Read What Has Never Been Written”
On Yang Maoyuan and His Art
By Wang Jiaxin
The House:
I met Maoyuan in his home in Tailing Village in the Ming Tombs area, Changping. It was formerly a grain supply center built in preparation for war and famine many years ago. Maoyuan turned the lofty and peaceful grain depot into his studio, making almost no alterations. The living quarter that he and his girlfriend designed and built by the grain warehouse is a piece of artwork in itself: honeysuckle growing all over the door frame, wood pillars inside the house, a fireplace built of long bluestone and a polished and extended wooden staircase leading to the second floor…
Maoyuan’s home is such an “attraction.” I get excited every time I go to his home or just think about going there. In his home, we make dumplings filled with shepherd’s purse in springtime. The valley nearby echoes the clap of thunder and flowing water in summer. We sit by the fire, baking chestnuts in winter. There is also Maoyuan’s humor. We have spent many unforgettable long nights there. Maybe what attracts me more about his home is that after driving about six to seven kilometers up along the winding path in the mountain from the valley behind the grain depot, we reach a great dilapidated wall that summons us, again and again…
Whoever lives here is really someone who is blessed and protected by the gods.
Naturally, the story of the artist doesn’t start from here. Maoyuan is from Dalian. A few years ago, he wanted to give me a few photographs of his life taken at an earlier time. I picked two of them. One was a small Russian style train station built in the old day; the other a house by the Dalian coast taken in wintertime. There was not a person in sight in both photographs. They were both very “clean.” I hung the photograph of the small train station in my studio in Shangyuan, Changping. The picture was as peaceful as my countryside studio, awaiting the siren that was forever silent. I hung the photograph of the seaside house in my new home in Wangjing. In this picture, there was a plot of frosted field covered with corn, an abandoned house, a blackened chimney on the rooftop and frozen beachfront. You could make out a turbulent, far off sea under the cindery sky and a greater element that was glistening…
I approach to this photograph again and again, experiencing the emotions of the photographer, feeling the texture and solitude of life. It seems to communicate to me better than any other thing. It contains a place lonely and determined souls can look towards the distance.
Yes, it is such a photograph that makes me think about how someone has become an artist, how a story has started and how a destiny has unfolded from desolation and nihilism…
Traveling, walking and road signs:
Maoyuan is someone who can’t stop. It’s been said that in his free time, he always takes his old Beijing Jeep out across mountains to visit the villages in Yanqing or even further. He drives along the desert on the border between Hebei and Inner Mongolia. When he gets sleepy, he turns the car off and sleeps by the roadside. Spontaneity factors in his life. Or rather, he is driven by an impulse towards self-exile, something he himself can’t explain.
Maoyuan might be considered a “field” artist, despite being trained in the fine arts. His most important experience was going twice to Loulan to help film a documentary that revisited the relics of the ancient Loulan Kingdom. This experience had a profound impact on many of his later works.
The desert, mysterious relics of the ancient kingdom, broiling unusual climate, peculiar hybrid civilization, wind, sand and force of the Nature all attracted him enormously. In the Uyghur language, the meaning of Taklimakan is “once you are in it, it is impossible to come out.” Did Maoyuan think about that at all when he “went into” it? I have no idea. I myself once entered the “sea of death.” Therefore, I know that only when we walk on the desert, experiencing the extreme climate change, sometimes icy cold and other times unbearably hot, and when we almost collapse as exhausted camel, can we really enter a poetic life.
At this point I recall Ceng Sen’s eternal seven-character poem: “Haven’t you seen the vast Zoumachuan closely linked to Xuehaibian. In the immense desert, yellow sand is rolling, as if reaching the blue sky. Autumn wind in September in Luntai is raving day and night. The broken stones in Zoumachuan are huge. The fierce wind is sweeping across the desert and stones are moving all over…” It is such a great description. It was this atmosphere of rolling sand and walking rocks that inspired an artist’s life. It not only aroused the “Northern temperament in his body,” but also expanded the scope of his artistic practice.
It was during this journey that Maoyuan carried out a few artistic projects. One of them was the Road Signs series that was installed in the deep Lop Nur Desert. The materials were all sorts of “shredded copper and iron” found in a scrap yard. I saw those photographs. In one of them, quite a few iron arrows were wrapped around an upright iron pole. The arrows pointed in different directions. It was quite baffling. Another signpost was much more concise, but equally incomprehensible. A wide iron arrow welded onto the back of an iron chair pointed directly towards the ground, as if there was some very profound riddle underneath. There was another “road sign” that pointed sidelong, towards the sky. It is said that years later, someone who was lost in the desert followed the arrows and kept on walking until he discovered that it was pointing to the constellation of Ursa Major. Instead of being real “road signs,” his project was actually a satire of road signs, full of absurdity and various interpretations. It showed the artist’s impression of the desert, as well as transcended reality. It reminded me of one of Heidegger’s terms, the topology of being.
Moreover, I recalled Walter Benjamin’s saying, “Paris taught me this art of straying.” The desert has taught Maoyuan the same thing too. Indeed, only after he’s grasped this “art,” is he able to position himself in the infinity of the universe.
Another project Maoyuan carried out this time was to hire local craftsmen to carve figure statues out of hollowed logs. They made twelve tall and rough woodcarvings and erected them in the desert, towards an unknown distance. (Why twelve? Maybe it would remind people of the twelve Disciples of Jesus Christ.) These works would surprise travelers coming from distant places even more. They would mistake them for something that extraterrestrials had left behind. I really wonder what these sculptures have become. As much as I am amazed by why he placed these works in the desert, they can’t be exhibited, or owned by the artist himself again. They couldn’t possibly withstand wear of long-term exposure to dry climate and sandstorms in the desert. If they could, it would be truly incredible.
In the face of the natural erosion and violence, a force that makes civilization disappear and dissolve, infinitude, and a god that can’t be scrutinized closely, Maoyuan still planted his works there. (This reminded me of the seaside house in the photograph he gave me.) Maoyuan’s actions were both compliant and unyielding. He simply surrendered the sculptures to the wind, “the Creator,” the enigma of eternity. To surrender was to disappear.
Nothing can better reflect his innermost impulse than this.
Nothing is closer to “original art,” or the most ancient origin of art, than this.
Animals:
“Horses and sheep are related to men in a way that shouldn’t be overlooked. They have the most intimate connection with men of all animals. They have the same connotations in both Eastern and Western cultural contexts. Horses and sheep play important roles in the destruction and creation of civilizations,” Maoyuan said about his “Horse” and “Sheep” sculptural series (2000).[1] His work is truly extraordinary. He visited Xinji, a very far place in Hebei. It has been the biggest distributing center for leather goods in northern China since the Yuan Dynasty. He went there on his own to purchase horse skin and sheepskin. In his peaceful “grain depot,” he stitched and processed them (which reminds me of one of Heidegger’s sayings, “Thinking is a handicraft”). He then blew them up so that their bodies became gigantic and exaggerated round shapes. Circles are the ultimate shape. The inflated skins replaced the natural forms of horses and sheep.
In terms of the color he used, horses were brown as they should be. Sheep, however, donned a surprising deep blue. What was more shocking was that the sheep were “conjoined.” Every inflated sheep body had two or three small sheep heads.
“Art should demonstrate an astonishing quality,” Maoyuan said in an interview. This was indeed surprising to hear but it was not intended as a shocking remark. Constant inflation turned horses and sheep into “monsters” that were not recognizable even to the demiurge. What was not possible to transform was the heads of horses and sheep as well as the sadness in their eyes, manipulated by a force they themselves could not understand. They put thinking in an awkward situation or, rather, they revealed the hardship of thinking under atrocious conditions.
They were once exhibited in a gallery in Berlin under the title Zero Gravity. Some foreign critics attempted to interpret this work through the concepts of “round” and chi from a Chinese cultural perspective. But I want to make it simple. He couldn’t have created this kind of work without vivid experience of the physical pain of animals, sympathy for every life on the planet or extreme sensitivity towards and the most melancholy observation of the “variation of species” due to civilization’s sickness and modern living conditions. Works are static. As long as we stand in front of these deformed, bloated, weightless horses and sheep, we could feel a certain powerful pull and the vain struggle of ourselves. We could hear a soundless outcry.
Are they still “horses” and “sheep?” This question is no longer necessary. This is art, the apocalypse of our own existence. We are living in an increasingly inflated world. All of this makes me think of poet Joseph Brodsky’s last sentence in his introduction of Mandelstam’s long essay “The Child of Civilization.” Brodsky wrote: “These are our metamorphoses, our myths.”
Food Inside the Cattle’s Stomach:
The series of horses and sheep has revealed to us that Maoyuan is an artist who feels and thinks through the body. Maoyuan doesn’t usually talk much. Apart from telling stories and cracking jokes, he never voices his opinions in front of others. He doesn’t know what “postmodern” is. He only hears about some of these concepts if people talk about them. The experience of the body in itself and the energy inside the body are really his only secret weapon.
This allows him to maintain an artist’s most instinctive sensitivity and perception. His Food Inside the Cattle’s Stomach (2002) was also a work related to animals and bodies. He packed the fodder being digested and fermented in a cattle’s stomach directly into oil paint tubes. The work was presented in the same package as Marie's oil color tubes. It was the “paint” inside that was different. According to Maoyuan, the work was inspired by the strong impression he got when he first set eyes on the Muslim slaughtering cattle in Ningxia. “It was a blurry memory. After the imam finished praying for a herd of cattle, there were the giant scimitar in the hands of butchers, red blood bursting like broken pipes and the warm and fermenting plants inside the cattle’s stomach. Mild, green, warm, fermenting inside of a body, full of energy.”
To replace paint with fodder from the cattle’s stomach was not only a Dadaist joke. It also revealed the artist’s understanding of art in the strictest sense. People interpreted this work from various angles. In my view, this was more than an attempt to probe into the dark insides of a cattle’s stomach and the unknown digestive system and biological chain. He also intended to bid farewell to academic paintings with this work. (Maoyuan’s fine art academy background comes to mind.) He wanted to turn the “food in the cattle’s stomach” into the energy of art. In “an age of mechanical reproduction,” he wanted to return art to its origin. At the least, the kind of art that he anticipates should be natural, wild and vital.
To replace the paint used in art with fodder from the cattle’s stomach even has a certain sense of religious ritual. We can only be silent about it. Maybe it is the most hidden thing in the life and art of an artist like Maoyuan. Who knows what he was really thinking about as he witnessed the cattle being slaughtered or stitched the horse and sheep leathers like an old lady in the peaceful “grain depot?” Perhaps he doesn’t know it either.
Land and men:
Among his works, it is his painting series featuring the images of land and men since 1996 that is the closest to and corresponds most with the inflated “horse and sheep” series. They both produce strong visual stimulation and a sense of amazement, but the former might be more difficult to interpret. There were dark blue skies, golden lands and human bodies that were inserted into the earth: a partially buried head, face, foot or a leg. Sometimes, a head was on one side while a leg protruded from another part of the ground. Some men whose bodies were half buried under the ground were still straining every nerve to gnaw and swallow old corn (they were like old corn themselves), as of it was their savior. There was nothing else but those locusts that wore the faces of bureaucrats.
“This is the metaphor for danger, signaling the uncertainty of human development,” Maoyuan explained. But first of all, it exposed the ancient predestinate relationship between human beings and land in an extreme manner. The more we looked at it, the more we felt that it had the quality of a “national myth” (Fredric Jameson). It was the artistic expression for “local experience.” As the artist stated himself: “My experience in the barren atomic bomb test ground led me to reflect on the simplicity, lack of autonomy and self-importance of men under state control.”
Land and men have always been an important subject in Chinese modern literature and art. A famous modern poet entitled Three Generations once wrote a poem that read: “Kids/taking a bath in the field; Dad/sweating in the field; Grandpa/buried in the field.” This paints a completely different picture from that of ancient pastorals. I have been to the “barren atom bomb test ground” that Maoyuan described. Many kids there were born eyes shut, unable to open them. Exposed to the unclear radiation, land and men, everything has become eerie and unbelievable. Worse, everything was retaliatory, a cruel joke. Human bodies were completely out of proportion (for example, their toes were gigantic, their heads were bigger than their bodies, their genitals were like those of small children.). The dominant “yellow” color on the paintings was also symbolic of a certain sickness and disaster. It was not only the color of land and a race. Yellow became metaphysical.
There was also a kind of sadness here. An emptiness prevailed. The products of these lands had no possibility for redemption. This was a plot of land that only yielded sacrifices. There was only blind submission towards the land. When we set eyes on large, somewhat monotonous oil paintings, we seem to return to the primitive times of barbarism and deprivation. We experience a grieved heart, as if those people lying there or half-buried in the earth were our anathematized selves.
It was this intense and sorrowful experience of the local land that helped Maoyuan form and develop a distinct artistic language. The artist picked up this painting series of land and men again after a few years later. They were titled Standing on the Other Side. On the lower sides of the paintings, the audience would first see human heads (not feet), followed by bloated and disproportional figures. The angle was either altered or entirely reversed. There were also some new images. A human body that covered his face and sat with his arms around his knees appeared in the shape of a pyramid, with a pair of huge toes sticking at viewers. An ominous shadow enveloped him.
Regardless of whether or not we understand it, such works are powerful and enlightening. I can even truly imagine that those heavy pyramid-shaped bodies are actually there, kind of like a memory of the future.
Coins:
Many years have past since his experience of the desert and searching for the ancient Loulan. But they have left a long-lasting impact on Maoyuan’s thinking and art. Today when the world faces increasing “desertification,” we’ve also become aware of the tone and impact of the desert in this series of land and men. In the first landscape he made this year, he painted a desert consisting of small wavy sandbanks, complete with a dark blue shadow. Maoyuan told me that this was the first landscape painting that he’d ever composed in his life. The first landscape painting only appeared after so many years. It must have a certain “ultimate” quality.
This doesn’t mean that Maoyuan’s concepts and art are monotonous. He is actually a very undefinable artist. His creations of so many years contain a very complex and dynamic artistic relationship. As his name implies, he has been persistently searching for the origin. In fact, many of his works were inspired by the motif of “tracing origins.” It is exactly during this process that he has developed more sophisticated experiences and understandings of life and art. In 2002, he made a video The Middle Way. He used the two sides of a coin to determine the direction he would take in his journey. He left a serious life issue like “where to go” to the toss of a small coin. It is said that he had played this kind of “game” many times before. Once he set off from his house and every time he approached an intersection, he flipped a coin to decide what direction he would take next. In the end, he wandered around in his neighborhood. Once he went very far from home. He ended up going to many places he didn’t intend to visit at all, but he had to stick to the coin. The Middle Way was shot using a coin during the journey he took from his home to a part of the Great Wall in Huanghua Cheng in Huairou. The journey was full of unpredictable elements. It happened to be a misty day. The tone of the work evoked a kind of asceticism, mystery and sentiment, even though it was fundamentally not an ascetic work.
This experiment, like a game, was actually very interesting. (It would have been more interesting had it been interpreted in relation to his previous work Road Signs.) To entrust the verdict of “where to go” to a coin was to open oneself to fortuity. This was a self-surrender, but it also alerted one to attention. It was a riddance of inevitability and regulation; a celebration of possibility and liberation of man.
Thus, it is not difficult to understand why Maoyuan always possesses a tireless curiosity about the unknown road, the unknown, the nameless and various interpretations. As I have written up to this point, I also want to be a bit sentimental: How I wish to be partnered with such an artist, to drive on the bumpy mountainous road in a misty day, to keep on going, going, just like that…
The Fable:
A few years ago, Maoyuan conceived a work entitled The Fable, which consisted of a used table, chair and a crow perched on the back of the chair. He also produced another work at the time, Go Back to Before. It was still a black bird, this time a grackle that constantly mimicked the innocent voice of a small girl, saying: “Go back to before, go to before.” But this bird was kept in a cage.
Later on, for some reason, these two art projects were incorporated into one. (It seems that this type of work has indefinite possibilities of being deconstructed and reconstructed.). There was a Chinese style table and chair set and a black bird perched on the back of the chair, repeaing “Go back to before, go back to before.” There was also a steady supply of bird feces that appeared on the table. Sparkling. Excrement.
The simplicity and mystery of the work evoked such artists as Magritte, who Maoyuan likes. But this work of his is more thought provoking and can further inspire the audience’s imagination.
The most mysterious thing was, of course, the black bird. How did it get there? “The phoenix was sent by a heavenly order. It landed and thus Shang came into being.” Giving this origin story, we might hypothesize that the piece is related to the mysterious origin of a race. It kept mimicking a small girl saying, “go back to before.” It had a force that transcended the fable. The bird’s message can also easily be interpreted as ironic.
What was even more inexplicable than the talking bird was the table full of bird droppings that seemed to have been produced with great difficulty.
The chair and the table, the bird and the bird droppings, these exist in the works as components. When these two relationships make up one, a “myth” of art itself is born. In Roland Barthes’ view, a myth is a meaning that finds its form. It thus acquired the miraculous quality of “the coexistence of heterogeneity” and attained a vigor that can never be clarified.
This shows that Maoyuan is not simple, though his simple self doesn’t allow him to be deliberately mystifying. His art appears increasingly to display a more free and playful spirit, but he doesn’t abandon meaning completely. He intends to create meaning from the desolation, nihilism and humdrum of life in a more unique and creative way. This might be the most serious demand he has made of himself. For the moment, he is an artist who creates legends as well as questions myths.
He still follows these innermost impulses. One of his proposals Dragon was based on the event in Yingkou, Liaoning during the Manchurian state. Many people witnessed a dragon struggling and dying slowly in a swamp during the rainy season. What he wants to do is: 1) look for newspapers that published images of the dragon; 2) look for information about witnesses at the time; 3) search the whereabouts of the dragon bones and to find out whether it was documented in Japan; 4) look for its records in local chronicles and civilian documentation, and so on. The exhibition will present all the materials concerning the investigation, interviews, related information and photographs of the whole incident. What he wants to ask is whether dragons really exist. Because he believes that “we live in the world of trueness and deception, of reality and mythology.” I look forward to the realization of this project. It is because dragon has a special place in Eastern culture and because his unique way of thinking and working would enable the entire event to move beyond the area that usual anecdotes can reach.
Look Inside:
Last year, Maoyuan stunned his friends who were knew him well. He made marble reproductions of a group of ancient Greek and Roman platter statues commonly seen in fine arts supply stores. He removed the “classic” curly hair and beard in the original images of these models so that these famous statues all became consistently elliptical. He then flattened a certain outstanding facial feature of these marble head portraits, be it a nose, an eyebrow bone, edges of a face, corners of the mouth or a chin, etc. He named these works “Look Inside” and moved them into the exhibition hall right after they were completed.
This series of “sculptures” quickly attracted a lot of attention. A German critic comment: “Yan Maoyang…polishing the edges, synonym for European philosophy and power attitudes away. In Chinese culture, the round is perfect and not the edge. This as the base of the working process transforms the prototype and shows the counter culture attitude by rounding the sculptures with the Chinese philosophy of beauty and harmony. The counter culture attitude is both critical towards the education methods of copying Western sculptures as well as the Western idea of power aesthetics as prototypes of beauty.”
This review has valid points and is compatible to Maoyuan’s primary motif to an extent. This group of ancient Greek and Roman plaster sculpture models was introduced to China early last century as the basics for fine art training. They have become a certain symbol in Chinese fine art education curriculum. Maoyuan claims that his initial fine art knowledge and artistic concepts came from the 15th Middle School in Dalian all the way to the Central Academy of Fine Arts. (In this studio, these plaster statues still lie, resting on the ground. They are curiously mixed with the plaster models of Workers, Farmers and Soldiers of the Cultural Revolution and Lu Xun’s statue.) Thus, the creation of this work truly indicates a critique and reflection on art itself. It echoed Food From the Cattle’s Stomach as well as reminded me of Wang Yin’s series of paintings based on his contemplation of early modern Chinese oil paintings in recent years.
What fascinates me about this work is much more than this. On material, Maoyuan doesn’t choose plaster. He settled on heavy marble instead. This decision seemed to mean a lot more than anything else. Thus, it comprises a powerful “critique.” It is as if he combined the “weapon of criticism” and the “criticism of weapons.” It was provocative. Look Inside was also an unexpected name. It first of all gave off the impression that something had to be torn apart or peeled off and implied the childlike innocence of “peeping inside.” It also revealed an intellectual conceit: when one “looks inside,” there is nothing at all…
Indeed, it’s very difficult to “look inside” through solid marble. Instead, people can look inside an artist through this work.
But this “inside” is both open and closed. This is where the key lies. 0509 is a room number for Teda Hotel and Museum. Maoyuan was invited to make a work based on the furnishing of the room. An architect was supposed to assist him in this project. They photographed the interior structure of the room while it was being furnished. These interior details disappeared upon the furnishing’s completion. He framed these photographs and covered them with paint so that they were hidden and became invisible. He hung the frames in Room 0509 so the title of the work became 0509.
I don’t know how the people who invited him to create the project felt about it. It reminded me of Susan Sontag’s statement on tourist photography quoting poet Mallarme: “Everything in the world exists to end in a photograph.” [2]
The issue is that this photograph, rendered with some difficulty, has become hidden. To be more precise, the artist hid it. It is there, but we just can’t see it. This is like the secret of ancient Loulan that has been concealed by the desert.
August 2006
Yang Maoyuan’s “Secret”
The overall concept of this “Permeation” exhibition is quite interesting. I think that “Chinese medicine” is not merely curative “medicine”, but a Chinese method for discerning things. That is because Chinese medicine and western medicine have different notions about the treatment of disease. The essence of Chinese medicine is therapy and the restoration of flow. This is a specific difference deriving from differing cultural backgrounds.
My work is a small, hand-spun ceramic jar with a very small mouth. This small “implement” has no particular traits or threads. To describe it, we could use words like “jar”, “vessel” or “whistle” (it makes a sound when blown), but when it was being produced, I repeatedly told the craftsman, “when it is finished, I don’t want anyone to know what it is for.” Since it does not have a specific use, it isn’t really anything at all. At the exhibition site, I will pile a bunch of them up on the ground. If they want, people can pick one up and take it home. They can play them if they want, or they can do nothing with them, keeping them merely as souvenirs. These things will be spread around by various people. You don’t know where they might end up. Some people might smash them, some might keep them as souvenirs, but they will all retain that aroma.
To get back to the original question, what does this artwork have to do with the “permeation” theme and “medicine”? The connection lies in the fact that this small vessel emanates an odor. It is this clearly perceivable yet intangible odor that makes this object interesting. The trick is that during the production, we inserted a material that creates a certain odor. This comforting aroma seeps out of the unassuming object with an air of secrecy.
When you look inside, the jar is completely empty. If you really want to know what produces this smell, you can smash the jar, but then the object is no more, the artwork has vanished. This is the perspective and attitude through which easterners view things. The reason I chose this artwork for engaging the audience is because it was the best suited for presenting an experience of mine. Also, I gave it the simplest external appearance, that of a rough jar, and if it makes noise, then it also has the unassuming qualities of a whistle.
The Chinese title for this artwork is “Vessel”. I think that anything can be included in the concept of “vessel”. All vessels have a relationship between their exteriors and their inner content, i.e. the two aspects of everything. The English title for the artwork is quite interesting. I chose not to use a direct translation of the word “vessel”, because there is too much room for interpretation in Chinese characters. As opposed to vast, cerebral concepts such as “emptiness”, I rather prefer more solid things. For instance, with a cup, I would rather present it simply as a cup, though that does not prevent it from containing other meanings. That is why I chose this translation for the exhibition. I did it in hopes of revealing a meaning within this artwork, and to make viewers and takers of this artwork aware of my effort.
“All matters are visible” is an allusion to the secrets concealed within the jar. Also, this English title basically explains one of the intentions of this work, namely that there are no secrets in this world. Why would I say that? This aroma is concealed within the vessel like a secret, but through the aroma it emanates, we can clearly perceive it, and thus the odor that is perceived through the sense of smell, and the tangible object that is perceived through sense of touch have been inextricably fused together.
[…]
This is the way of the world. “Everything can be seen”.
Here we share with you in the psychological process of obtainment and loss.
Confronting the Ignorance
Li Xianting
What I can say cannot be better than what Maoyuan has said in his "Conversation in the studio". I am writing just, however, to give an account of why I feel a kind of shock and pressure before his painting.
It is more than ten years since Fang Lijun introduced him to me. I remember his painting then was of a kind of abstract expression with quite marvelous techniques. He later removed inhabit Yuanmingyuan and still worked in the language of the abstract expression .The abstract expression was once fashionable in the US since its appearance
In the 1950s, and it, is therefore difficult for one to define his personal perceptions in that language. Anyway, I could make no sense of Maoyuan’s painting at that time. Between 1993 and 1996, he and Du Peihua went to Xinjiang and produced there a TV film " In search for the Ancient Loulan Kingdom". In that process, they removed to live at the foot of Shisanling, an agreeable landscape that I visited several times. It was in 1996 that Director Lao Du finally got down to the finishing work of her TV film, while Maoyuan was working on his painting. Each of my visits to their home could see the changes in his painting. The film was shown last year and made a great sensation, and Maoyuan's painting took on an amazing change, too, that is, a sense of strength of the land and the composition replaced his previous skilled but casual strokes. I suppose it has something to do with the remoteness and the mysterious history he perceived during his participation in making the film " In Search for the Ancient Loulan Kingdom".
In fact, the most important turn in Maoyuan's painting took place in 1996 when he produced some works about the buried people. This is related also with, as it seems to me, his experience in search for the ancient Loulan, or in other words, those works suggest that he is especially interested in the fact that " History exists buried”. But after that, Maoyuan stopped that language "Of burying" and began in 1997 to paint some big portraits together with the crops. When I saw those big portraits, I could not but recall the mural and picture posters in the days of the Great Leap in 1958 and of the Cultural Revolution. And I could also think of the big portraits by Fanglijun, in contrast to whom, Maoyuan's portraits wear no happy smile as were often present on the faces in the Great Leap period or the Cultural Revolution, nor are they the grimes and grimaces on the portrait by Fang, I was not aware what he was searching for, or put it another way, I embraced questions and said nothing because those of his work had not yet demonstrated his personal manner. Now it reveals that Maoyuan abandoned the way of merely "burying", because that was no more than the way itself. It seems to me that he did not intend to paint the ancient Loulan, for Lao Du's film was a more forceful representation of the Kingdom. I think Maoyuan was in search for the sense of history he wanted best to express by the way of "burying" he had experience in Loulan.
Since the way of merely "burying" was far from adequate to express his whole feeling, he would give up or suspend momentarily the "burying way ". He found his own "sense of history " when working on the portrait and crops----he encountered with and experienced those ignorance forces that sense of history "buried" in him. The big portrait and crop, his sense of history, however still had a bit too much realistic narration. Perhaps he got inspiration from the way of Fang lijun's working of the big portrait, but had not yet found his specific way of expressing that sense of history. Or in other words, the way of "burying "and the sense of history were two distinctive lines in his mind then. It was until an early winter day in 1998 I went again to Maoyuan's studio that I was deeply moved by the first of his works of this sense. The big portrait half -- buried and together with the thick land shape into an unspeakable ignorance and solid horizon under the firmament, which provided me with an exceptionally forceful visual sensation, at least at that time. Putting his previous and later works together under scrutiny, I think he is fusing the two directions of thinking, that is, he seeks to express his sense of history by the way of "burying" which he had experienced in the search for Loulan, as he says, for example, " It could combine my own experience with that piece of land", or " I paint the most ordinary people who look very familiar and leave their silhouettes in my memory and represent our times, with blind creation and destruction. They neither think nor believe, but feel very assured and a bit happy. This seems to be something cruel but really credible, and this is just what I want to express. Burying men in the land is my significant way of preserving this hope."
This "blind creation and destruction" and those who " neither think nor believe, but feel very assured and a bit happy " are excavated out of the memory of Maoyuan and cast into an image until with the land. This is really symbolic of that age. Those initial works about the perceptions of the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution can be taken just as, at least for Maoyuan, who witnessed the Cultural Revolution, the preliminary point for his reflections, that is, the national character or the so-called "Chineseness". The most unforgettable slogan that shocked each of those days was "Man is sure to win the providence”, and we have been immersing ourselves in our self-made suphpria of “the great human victories” from the Great Leap down to the explosion of atom bomb, the field –making by reducing the lake, and the river-damming, from the ancient Loulan, Maoyuan is at the same time in search for that ignorant and stubborn craziness he has witnessed. He talked more than once of the “historic site”of the nuclear experiment he confronted in the process of the search for Loulan, the ancient and the current seem to emerge in his sight simultaneously, forcing him to reflect in the condition of man today, as he says, “In the ancient days, our ancestors worshipped nature, where they were inspired with original idea”.” Men forget that worship in the process of development and progression”, “Modern civilization is a sort of material and blind, stupid and waste development”, “Now, man and nature has become a popular theme and part of politics, and this is an inescapable question for the ideology and the way of life in the fin de siecle, and “I look upon man as a miniature of civilization who is deserted in an environment without vegetation or animation, according to my understanding of modern civilization”.
The most important change of language in the painting of Maoyuan came in the autumn of 1998, the big portrait and the land are treated as a whole, and the rejection of realistic narration led to the symbolic and metaphorical language as to increase the strength and depth of painting. Second, the blue sky and the yellow loess as the major colors render the symbolic meaning and a terse strength, meanwhile, the formation of a vast and vigorous horizon is supposedly indebted to his experience in the ancient land of Loulan, For me, the horizon over that ancient land must reserve an unspeakable history, suffering and strength, which is entirely different from the neat one over the “hopeful field”fraugth with crops, and more different from the feminine Southern horizon. Third, the big portrait is produced in the way of painting the land and thus man is made land, and land, man, which well suggests both the significance and strength. As for this, Maoyuan has made a more detailed account in the “Conversation in the Studio”. Fourth, the big portraits with a limited metamorphosis are not pretty- looking and yet not of ridiculous caricature, who reveal a simplicity and assuredness out of the ignorance and stubbornness, and “a bit sense of happiness” through the blind expression. Fifth, the image is born out of that of the peasant, and moron image just as Maoyuan’s first topic in the “Conversation in the Studio” is rightly maize and crops, he says that the maize on the painting stands for hope and “is what I long to approach to”. I would like to understand his “approach” as a symbolic capacity of the figure, and this kind of figure will not be, without the image of peasant or more accurately the image of the peasant consciousness, able to transform the awareness of the ignorant and stubborn in the profound sense easily into the meaningful image.
The various so-called modernizations are essentially an upstarting ideals and realities of the peasant, through the mediation of the Western consumer culture since its introduction into China. However, this is not the consumer culture itself, for it depends on a basis of wholly modernization society and values, which are not seen in China yet. Especially in the painting before the autumn of 1998, his figures could not be separated from the crops, and the figures in the subsequent works present similar imprint. Meanwhile, the intended handle of big, non-smooth forehead as well as too close facial features in Yang Maoyuan’s painting symbolizes the moron image. This is the source of the ignorant element in his painting. The Painter is expressing his evaluated feeling exactly by this sort of images.
Of this series by Maoyuan, there is an exceptionally important one, which is composed like the picture poster in the Culture Revolution where all the hearts beat in the direction of the Red Sun, nevertheless, a hillock-sized portrait takes place of the Red Sun, and the all-in-the-same-direction as a sign represents in the phrase of Maoyuan those ideal figures who “neither think nor believe, but feel very assured and a bit happy”. It is just this solid, ignorant and stubborn hillock-size portrait by Maoyuan that shock me unforgettably with all the weight of a hillock. The word “confronting” in the title here means that Maoyuan’s painting dares to confront this true reality buried in the pompous phenomena, which I suppose to be an insistence of the artist on his conscience and independence.
Yang Maoyuan
Dialogue with Hujie
On the Ache ; Extracted from: “Beijing Evening Paper”, March 26th, 2000, page 12.
Expanding in the self-esteem and the success to the verge of explosion, a liquid may ooze from the body. A feeling of aphasia, as if lodging inside a huge cotton cover, you cannot touch it, where there are some hidden nails. I like those nails, and try to gather them. Let me tell you a story, in 1987, I went to travel in the North-West. The train was very crowded. It’s a time for “great flow of labors”. When we reached Zhengzhou, thousands of people were filled on both sides of the railway. The scene was horrifying. The train stopped among the crowd. The passengers in the train shut down all the windows. They dared not open the door. The hot air was suffocating. I had no idea then about the great flow of labors, and had no way out, and I was very much scared, and felt a drumming in the ears. In the crowd a young man holding a stick of which one end infixed into the baggage made his way under the window, poked the window glass, tried hard to climb inside the carriage which was now filled with more people. I sat on the luggage carrier, and saw the young peasant make his way next to the bathroom, sit on the baggage, hold the stick in his hand, stare at the floor with a blank look.