THE DRAMAS OF VIOLENCE : Solo Exhibition by YANG SHAOBIN
March 9 - March 18, 2007
GALERI NASIONAL INDONESIA, JAKARTA




Approaches/ Encounters/Realities
by Alexander Ochs, Curator

First Approach

1996, Kunstmuseum Bonn: I’m standing in front of a picture. It shows six policemen in green uniforms. The image formation is wrong. They are laughing. Are they laughing at me? A butterfly is fluttering through the picture. There is something wrong about it. About the picture, and about the butterfly. Somebody is struggling here, trying to give form to something that is not yet educable for him. The autodidact Yang Shaobin is painting his past. The past of Yang Shaobin, the policeman. The work, a square of 170 x 170 cm, was painted in 1993. Since 1991 Yang Shaobin lives in the artists’ village of Yuanmingyuan. He lives there illegally. Later, talking about this time, he says that he had found it hard to paint. He was labouring at that time, with that time, with the year 1989. With the years before, and with the years following. He had resisted the label of the Cynical Realists. And yet he had longed to be part of it all.
Everything is wrong about this picture. Everything is wrong about this time. The painting repels me, it will not please. And yet it will not let me go. 

First Encounter

1996, Beijing: I meet Fang Lijun in front of the CD-Café. Jazz is played here, Cui Jian performs here with a red blindfold over his eyes. The singer is no longer allowed to sing, he plays trumpet in his café. Fang Lijun introduces me to his friend Yang. The painter is not allowed to exhibit his paintings in China. He is very friendly. He is probably doing therapy for and by himself, painting his past into paintings of policemen.  
The picture ‘Untitled’ emerges in 1996. It shows two men in front of a lake. The water, the overgrown shore, exudes a feeling of peace. The man standing on the right is choking the man on the left. The man on the right is wearing a uniform-jacket. Its green colours seem to merge into the landscape of the waterside. He is retching on the man standing below him. This man is wearing the face of Fang Lijun.  

The artists are on their way to Rita und Uli Sigg. The Swiss embassador has invited them for dinner. During this time, Sigg starts to collect Chinese artists. He cannot show them, but he shows himself with them.

In Beijing, seven years later: I meet Yang Shaobin for lunch in a Beijing-luxury-restaurant. He is just back from Tangshan in the Province of Hebei. There, he is preparing his exhibition ‘Miners – 800 Meters under’; several pictures from this cycle shall be on display at TATE Liverpool in 2007. The artist is still shocked, by the dirt, the violence and the exploitation of the miners and their families. He is talking about his fears, those rather personal, and those he feels for ‘his people’. He has remained true to his subject. During his report he appears very gentle, almost tender. He still seems to be painting away the horror.

Second Approach

Venice-Biennale, 1999: One room, two works by Sigmar Polke, three large-sized works by Yang Shaobin. The Chinese artist can meet Polke. He can meet up to him. Huge, bloody paintings. Portraits of deformed faces in which the colour seems to transform into raw meat. Colours used as if they were blood. The paintings’ backgrounds closed, almost hermetical, inaccessible. ‘Real’ paintings. The artist acts us out, shows our precipices, our injuries, our phantasies of violence – all the poor ambivalence of human existence. The artist has disengaged from China. He has become universal in his statement and clear in his expression. Colour gradients in bleeding red quote Western painting, the abandonment of central perspective, the plane hierarchy points towards the East. Harald Szeemann declared, the 21st century would belong to the Chinese artists. For Yang Shaobin it had already started. However: he still cannot be shown in China, in the West one sees what he has learned. Although never catholic, although not gay: he is again and again compared to Francis Bacon. 2006 he paints the picture ‘Sleepless Francis Bacon’.

Theory

Probably the autodidact has already arrived in art history. Against his own will. In 1992 he says: ‘I keep running over the pages of books on art history. They are heavy and boring! I think, I don’t want to be tied by art history. I would never become free. I’m an artist, not an academic. And that is why all I need is my instinct for art and the feeling of joy while I paint. It is not easy to live in the real world, but I don’t have to explain anything… I don’t need to pretend and act as if I had a mission to save the world… And there is no solution. Then, I can only laugh. And maybe this is exactly my attitude towards myself.’

Astonishment

We are astonished. Yang Shaobin is laughing. Laughing at himself. It is no longer his policemen, who are laughing. Somebody is laughing away his fears here. Undesigned, no ambitions, aimless.  All he needs is the feeling of joy when he works. The feeling of joy, when his brush leads him, when the colour determines him, when he brings himself onto the canvas, without filter, without catalyser. In 2003, he gives a small picture to me. The title is ‘Climax’. Green in green, two men in front of a concrete column. This could be in an underground garage. And again the familiar theme: one man choking another man. The retched man is screaming. The well known motif of human violence – and yet different. Both men and column appear to be kicked out of the perspective, the column almost seems to strike the men. The architecture becomes part of the violence. The line is new, rather reduced, the colour gradients have disappeared. There is no more painting-over. The various greens and blacks are applied side by side, the brush has become broader, faster, more energetic, the line fits. Close application of colour, thin, leaving the canvas almost transparent, the force of almost fluttering lightness and, for the first time, space, an idea of perspective. The painter sets the light in the front, the room opens into the depth, into the black.

Politics

Then, later, the political paintings. Big cycles of works to the Asian Wars, the Japanese War, the allies of Hitler, the Korean War, the war in Iraq, the colonization of Asia and the account of post-colonialism. Armies are choking armies. Systems are choking systems. Weapons, blood, lies, the artist has stayed true to his subject. China is part of the global world, Yang Shaobin conserves history, freezes time, retains the inflation of media-images. He breaks open the monochrome character of his work. He uses colours, wrong colours, the colours of electronic media, the colours of press-photographs, the falsified colours of the internet. And yet no persuasion, no didactics, nothing missionary, no statement, no clues, nowhere. Although the artist now affords titles – before, he only numbered his works – these titles are often absurd, delusive, and meaningless. Painting merely for creating a moment of joy for the artist?

Realities / Circumventions

In summer 2006, conversations with the artist about exhibitions in Berlin, Jakarta and Havana. 2006, a year of global warming, the German Pope visits the Blue Mosque in Istanbul /Turkey, in Iraq four thousand American soldiers and thousands of civilians die, in Cuba Fidel Castro temporarily disappears from the television-screens, in China there are ten thousands of stoppages and strikes, also in the mines. Yang Shaobin paints nine pictures to the Ten Commandments for the St. Matthew-Church in Berlin.

The artist uses images from the public media as pattern. Television images, press photographs. He shows us adultery in an American porn-film, he shows us the press officer of Saddam as liar, he shows us the thief as an industrial spy, he shows us the weapons of the Taliban. The image of Christ mutates into the figure of a blood-streaming panda, the abandoned father turns into a desolate victim of the flood in New Orleans. The Ten Commandments, the universal system of values in the Western world. The artist turns it upside down. For the church, these pictures are too rigorous, too tough, too straight. They can’t be shown. They could hurt Christian religious feelings.

Yang Shaobin paints a cycle about Fidel Castro. A German manager, friend of the dictator, wants to show them in Cuba. Yang paints the falling Castro in Santa Clara, the tired hero of the revolution in a chintzy-red robe, on the sickbed. Yang Shaobin shows realities, and yet the wrong pictures. The Götterdämmerung has started, there, in Cuba. No gallery in Cuba is found that would dare exhibit these paintings.

Alexander Ochs| Curator and Art Dealer

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