Manipulations of Tradition: Environmental Concerns in Yang Yongliang's Digital Prints

In the past twenty years, Shanghai has developed at a seemingly exponential rate, quickly becoming China’s most urbanized city and an international business center. Chinese artist Yang Yongliang 杨泳梁 was born, raised, and continues to live in Shanghai and his works engage with the changes he has witnessed in his lifetime. The artist’s born-digital prints are influenced by and react to Shanghai’s increasingly globalization, manipulating and restructuring the imagery of traditional Chinese landscape painting, a symbolic cultural icon. This exhibition will explore the connections and disparities between the original landscape scroll paintings and Yang's reinterpretations. 

Classical Chinese philosophy emphasizes the union of man and the environment in search of harmony with nature. Ancient Daoist belief in the sacred earth influenced how traditional Chinese artists visually and conceptually perceived landscape. Themes of purity in nature and of human-nature unity are prevalent in Daoist tradition and embodied in traditional Chinese landscape painting, or shanshuihua 山水画. As modern China’s landscape becomes increasingly urbanized, many contemporary Chinese artists evoke traditional imagery as a means of commenting on modern city life. Yet these portrayed urban landscapes do not focus on harmony, but on the growing hostility between humankind and the natural world. [1]

This pointed reinterpretation of traditional imagery can be found in the photocomposites of contemporary Chinese artist Yang Yongliang. He recreates the works of old masters, primarily from the Song Dynasty, in a new medium – photo collage. In combining both traditional and contemporary elements, he speaks to the recent shifts in Chinese society and economics, a topic that interests many artists of his generation.Yang Yongliang initially began experimenting with traditional imagery because of his fear of losing an inherent part of Chinese culture. Yang grew up studying traditional Chinese culture, calligraphy, and painting from his mentor who was a professor in Hong Kong and a student of Liu Haisu 刘海粟. As he was a longtime student and appreciator of shanshuihua, he feels uneasy that China’s goal of modernization will result in a loss of the subtleties of Chinese culture. As he stated in an interview with the CEO of JWT Worldwide: “I think modernization is devouring everything at an ultimate speed, including history and culture, that is to say some humanities, and even a kind of kinship, a kind of human interest that Chinese people value so much. Such elements are now less and less. In my view, development is important. But I think we should think about retaining something behind the development, or protect something we should have originally, so as not to lose all traces of [Chinese culture] after a number of years." [2]

It was not until 2005 that he began experimenting with new media, gradually forming the unique style of his work today. Yang creates digitally manipulated photo collages that evoke traditional Chinese landscapes in both imagery and format. The texture and rules of composition are borrowed directly from shanshuihua paintings, where “the image’s moral and contemplative component is ultimately more important than its aesthetic quality.” [3] In his juxtaposition of two different art aesthetics, he succeeds in blending China’s current fast-paced urban environment with the tranquility of traditional landscape paintings.

Yang’s works represent his belief that the traditional human understanding of nature and the natural environment itself are in danger of being destroyed by China’s current goal of reaching modernization and urbanization. His photo collages simultaneously evoke the feelings of a traditional landscape painting, while also showing the threat to nature of China’s modernity. While he is not the only contemporary Chinese artist to employ traditional imagery as means of critiquing contemporary life, his works are unique in that he is presenting traditional depictions of nature to raise awareness of China’s environmental issues. Underlying his apocalyptic warnings and pleadings for environmental consciousness, Yang’s artworks also imply his desire for a return to traditional Chinese aesthetics and values, where man-nature harmony can be restored.

---
[1] Kiu-wai Chu, “Constructing Ruins: New Urban Aesthetics of Chinese Art and Cinema, “ Master’s thesis, The University of Hong Kong, 2009: 42.

[2] “Contemporary Artist Yang Yongliang on Worldmakers,” Youtube video, 5:22, posted by “JWTWorldwide,” September 5, 2013.

[3] David Rosenberg, “The Mirror of Time,” Galerie Paris-Beijing, May 2011