Yi School – 30 Years of Chinese Abstract Art
80 works by over 40artists spanning 30 years of artistic reflection, cultural inquiry and protest.
Where: Caixaforum
When: 4 June – 21 Sept 2008
What: abstract art, Chinese art, organic
On entrance, a softly swaying sea of silk.Chinese fans. Disks of white over bamboo hoops. They hang, suspended from theceiling by thin, copper wires. The initial impression is of a subtle femininefigure for gentle contemplation and might be brushed off as such, but a longerlook and the near-motionless passivity of these objects begins to unsettle –like a herd of pale carcasses hung fresh in the abattoir. The militaryprecision with which these cloth corpses have been strung up, the way the taut,neatly ordered wires gleam like prison-camp fences, is chilling. The fact of theirwrongness – a fan's innate activeness as an object to be handled, createbreezes, cool its user, yet symbolic of the utmost femininity and human contact– highlights this crime, of enforced stillness, pushed at only by outsidedraughts, reduced to this gridlocked isolation. With gut-wrenching calm, QinYufen's Silent Wind [2000] draws the viewer from contemplation ofapparent surface calm into deeper metaphors for political repression, women'srights and connotations of terror.
The artists in this exhibition use the Chineseconcept of Yi: an exercise in contemplation of surroundings, or the actualmatter of the materials, through which they reach a deeper comprehension.According to the exhibition brochure, this represents “the creators' state ofcontemplation and meditation, the way in which both artists and poets thinkabout and observe their environment”. It is the key to looking at many of theartworks here. The artist enters a zone of contemplation where creation begins.
Chinese abstract art should not be too tightlylinked to ideas on Western abstraction, or the compulsive, revolutionarybreaking with the old that the latter represents to many people. Abstractionhere stems from a deep-rooted tradition through which Yi creates an“alternative path”, addressing upheavals in society and culture that haveoccurred in
This strong, traditional basis is present inmaterials and colour. Works are executed in the subtle ochre or sienna hues ofnatural pigments with few strong primaries. Yi becomes an exultation of thenatural world over the man-made. Natural forces affecting the artificial, suchas rain falling on paper. Such works often form a vehicle for protest, anexpression of discontent at the political restrictions among which the artistslived and worked.
In Meng Luding's early work, PrimordialMovement [1988], these bulging, organic masses, oozing over and around eachother convey a strong sense of movement, of a formative process. Here geometricshapes are placed in harmonious conjunction, given rein to create pictorialeffects such as landscapes or rivers, literal identification of a kind Westernabstraction rejects.
Likewise, Yu Youhan's Sphere Series [1984-12]conjures up the soft tones of charcoal daubed on white clay, reminiscent ofhand-fired pottery, a flattened sphere inviting the viewer to drift into theallusions.
The cultural importance of calligraphy inChinese culture is paramount. Many pieces play with this association – asubconscious acknowledgement of black ink strokes sweeping a blank paper field.One of the largest and most powerful canvases draws strongly on thisdiscipline. Gu Wenda's Myths of Lost Dynasties [1985], a huge work ofink on rice paper, sets out to destroy the ideological authority of traditionalChinese characters by changing their shape. Written across the canvas, deformedletters read: “Illumination comes from contemplation”. A manifestation of Yi'straditional yet radical nature.
HeYunchang's Rock Touring Around Great Britain [2007] appears moreplayful, demonstrative of the exhibition's wide range of styles. It is alighter piece than some of his other installations. The artist carried a rockaround the
Other pieces are passionate in their intensity.In Existence No. 115 [1985-86], Zhang Jianjun captures, through thehorizontal, lineal progression of his canvas, a sense of the repeating journey,the ultimate, the only journey we ever undertake. Contrasting black and whitedisks create a sense of rushing movement, invoking a sense we are hurtling tomeet our destiny, like a black comet falling into oblivion, which appears as awomb, or as a doorway of light. It simultaneously conveys the threat ofimpending collision even as it suggests the birth of the new cycle.
Equally violent is Meng Luding's StupidPower [2006], two, rough, grey circles cleaved by slashes of bright pink onblack and white grounds, respectively. An important concept to recall here isthe symbolism that Eastern spatial philosophy exercises in Chinese culture, asdivorced from the geometric forms to which we give significance in Westernculture. Although a two-dimensional surface, these representations of thesphere correspond, in traditional Chinese culture, to the origins of theuniverse. “Qi” is a ball of intense energy, concentrated into the primordialchaos. This is art of protest, the fundamental cycle of energy shattered by theintruding human violence of the synthetic, pink paint.
Yet one of the most powerful works in the show appears to break allthese rules. Ding Yi's piece from his series Appearance of Crosses97-14 [1992] is brazen in its use ofcolour while self-consciously deliberate in claiming and reshaping Westerniconography (Scottish tartan). We might interpret it as a kind of visual,Deleuzian “deterritorialisation”, taking something familiar to Westerners (andto Chinese, if the Burberry invasion has reached there as well as Japan)and making it strange. Ding Yi beginshis canvases by dying the stretched tartan a uniform colour, displacing it from the traditional colourscheme. He then works in an apparently random manner, using four fluorescentcolours, over-painting the tartan with tiny crosses. The effect is riveting, creating a swirling panorama ofluxuriant colour to swamp the senses.
Despitethis year's Beijing Olympics and the sizeable community which now calls the Ciudadcondal home, we still remain largely ignorant of the Chinese culture. Thisexhibition brings us closer. Yi – this attuned meditation on the physical environment– carries both creator and viewer into a wider universe of significance.Whether Yi as a concept is strong enough to bind these practitioners togetherso they can be considered a school is debatable, especially over the durationof this thirty-year period. However, the art itself speaks of a healthycreative scene, of a richly contrasting landscape of artists. Yi School – 30Years of Chinese Abstract Art is a unique window onto some of
Yi School – 30 Years of Chinese AbstractArt
4 June – 21 Sept 2008.
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