Promoter, agent, art reviewer and gallery operator: Ye Yongqing (葉永青) wears many hats in China’s frenetic contemporary art world. When he returns to his hometown of Dali (大理) in China’s Yunnan Province, however, he discards them all and becomes a playful artist in the Chinese literati tradition.
Contrasting the solitude of his hometown with the stress and competitiveness of Beijing and his obligations as a professor at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (四川美術學院), Ye told the Taipei Times that Dali is a place where he can unwind and relax.
“It provides me with the seclusion necessary to create [these] lighthearted paintings,” he said.
Photo Courtesy of Metaphysical Art Gallery
The show currently on view at Metaphysical Art Gallery (形而上畫廊), titled Beyond the Bird (非關鳥事), brings together a number of collage-like works Ye created over the past year and includes some of his earlier bird paintings.
Born in 1958, Ye graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Academy in 1982 with a degree in oil painting. He became an active participant in the academy’s then nascent, though vibrant, art scene and later joined the 1985 New Wave Art Movement (新潮運動), which promoted avant-garde art. In 1986, he cofounded the Southwest Art Group (西南藝術群體), an influential collective of artists including Zhang Xiaogang (張曉剛), Zhou Chunya (周春芽) and Yang Shu (楊述). Since then, he has traveled the world championing contemporary Chinese art.
Though Ye came of age during the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, his paintings are somewhat unique in that they avoid the political pop imagery and cynical realist themes common among his contemporaries.
Photo Courtesy of Metaphysical Art Gallery
Instead, his work is a visual diary of his everyday life in the form of mixed-media collages of trivial objects — flowers, birdcages, stamps, light bulbs, newspapers and old photographs.
At first glance, the collages, which are assembled within a framework of grids, seem amateurish, almost childish. The doodled outline of a bird here, or a simple leaf with impressionist coloring there. But Ye’s imagery follows the Chinese literati’s tradition of playful sketching. For Ye, these tidbits and ephemera serve as “memories of and reflections of my life experiences,” he said.
Closer scrutiny reveals some Western influences, including the dreamy surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico and Salvador Dali, as well as the vibrant coloring of Paul Cezanne and assemblage canvases of Robert Rauschenberg. Similar to the objects depicted on the fragmented grids, these artistic influences have become part of Ye’s visual language.
Photo Courtesy of Metaphysical Art Gallery
Ye is probably best known for his series of bird paintings, five of which are on view in this exhibition. Begun in 2000, they are executed using traditional ink and brush on rice paper and are rendered in scuffed black lines. They possess a lightness of touch and freedom of expression that could serve as symbols of the artist himself.
“I often see my life as a migratory bird moving among several different cities, fragmented, and with no fixed abode,” he wrote in a letter to art critic Li Xianting (栗憲庭). “I paint and put together my creations in the same way.”
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