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拍品专文
“Art connects to traditions on one end and links to the future on the other; contemporary art does not come from life, it comes from culture.” – Yu Youhan
Born in Shanghai in 1943, Yu Youhan graduated from the Central Academy of Craft Art in Beijing in 1973 (now the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University). After graduation, Yu returned to his hometown to teach at the Shanghai Art and Design Academy, where inspired by Post-Impressionism, he focused primarily on figurative painting. However, by the mid-80s, Yu's growing disinterest in realism compelled him to move away from figurative subjects, leading him to explore the possibilities of expression offered by abstract painting.
In Abstract 1991-2 (Lot 23), bright swatches of green, blue, orange, and red jostle for precedence, each colour separate, yet combining to produce a complex tapestry of layered hues that flow and ebb in a complex current. The work's all-over composition makes no attempt to infer dimensional depth – rather, colours appear to shift into the relative foreground and background, combining in a multitude of ways across different parts of the canvas. In Abstract 1991-2, the manner in which Yu applies dabs of contrasting colours right next to each other recalls the visual experiments of the pointillists, such as George Seurat and Paul Signac (Fig. 1-2). Contrasting colours placed side-by-side are mixed by the eye, and yield even brighter tones than what can be achieved through a single pigment alone. Signac, in particular, favoured using bright colours including red and orange to help illustrate sky and water, creating dazzling effects as the viewer's eye is engaged in the act of colour mixing.
Yu's symbolic language of dots and dashes bears more than a coincidental resemblance to the written appearance of Morse code; in an interview, Yu Youhan recalled the time he spent serving in a military communication battalion, where he learned to send and receive messages sing the system. In Morse code, the alphabet is reduced to different combinations of short and long signals, represented visually as a chain of '.' and '-' symbols strung together to create words and sentences. In this way, even the most complex ideas and concepts can be broken down into simple components, while a single dot can form part of a larger message that conveys vast quantities of information. Yu Youhan expresses this concept in the visual vocabulary of his abstract paintings by evoking the appearance of encoded text. Though the dabs of paint may not carry specific messages, they nonetheless suggest a world of information that lies just out of reach, expressing the idea that even the most complex images and messages can be created from a simple set of building blocks.
Yu Youhan's stint working in military communications echoes that of another pioneering abstract painter, the American artist Cy Twombly (Fig. 3). Between the years of 1953 and 1954 Twombly was drafted to work as a cryptographer for the US Army, spending several months working at the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The time he spent working on encrypting and decrypting messages would later have a profound influence upon his approach to art-making and his understanding of symbolism. Despite the apparent meaninglessness of the abstract scrawls and scribbles on canvas that Twombly is most known for, his paintings are filled with rich allusions to classical myth, poetry, literature and language. Like Yu Youhan, Twombly was fascinated by human psychology, and our ability to find meaning within the simplest of gestures and shapes. Both artists plumb the possibilities of using fundamental elements to express profound meaning in their work, producing paintings that seem simple in their construction yet contain allusions to millennia of human intellectual progress.
Every one of Yu's paintings begins with a single dot. No matter how complex the flow of lines or how nuanced the composition, like a letter broken down into dots and dashes Yu's paintings can also be deconstructed into the most fundamental brushstrokes. The Taoist saying, 'The one bears two. The two bear three. The three bears the ten thousand things' expresses the idea that all things begin as fundamental elements, and that from a single dot placed next to a second dot, amidst a matrix of similarly meaningless dots and dashes, a collective expression of pictorial significance may ultimately emerge. This conceptualization of something-from-nothing, meaning from code, embodies the essence of Yu Youhan's approach to his abstract works.
Though this piece, along with Abstract 1990-1 (Lot 62), falls into Yu's series of abstract 'Circle' works, there is no circle to be seen in the composition of either painting. According to one critic, 'The fact that the 'Circle' series shifted from black and white to colour, and that it no longer needed the cultural implication of the 'circle' for support, meant that [Yu Youhan] had become fascinated with a more refined painting language and the purer, more basic aesthetic it could express.' Though all works in this series share a common vocabulary of dots and dashes (miniature circles, in a sense) arranged in flowing compositions, rather than focusing exclusively upon the form of the circle as he did in his earliest works, Yu explored broader concepts as his work matured, though he would frequently return to the circle motif.
Born in Shanghai in 1943, Yu Youhan graduated from the Central Academy of Craft Art in Beijing in 1973 (now the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University). After graduation, Yu returned to his hometown to teach at the Shanghai Art and Design Academy, where inspired by Post-Impressionism, he focused primarily on figurative painting. However, by the mid-80s, Yu's growing disinterest in realism compelled him to move away from figurative subjects, leading him to explore the possibilities of expression offered by abstract painting.
In Abstract 1991-2 (Lot 23), bright swatches of green, blue, orange, and red jostle for precedence, each colour separate, yet combining to produce a complex tapestry of layered hues that flow and ebb in a complex current. The work's all-over composition makes no attempt to infer dimensional depth – rather, colours appear to shift into the relative foreground and background, combining in a multitude of ways across different parts of the canvas. In Abstract 1991-2, the manner in which Yu applies dabs of contrasting colours right next to each other recalls the visual experiments of the pointillists, such as George Seurat and Paul Signac (Fig. 1-2). Contrasting colours placed side-by-side are mixed by the eye, and yield even brighter tones than what can be achieved through a single pigment alone. Signac, in particular, favoured using bright colours including red and orange to help illustrate sky and water, creating dazzling effects as the viewer's eye is engaged in the act of colour mixing.
Yu's symbolic language of dots and dashes bears more than a coincidental resemblance to the written appearance of Morse code; in an interview, Yu Youhan recalled the time he spent serving in a military communication battalion, where he learned to send and receive messages sing the system. In Morse code, the alphabet is reduced to different combinations of short and long signals, represented visually as a chain of '.' and '-' symbols strung together to create words and sentences. In this way, even the most complex ideas and concepts can be broken down into simple components, while a single dot can form part of a larger message that conveys vast quantities of information. Yu Youhan expresses this concept in the visual vocabulary of his abstract paintings by evoking the appearance of encoded text. Though the dabs of paint may not carry specific messages, they nonetheless suggest a world of information that lies just out of reach, expressing the idea that even the most complex images and messages can be created from a simple set of building blocks.
Yu Youhan's stint working in military communications echoes that of another pioneering abstract painter, the American artist Cy Twombly (Fig. 3). Between the years of 1953 and 1954 Twombly was drafted to work as a cryptographer for the US Army, spending several months working at the Pentagon in Washington D.C. The time he spent working on encrypting and decrypting messages would later have a profound influence upon his approach to art-making and his understanding of symbolism. Despite the apparent meaninglessness of the abstract scrawls and scribbles on canvas that Twombly is most known for, his paintings are filled with rich allusions to classical myth, poetry, literature and language. Like Yu Youhan, Twombly was fascinated by human psychology, and our ability to find meaning within the simplest of gestures and shapes. Both artists plumb the possibilities of using fundamental elements to express profound meaning in their work, producing paintings that seem simple in their construction yet contain allusions to millennia of human intellectual progress.
Every one of Yu's paintings begins with a single dot. No matter how complex the flow of lines or how nuanced the composition, like a letter broken down into dots and dashes Yu's paintings can also be deconstructed into the most fundamental brushstrokes. The Taoist saying, 'The one bears two. The two bear three. The three bears the ten thousand things' expresses the idea that all things begin as fundamental elements, and that from a single dot placed next to a second dot, amidst a matrix of similarly meaningless dots and dashes, a collective expression of pictorial significance may ultimately emerge. This conceptualization of something-from-nothing, meaning from code, embodies the essence of Yu Youhan's approach to his abstract works.
Though this piece, along with Abstract 1990-1 (Lot 62), falls into Yu's series of abstract 'Circle' works, there is no circle to be seen in the composition of either painting. According to one critic, 'The fact that the 'Circle' series shifted from black and white to colour, and that it no longer needed the cultural implication of the 'circle' for support, meant that [Yu Youhan] had become fascinated with a more refined painting language and the purer, more basic aesthetic it could express.' Though all works in this series share a common vocabulary of dots and dashes (miniature circles, in a sense) arranged in flowing compositions, rather than focusing exclusively upon the form of the circle as he did in his earliest works, Yu explored broader concepts as his work matured, though he would frequently return to the circle motif.