Yang Yongliang by Thircuir Ltd.

Yang Yongliang : Landscapes

Essay by David Rosenberg All images selected from Yang Yongliangâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s works

The Mirror of Time David Rosenberg

Yang Yongliang walks through his city – Shanghai – and photographs the buildings that he will then use to compose his “Phantom landscapes”, his “Heavenly Cities” and “Artificial Wonderlands”; these series of digital “pictorial” works whose visionary power and plastic coherence have quickly earned him unanimous international recognition. He is above all a walker, a surveyor. In this he joins the line of the pioneers of modernity, such as the photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927), a large part of whose work consisted in keeping a kind of inventory or visual archive of the architectural forms that surrounded him, both those that were about to disappear and those that were just appearing. He was not an observer of a serene and impassible landscape, but rather of continuous upheaval. Thus his photographic images could not be conceived, according to him, without this double determination: the mobility of the artist, and the city as the field of a visual, philosophical and artistic investigation. These two characteristics are also found in the works of Yang Yongliang.

Strolling, wandering, collecting: his attentiveness and the shifting outlines of his gaze also call to mind Walter Benjamin’s “Passages”, where he writes thus about Paris: “Even to the flaneur, the city – be it that where he was born (…) – is no longer native soil. It represents to him the stage for a performance.” This line, this lineage also reaches back to the surrealists, to Aragon, whose visual as well as poetic work “The Peasant of Paris” traces back the genesis of the complex feelings that the transformation of the Parisian landscape inspire in him. For these idlers, these gleaners of perceptions, thoughts and fragmentary affects, the “now” of the image contains the “once upon a time”. The traces and remanences are at the heart of their concerns and, if they compose their works using the visible, it is as much in order to decrypt that which it unveils as that which is left concealed within it. Seeing is a way of thinking, and thinking is another way of seeing. It isn’t just about simply recording, but as the American photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976) explained, it’s about working with a “machine” for inventing new ways of seeing. Their gaze is a prism whose facets diffract not only light, but also time and history. Through this dialectic seizure of present and past, what emerges is a vision of the future or of possible futures. “Each era dreams of the next”, wrote the historian, Jules Michelet. In the works of Yang Yongliang, the stroll is not limited to

a physical walk amid the urban landscape. It is also a mental walk through images of the history of art. It is from this double advance – through an upset and evanescent physical space as well as a stable, impassible mental observation – that this present body of work is derived. “The city,” he explains, “is the place where I live, a space that evolves with me and which contains my memories. A mirage or ghost-city is the environment towards which I reach out, but it only exists in my imagination. The water of the mountain (the landscape) suggests the imitation of the traditional art forms of my childhood, which have gradually disappeared as the city and I have evolved. The birth of the Ghost Landscape is not an accident. The City, the Landscape – I love them and hate them at the same time. If I love the city for its familiarity, I hate it even more for the staggering speed at which it grows and engulfs the environment. If I like traditional Chinese art for its depth and inclusiveness, I hate its retrogressive attitude. The ancients expressed their sentiments and appreciation of nature through landscape painting. As for me, I use my own landscape to criticize reality as I perceive it.” The megalopolis and its new technologies are seen as a biotope of images and art; the contradictions, tensions and mutations of the real are the motor of creation; the remanence of traditional culture and the emergence of

new ways of thinking that polarize contemporary artistic conscience: this, in brief, is what characterizes Yang Yongliang’s work. But getting back to the profound connection between the artist and the city of Shanghai, it should be stressed that it is not so much this particular city, with its characteristics, its “soul”, its history and aesthetics, that interests him. The issue that is at the heart of Yang Yongliang’s work is the essence of “building” – the grey seriality, the repetition of the same, the proliferative and uncontrolled phenomenon of excessive urbanization, and the antagonistic relationship to nature which underlies it. In a sense, he is like those scholars whose pictorial work was based more on a conception and a feeling of nature than on direct perception and observation. Another paradox is that the artist uses the photographic medium and the resources of modern technology to produce these “paintings”, whose texture and whose rules of composition are borrowed directly from Shan Shui, the traditional landscape art of China, an art in which the image’s moral and contemplative component is ultimately more important than its aesthetic quality. On the one hand the artist uses this open reflection on the world, while on the other there is a critical reexamination of his medium of choice as well as the pictorial heritage in which he was trained, making Yang Yongliang a contemporary artist in the full meaning of the term.

The critical potential contained in his works may not, however, be reduced to ecological clichés or to the righteous feelings of a guilty conscience deploring the loss of the link between man and nature. There is in them a true visionary breath, a spectacular sense of composition that allows the artist to play with a wealth of almost imperceptible details without ever losing sight of the whole of the landscape of which they are a part. Faced with the accumulation of skyscrapers and oversized buildings, faced with these pharaonic construction sites, these mountain-cities or mountains of cities, one thinks of the German Expressionists and Dadaists, such as John Heartfield or the brilliant Belgian engraver, Frans Masereel – who, it so happens, also spent time in China – both major critics of the dehumanized modern megalopolis. One also thinks of Altdorfer’s battle scenes, of Brueghel’s Tower of Babel, and of Bosch’s apocalypses. Nevertheless there is a notable distinction: In Yang Yongliang’s works there is no trace of the individual, not a single human figure in sight. What does this mean? Is there no actor, no author? Does the city reproduce itself by itself indefinitely? Does it proliferate along the lines of uncontrollable metastases? Or should we seek the answer in the seals and inscriptions in red ink that adorn these rolls of paper? Seen from afar, these signs inevitably recall the texts and marks of collections that adorned ancient paintings. But here we find an accumulation

of bar codes and the logos of multinational corporations. It is these abstract entities that sign the landscape we have before our eyes, they are the co-authors of these latent images that the artist makes visible and records. Construction and destruction, inevitable cycles: it is a total show that is both strange and familiar. We are torn between the limbo of dreams and naked reality. The essence of the megalopolis is revealed here: it is a colossus with feet of clay. Here a giant wave sweeps away everything in its path, there buildings stand half-submerged, elsewhere disturbing steam clouds completely cover the surroundings, buildings teeter on their foundations, or else dramatic and devastating explosions shatter a once familiar and livable world into pieces. Only from a certain distance is it possible to account for these invisible and antagonistic energies whose tumultuous interlacing sometimes draws majestic and unique shapes, and sometimes draws accumulations of discordant structures. It is these energies that open up space or lead to its saturation; these energies which generate fluid and ample traffic patterns or lead to fatal gridlocks. Hence the “distant” and withdrawn point of view from which the artist builds, directs and composes his “paintings”. Premonitory works? Yang Yongliang’s landscapes linger patiently: they are simply waiting for the world to end up resembling them. There is a profound truth in them which

gives them a head start on their model. The mimetic relation between the real and the image – between the model and its double – is reversed. It is like Picasso explained to Gertrude Stein, whom he had just painted, that if the painting did not look like her, she would end up looking like the painting. The images emerge. They appear like a ghost ship on the shimmering surface of the deep waters of the unconscious. The conditions conducive to the breakup of the spirit and to the fragmentation of sensitivity must be fulfilled so that both the gaze and the world can be transformed and can complete their reconstruction. Whether it is patiently meditated and planned in its structure as well as its execution, or whether it is the unpredictable consequence of an instinctual and uncontrolled energy, the picture – the oracle – only takes place and achieves its full significance in relation to reality, going beyond mere likeness or verisimilitude. It is at this price that it acquires its illuminating power of anticipation. The picture – the big picture – is the mirror of time. In it are reflected the startling landscapes of Yang Yongliang, which are like the memory of the future.

Artificial Wonderland I, detail

Artifical Wonderland 02

Artifical Wonderland 02, detail

On the Quiet Water View of Tide III

On the Quiet Water, View of Tide III, detail

On the Quiet Water View of Tide I

Phantom Landscape III, Misty City I Phantom Landscape III, Misty City II

Phantom Landscape I, No I

Artifical Wonderland part 2

Phantom Landscape III, Funfair City, detail

Artifical Wonderland part 2, detail

Phantom Landscape III, Funfair City, detail

Phantom Lanscape I No III

Phantom Lanscape I No II

Heavenly City

A Cloud On The Horizon

Heavenly City, Skyscraper

Heavenly City 1

Heavenly City, Untitled 1 Heavenly City, Untitled 3

On the Quiet Water Underwater Paradise

On the Quiet Water, Underwater Paradise, detail

On the Quiet Water View of Tide II

On the Quiet Water, View of Tide II, detail

Phantom Landscape III Triptych 1,2,3

Phantom Landscape III, Triptych 2, detail

Snow City, Quaternity I

Phantom Landscape III, Day of Night

Snow City, Quaternity I, detail

Phantom Landscape III, Day of Night, detail

Snow City 1

Snow City 2

Snow City 3

Snow City, Quaternity 2

Snow City, Quaternity 3

Snow City, Quaternity 4

Snow City, Quaternity 2, detail

Artifical wonderland part 1, detail

City of Light, detail

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Thircuir Limited. Editor Editeur

Enoia Ballade Essay Texte

David Rosenberg Translation Traduction

Thomas Bartz