Author: YANG JIECHANG 杨诘苍

Size: 233×120cm×9

Signed and dated: Painted in 2007-2008

Estimate:

Final Price: RMB 400,000

LITERATURE
2008 Yang Jiechang-No Shadow Kick / P26-31 / Tang Contemporary Art
signed in Chinese and Pinyin, dated 2007-08
EXHIBITED
2008 No-Shadow Kick: Yang Jiechang, Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai

Clouds, heavy, dark.
Red weighs upon a sinister horizon.
Lightning and thunder,
Their sound，
The voice of men：
“Ya Rabbi”，“oh, my God”，“oh， Diu”！
A symphony of anger.
Then，
Only yelling silence.
Catastrophe and anger
Changed to beauty here.
Calligraphy and painting
Become a pure act of hope.

Yang Jiechang is an artist with a rebellious streak who spans several disciplines. He is never bound by any genre or fixed formula, and pours scorn on the superficial forms of pop culture. He always indulges in his own world of meditation, without being swayed by mainstream thinking. He also constantly changes himself. While challenging the tradition, he adopts an artistic view that turns everything upside down and is also compatible with everything. Yang Jiechang began his artistic career in the field of traditional calligraphy and painting, practicing calligraphy since he was a child. He studied at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in the early 1980s. After training, he has mastered three techniques: calligraphy, ink painting and traditional Chinese realistic painting. At the end of the 1980s, he repudiated what he had learned in the past, and created the conceptual art series called “One Hundred Layers of Ink”, which earned him international recognition. In the decades that followed, Yang Jiechang changed his creation, went beyond the boundaries between China and the West, and between tradition and the contemporary, and established a link between different media materials. He studied Taoism philosophy in his early years, and Taoist philosophy of “moving with the times and adaptability” influenced his lifelong creation.
Oh My God-Dark Red Cloud is a work created after the millennium. Following the “One Hundred Layers of Ink” series that lasted a decade, Yang Jiechang gradually shunned the exploration of purely abstract ink painting language, and focused on the broader current affairs, political, social and cultural levels. He describes and interprets some well-known events in a special way, combining specific situations with intuitive inner experience to create a new art language that blends violence and romance. The theme of this painting is “Black Cloud”, similar to the “Listening to the Clouds” series, showing the concerns about Iran’s nuclear crisis. In the painting, the scene of “black clouds bearing down” is spread in the form of scroll paintings. Huge clouds are stacked layer upon layer, some gathering and some scattering, swirling and changing. It creates an oppressive and serious feeling with the extensive use of ink and wash. The strong brushstrokes are an orderly combination of the void and the solid. Numerous curves with different thicknesses and weights constitute rich blocks and a clear spatial hierarchy. “Cloud” is a symbol of recluse culture in traditional Chinese landscape paintings, but the cloud here is no longer abstruse. Through the thick cumulus, the artist describes evils of contemporary society in the form of vision. The black cloud represents the flow and spread of nuclear pollution in the air. Obtrusive words in the black cloud appear in the form of monologue in comic strips, as if the sound voiced by the humans under the black clouds. These words “Oh My God / Oh Diu” were written by Yang Jiechang following the “September 11 Incident” in New York, the USA, expressing emotional shock using a unique font and mood. Some blank dialog boxes exhibit modern people’s speechlessness against consistent destructive behavior.