
English poet William Blake’s famous words, “To see a world in a grain of sand” best describes Shang Yang’s Landscape of Place E-7 (Lot 47). Having experienced a decade of Cultural Revolution, Shang Yang deeply understands the influence human beings have on society, civilization and environment. As traces of life disappear with time, he chose to document the changes of this world through visible views (of nature), connecting the visual relation between “views” and “world view” and condensing the expressions about nature, human beings, concepts and society into islands and deserts to refract the human-world relationship.
In the long course of history and civilization where rises, downfalls and changes happen, human beings continue to construct and destroy the world, making it an unchanged cycle. The tragedy of Mother Nature began with human beings’ attempt to divide forests, fields and swamps like a chess board. Hidden in Shang Yang’s poetic paddy fields are dangers brought about by today’s civilised society. His Great Landscape series questions the human-nature and humanfuture relationships. His Huangtu Gaoyuan (Loess Plateau) human beings and lands in an overwhelming yellow tone, vague and indistinguishable. His Great Landscape series in the 90s, instead, expresses how natural environment and civilized society are separated. Airplanes, dinosaurs, meteorites and disproportionate human figures are scattered on the clean-cut profiles of mountains. Synchronic images are contained in the same world. After 1997, disordered, alienated human souls and post-modern chaotic phenomena are transformed into contours, leaving behind an empty Place E, which became the simple, pure and refined symbols in Shang Yang’s landscape paintings. Like José Joya’s Elysium (Fig. 1), Landscape of Place E-7 does not depict an identifiable place, it reflects the artist’s inner world through the elements of space, contours, colours and movements etc. through a micro perspective.
Klein Blue reflects Yves Klein’s impressions of the sky and the sea while Shang Yang Yellow captures the artist’s memories of himself journeying through Shanxi highland in his teenage years. The sand and earth of Loess Plateau became the artist’s nutrients and nurtured his unearthly grey, yellow, brown and ocher colours. The few off-white brushstrokes on the top show a sense of speed like Willem de Kooning’s thick gestural brushstrokes (Fig. 2), and cleverly convey the movements of stars sweeping across the sky. The artist’s father, Shang Wu, an inkand- wash painter, influenced the artist’s use of colours. Traditional Chinese landscape painting uses limited shades to convey the melodic tones of colours (Fig. 3) and Shang Yang expresses the cultural genes of these captivating landscapes through yellow alone. Solid and heavy earth tone paint is turned into a greyish yellow colour that carries a sense of purity and lightness resembling the ink-and-wash style. Echoing the nostalgic traces left in Shang Yang’s landscape, such use of colour has become his signature style. Orchestrating Eastern art techniques in a lively manner, he has also reformed the ways of expressions of Western oil paintings, surrounding his oil paintings with a classical, elegant Chinese aura.
His sensitivity and concerns for society and his pursuit of a meticulous artistic expression deepen the meanings of his visual language. The concepts of his art works highlight the contradictions between human beings and nature while his paintings are often calm and harmonious, showing no trace of conflict. Paul Cézanne once said, “To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.” Through repeatedly sublimed mountain views over the years, Shang Yang, in a personalised way, expresses how human beings and nature have turned from inseparables to oppositions, and then integrate with each other once again, forming a world view that advances with time.
- Shang Yang
English poet William Blake’s famous words, “To see a world in a grain of sand” best describes Shang Yang’s Landscape of Place E-7 (Lot 47). Having experienced a decade of Cultural Revolution, Shang Yang deeply understands the influence human beings have on society, civilization and environment. As traces of life disappear with time, he chose to document the changes of this world through visible views (of nature), connecting the visual relation between “views” and “world view” and condensing the expressions about nature, human beings, concepts and society into islands and deserts to refract the human-world relationship.
In the long course of history and civilization where rises, downfalls and changes happen, human beings continue to construct and destroy the world, making it an unchanged cycle. The tragedy of Mother Nature began with human beings’ attempt to divide forests, fields and swamps like a chess board. Hidden in Shang Yang’s poetic paddy fields are dangers brought about by today’s civilised society. His Great Landscape series questions the human-nature and humanfuture relationships. His Huangtu Gaoyuan (Loess Plateau) human beings and lands in an overwhelming yellow tone, vague and indistinguishable. His Great Landscape series in the 90s, instead, expresses how natural environment and civilized society are separated. Airplanes, dinosaurs, meteorites and disproportionate human figures are scattered on the clean-cut profiles of mountains. Synchronic images are contained in the same world. After 1997, disordered, alienated human souls and post-modern chaotic phenomena are transformed into contours, leaving behind an empty Place E, which became the simple, pure and refined symbols in Shang Yang’s landscape paintings. Like José Joya’s Elysium (Fig. 1), Landscape of Place E-7 does not depict an identifiable place, it reflects the artist’s inner world through the elements of space, contours, colours and movements etc. through a micro perspective.
Klein Blue reflects Yves Klein’s impressions of the sky and the sea while Shang Yang Yellow captures the artist’s memories of himself journeying through Shanxi highland in his teenage years. The sand and earth of Loess Plateau became the artist’s nutrients and nurtured his unearthly grey, yellow, brown and ocher colours. The few off-white brushstrokes on the top show a sense of speed like Willem de Kooning’s thick gestural brushstrokes (Fig. 2), and cleverly convey the movements of stars sweeping across the sky. The artist’s father, Shang Wu, an inkand- wash painter, influenced the artist’s use of colours. Traditional Chinese landscape painting uses limited shades to convey the melodic tones of colours (Fig. 3) and Shang Yang expresses the cultural genes of these captivating landscapes through yellow alone. Solid and heavy earth tone paint is turned into a greyish yellow colour that carries a sense of purity and lightness resembling the ink-and-wash style. Echoing the nostalgic traces left in Shang Yang’s landscape, such use of colour has become his signature style. Orchestrating Eastern art techniques in a lively manner, he has also reformed the ways of expressions of Western oil paintings, surrounding his oil paintings with a classical, elegant Chinese aura.
His sensitivity and concerns for society and his pursuit of a meticulous artistic expression deepen the meanings of his visual language. The concepts of his art works highlight the contradictions between human beings and nature while his paintings are often calm and harmonious, showing no trace of conflict. Paul Cézanne once said, “To paint is not to copy the object slavishly, it is to grasp a harmony among many relationships.” Through repeatedly sublimed mountain views over the years, Shang Yang, in a personalised way, expresses how human beings and nature have turned from inseparables to oppositions, and then integrate with each other once again, forming a world view that advances with time.