Based on his intuition, he once again developed a new understanding of the possibilities and essence of painting.
“As an act of direct mark-making, painting provides an immediate and spontaneous way for the artist’s ideas to unfold, as well as for images to be presented.” Yin Zhaoyang uses his brush and once again turns painting into a tool for revealing the unseen and making the familiar unrecognizable.
“Raging Rooms” presents a lesser-known aspect of artist Yin Zhaoyang’s painting practice. For the first time in this exhibition, he extensively uses acrylic, a highly soluble and fluid material. In the change of medium, he returns to the method he used twenty years ago - a very diverse and unpredictable way of painting - drawing. Drawings often embody their own aesthetics, the artist’s intuition, and confidence. Yin Zhaoyang’s drawings are done in both monochrome and color. Inspired by the transformative potential of the medium, in addition to drawings, acrylics, and oil paintings, he has also created a series of magazine collage paintings, which express his thoughts and concerns about various insignificant entertainment events in the mass media, translated into humorous banters and reflections.
After living in London, he once again observed the subtle coexistence between the human spirit and the social environment. He set the exhibition to center on the “human figure” from his usual perspective. He is presenting more than 40 of his most recent works in this exhibition, ranging from various portraitures such as Self-Portrait in Blue (2023), Man with Crown, Van Gogh, and Lohan, to abstract depictions of the human figure such as Sunrise, Collision, Deep Valley, and Man and Bicycle. His works are often steeped in the intuitive sense that comes from colliding with his surroundings. When we spoke of his art practice, Yin believed that we should all return to the fundamental point of “what moves you in the first place.”
Over the past twenty years, Yin has developed his attitude and style towards events and symptoms of the times through his keen observation of society, human nature, history, and traditional Chinese culture. He remains an idealist in his mid-life. His works have departed from rendering images that portray reality and sublimate to a type of image-making that relies on long-accumulated emotions. The broad brushstrokes and expressionistic core of his works are infectious and full of familiar, empathetic appeal.
Yin Zhaoyang always pushes the most expressive power of his paintings to the extreme, while his expressions of social conflict and absurdities seem discrete, which may be the reason why his works seem obscure and uncanny emotions. His works on canvas remind one of silent theater or a highly vigilant art form. He projects his passion intuitively into his works while hoping to preserve a naivete and sensibility in the medium of his practice.
Room 1: Recovering that nameless thing
This room shows the secrets he’s hidden in his mind, a kind of discrete private life.
“Art can be curious coincidences or actions led by willfulness. Painting doesn’t need to add up, but to let the horse run wild. That’s the appeal of painting.” Says Yin Zhaoyang, “Painting based on a narrative will always have its limitations, but once the narrative is set aside, then you can do whatever you want on the canvas, and the freedom of painting will become great.”
Experiencing infinite freedom in a limited space is an absolute pleasure for Yin Zhaoyang. “Why has painting always been and more and more so an essential part of my life?” Giorgio Agamben wrote in his book Self-Portrait in the Studio that he had relocated his studio several times, and there were several paintings that always accompanied him, placed in various studios; the paintings formed an unanticipated relationship with their surroundings, which at one point gave him the desire to write poetry. I think this is the victory of painting. Painting is the most literal translator of human emotions and the most abstract tool in the hands of the artist. As conveyed in Yin Zhaoyang’s latest works, he transformed the figures into loose, blurred, wild, or uncontrollable forms….
By symbolizing the artist’s soul, Sunrise, in a commanding position with an expression that looks like someone smiling, perhaps the work confirms the assumption that the positive aspects of human nature will eventually triumph over the negative and depravity. As the image and the brushwork overlap, the paint seems to overflow while being hinged within the content and form, which produces fluidity. In these fluid traces, an unspeakable pain is felt; they come from reality. Amid many downcast gazes, a red sun rises quietly, which can be perceived as a symbol of positive signals. In a strong will, there must be an optimistic soul. This work also depicts the void or emptiness felt in today’s complex social environment. It visually presents an overall structure bifurcated by the horizon, with large areas of color fields layered on top of each other, even offering the visual illusion associated with magnificent mountain and river landscapes, which is undoubtedly an expression of the artist’s straightforwardness.
“Painting, in my opinion, is indeed the poetry of silence, a discourse that becomes silent in the image. So, as it may, it exposes the discourse and the mythos. It takes a discourse and the silence, and in this silence, let that which has been restored to namelessness, that which does not yet have or no longer has a name, appear briefly.” And Self-Portrait in Blue is a work in which “discourse becomes silent in the image.”
Yin Zhaoyang enjoys quickly jotting down his first impressions of a large amount of visual and textual reading or waiting for something to move him. In this room, he re-imagines the human spirit – not as a representation of images or symbols – but to provide a site charged with emotions, agitation, and restraint. Just as the Post-Impressionist artists explored painting as a technique that replaces objective representation with subjective experience, Yin Zhaoyang, through his intuitive take on classical painting, reflects the lack of spiritual power and essential beliefs in a lost society while commanding his emotions. He also emphasizes the importance of the medium’s tactility and a personal understanding of the subject matter.
Yin’s creative journey has been long and arduous, like many mature artists. It is not by chance that he chose to paint Van Gogh, a historical figure with a distinctive character, as the object of his spiritual transformation. Vincent Van Gogh, a seminal figure in art history, who represents idealism, especially in the darkest hour of history, beamed like a flame that illuminated many lives. “What is a light that nourishes itself, and what is a flame that needs no sustenance? I think the imagery deals with the relationship between the soul and other passions, it’s related to what consumes it.” “So is the light of perception: it always bursts forth from the outside, but eventually, the inside agrees with the outside and can no longer be distinguished. At that moment, the flame ceases to consume us; it ‘nourishes itself henceforth.’”
Room 2: The Persistence of Drawing
Drawing, the original way of painting, may lead to unnecessary skepticism about the contemporary art field. Yet breaking such a skepticism requires a desperate effort. Yin Zhaoyang alleviates such skepticism by placing drawings into a larger framework, as in the case of his series of acrylic paintings Collision, which evolved from the drawings Man and Bicycle. The shift and diversification of the media have turned the piece into an independent and autonomous “impact system,” which has also formed its subtle path in painting.
The transition from drawing to acrylic on canvas marks the artist’s escalating mood, while the image conveys a cultural spectacle of contemporary society – showing the comfortable and carefree state of being between man and nature. However, what is absent became one of his concerns. Collision represents a difference in systems and cultural clash.
Painting, including the most realistic genre, often leads to myth. Lohan and Pine is a myth, a mystery. The figure in the painting is rapidly splitting into two, as if the lohan consists of two portraits, sharing the same body. He replaces brushwork with knife marks that seem to cut open the paper in a moment. As a person deeply versed in traditional culture, Yin Zhaoyang either draws inspiration from classical tales and historical legends or references the pain and senses of everyday life, and all these emotions have contributed to the development of his figure paintings in recent years. He paints figures as if to allow their spirit to emerge repeated through his various versions, or they come from his research, memories, and dreams. In Yin Zhaoyang’s works, the relationship between thought, experience, and painting are inseparable. Yin Zhaoyang’s life experiences tell us how “youthful cruelty” shifts to “mid-life cruelty” through his works on canvas.
“Art is about forgetting oneself and acting according to one’s instinct. People are constantly changing and aging, and it’s sentimental to document what’s going on.” --Frank Auerbach.
“Oh, what is in the hollow, so pale that I tremble with it?” This is a line from a poem by Hughes. In Abyss, the word “hollow” is written on the left side of the picture, and “laborer” is written vaguely on the right side, and in the middle is filled with destructive red. Yin Zhaoyang frees himself from using heavy pigments, and the saturation of the colors has begun to diminish, resulting in a freshness and elegance that highlights the gentle sharpness of the characters he depicts. Abyss expresses an unseen universal emotion with a specific suggestion in contemporary society.
As a curator, I often need to give an externalized description, but I cannot define the full meaning of these drawings. They are paintings with unique images and shapes and are also the outlet of the artist’s passion after accumulating his skills to a certain extent. What does an externalized description do for a dexterous and vivid drawing? Sometimes, even the artist himself may not know. I think this kind of drawing is the most precious part of the painting world.
Room 3: Raging Rooms (works on paper also can be penetrating)
The title of this exhibition, “Raging Rooms,” is derived from one of the magazine collage paintings in this room. In “Raging Rooms,” something new may happen; once it does, it is no longer new.
The artist’s paintings, created from the most common magazine pages, are presented as an improvisational response in this room. This form of painting trains the artist to capture inspiration when it strikes, which is the basis for long-term creativity. The magazine pages within reach are images of great artistic potential, and for Yin Zhaoyang, these images are the potential of painting that he must inhabit in order to realize this potential.
“Magazine collage painting” is a chance event, a unique encounter, an artist’s instinctive reaction, or even a kind of reality talking. It often implies a change in the foreseeable language of art or identifiable information. On the other hand, painting is always related to memory. If the artist disconnects the link with the principle of reality, then the painting loses its emotion and memory, ceases to be a language, and becomes ghostly.
I would like to conclude by quoting a short passage from Self-Portrait in the Studio: “What our culture lost in the 1980s is exactly what the avant-garde gained in the 1890s-enthusiasm, idealism, self-confidence, a belief that there are many fields to explore, and more importantly: that art, in its most just and noble way, can identify the necessary metaphors by which a culture in violent flux can interpret such metaphors to its inhabitants.”
Translated by He Xiao
