"These works are not exhausted in a single glance," one viewer observes. "They are paintings that reward contemplation." The paintings do not fit neatly into any "ism" because the artist himself cannot be wedged into any comfortable slot and called a product of "his time" or "his society." The works are too elemental for that. They reflect his psychological and philosophical drives rather than his socialization.
Yang's work is intricate and complex, and it is imbued with many symbols, tensions, and layers of meaning. He couples the primitive with the decadent, the primal with the subtle, strength with delicacy, passion with philosophy, urgent desire with resignation to fate.
An obsessive eroticism pervades his works, and in Yang's language any object can become a vehicle for erotic communication. Shells, bones, and plants are endowed with sensuality. The artist engages in a battle between the id and the classical world when he depicts a classical nude, a primitive fertility goddess, or a more contemporary symbol of sexuality. He has removed the traditional fig leaf only to replace it with a black garter, a suggestively red flower, or an animal head. Fantasy and rationality interact and enhance each other.
What are the wellsprings of Yang's paradoxical artistic sensibilities, this fusion of opposites? Born in 1947 in Taiwan and a graduate of Taiwan's National Academy of Arts, Yang has lived in New York for the past 10 years. He has had one-man shows in the U.S., Europe, South America, and Asia; under the auspices of the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, he was selected as an artist-in-residence at New York's prestigious Clocktower; and he has participated in the New York art scene, represented first by a 57th Street gallery and currently by a gallery in Manhattan's Soho district.
Yang declares that he has "neither an Eastern nor a Western consciousness" and lays claim to an "epic, collective consciousness." "Before being a Chinese, or a New Yorker, or even a painter, I'm a man," he says.
There is a subtle mixture of Eastern and Western influences in the man as well as in his works. Yang is very sensitive to line, leading several Western observers to dub his paintings "calligraphic" because they are influenced by Chinese characters.
Past critics have also hailed Yang's paintings for their Taoist significance without really knowing what this means. Although they reduce Taoism to a catchy buzz word, their basic point is right. Yang's work portrays Taoist principles in two senses: expressing strength through softness and yielding, and movement through natural cycles and transformations. Lao Tzu wrote,
There is nothing weaker than water
But none superior to it
in overcoming the hard...
Weakness overcomes strength
And softness overcomes rigidity.
Yang's paintings wield tremendous strength, at times direct and violent, at times almost lyrical. He manages to overwhelm with subtlety and detail, achieving an elusive, fragile power.
At first glance, Yang's paintings contain symbols of life and death, but upon further contemplation, the two become fused in a continuum of neither life nor death; instead, they represent the Taoist natural cycle of transformation.
The Tao is without beginning
and without end...
The succession of growth and decay,
Of increase and diminution,
goes in a cycle,
Each end becoming a new
beginning...
The things of this world
come from Being,
And Being from Non-being.
Juxtaposed with this sensitive Chinese philosophy is an urban contemporaneity inspired by New York. "On the streets of New York I sometimes feel like a small sea animal without a shell. One day you wake up to find your car vandalized, your windshield glass shattered into hundreds of pieces. The following day you fall in love in Washington Square Park. You never know what's going to happen next—especially in New York."
Yang's art is engaging visually as well as philosophically. It tantalizes, quietly challenging the observer to decipher the graphic code of the paintings. With ambiguity and compelling dramatic force, this art hovers on the borderline between abstraction and representation. His canvasses are rich with phallic bones; womb-like seashells; skulls and skeletons that lurk like memento mori; spears gouging their way through wood and stone; sexual flowers as if out of a Huysmans novel, almost lying in wait; bizarre plant life, remnants of the carnivorous jungle, ready to reach out and grasp their victim in death's embrace. These elements primarily reflect the organic basis of human life, even when they embody higher levels of psychological or philosophical sophistication.
An exhibit at Taipei's Lungmen Gallery in late 1988 was replete with the symbols that reflect Yang's major artistic and philosophical concerns. Plants, flowers, shells, skulls, bones, pods, and cocoons vie with each other in aesthetic interactions embodying the cycle of birth and decay.
In the series, Marine Egg Case I, II, and III, Yang depicts a completely mundane object, a sea skate egg casing of the sort children pick up on the beaches of the eastern U.S. It is a perfect symbol for Yang: once life-giving, soon dried up. The painter is known for his intense use of color, but here he paints in a neutral, almost monochromatic mode. Marine Egg Case I and II are rendered in subtle gradations of black, beige, and brown. Each painting encloses a careful balance of filled space and blank space. The surface and the background are given equal compositional weight, one infringing upon the other, constantly interacting. Yang's painting techniques intensify this effect: thin drips and slivers of paint reach into the composition's empty spaces like fine nerve endings.
Color enters the work in Marine Egg Case III. At once subtle and dramatic, flows of bright reds, blues, and greens course through this composition. Although he is painting in acrylics, Yang achieves a very fluid effect, revealing his heritage of delicate Chinese watercolors.
Yang advises the observer, "Don't analyze, emote." His advice is easy to follow when confronted with such powerful works as Study for Birth of Flowers, Reflections of Ancient Flesh, and White Shell, Red Flower. Each work has a scattering of Yang's favorite symbols. A female nude rendered in unforgettable color occupies a significant portion of these compositions.
In Birth of Flowers, a voluptuous nude is draped diagonally amidst blossoms, petals, and pods. Her weight seems somehow suspended in floral space.
In White Shell, Red Flower, a frontal nude is seated on the right in a space laced with shells, skulls, and flowers. The figure's neck and upper torso dissolve into a mist of paint.
In Reflections of Ancient Flesh, a classical torso occupies the darker half of the work. Its legs emerge from a deep brown mire; its head and arms are broken off, reiterating Yang's interest in classical nudes. The figure is surrounded by dark heavy paint, menacing bones and plants. The other half of this space is white and reflective, mirroring time and things that are timeless, and reflecting the void. Bean pods and cocoons are suspended in the white space. Wedged between the torso of ancient flesh and the void is a mask representing the observer and the artist, jointly witnessing the passage of time and the continuous cycle of decay and rejuvenation.
Another work, Blossoming Into Poetry, recently on exhibition at the Michael Walls Gallery in New York, is crucial to understanding Yang's corpus of abstract nudes. As in White Shell, Red Flower and Reflections of Ancient Flesh, this canvas has strong left-right tensions. On the left the ruined classical nude appears once again, human form giving way to drapery, drapery giving way to paint. White lilies emerge from the figure's neck instead of a head. The right of the canvas is occupied by an elongated, vaguely female form, painted in rich browns. Yang achieves an unusual impression of x-ray vision by painting bones within the outlines of flesh. This elongated form rises from a fiery base into a head drawn with the striking skill of a fine draftsman. This time instead of a mask it is an antelope's head wedged between the two nude figures, between the fire and the void. Faintly visible between the lilies and the brilliant white void of paint is another animal head.
In Study for Birth of Flowers, the woman's expression is obscured, and she appears to be oblivious of the viewer. In White Shell, Red Flower, the female figure is directly confrontational. In Reflections of Ancient Flesh, the figure is already a symbol, a stylized icon beyond individual identity. Yang's pattern is to alternate between depicting the human body as an icon and then as a symbol of iconoclasm.
The artist often chooses to depict headless women, but this is not the case in Blossoming Into Poetry. Here the figure is allowed a head, a real human expression and an identity. Who is the woman drawn in profile on the upper right? The rendering, with its long, elegant neck, resembles a Renaissance head. Is she an idealized emblem of woman? Is she an erotic earth goddess springing from nature? Or is this perhaps a portrait of a real-life person? Such questions crowd into the mind and demonstrate the intellectually evocative character of Yang's work.
Yang describes his own perspective as wavering between wonder and cynicism, an almost religious amazement at the phenomenon of being, and a sorrowful resignation to existence. Works like Reflections of Ancient Flesh clearly focus on resignation. Blossoming Into Poetry, however, has a delicate vitality which makes it more positive than any of the other works. This painting is both lyrical and potent: it is infused with vulnerability, but this is counterpointed by impressions of ethereal strength. Not merely evoking the macabre or profound, its visual and spiritual impact generates awe.
Erotica in Western art deals primarily with the female body, and so does Yang's work. The absence of male figures is almost uniform, although in some cases this is open to varying interpretation. Animal heads and masks sometimes appear to have usurped the male role, interacting with female figures and becoming major elements in many paintings. The artist has observed that these animal heads are somewhat self-representational. He chooses to depict men (including himself) in this primitive and instinctual way, harnessing the wild animal power which gives his works their visceral impact. But not all his animals are alike. When he first arrived in New York, the animals were tigers clawing and biting violently at each other. Now they take the form of deer or goats, licking or just gazing.
Many of the masks Yang paints also refer to the painter himself. The masks are ancient, omniscient, alienating, and impenetrable. They represent the intellect, not the animal urges. The mask in Reflections of Ancient Flesh is roughly drawn and crude. Two streams of paint enter its eye like inward-flowing tears. The mask is the ultimate passive observer of reality and manifests the artist's philosophical side.
Although he admires the rough surfaces and the thick buildup of paint by artists such as the German painter Anselm Kiefer, Yang's own applications of paint are far more refined and diverse. He flicks with a brush, scrapes with a knife, carves fine thin lines in charcoal, even brings paint to delicate protruding points with his fingers. This texture of paint, like his unique sense of space, color, and composition, expresses his Asian sensibilities.
Yang explores an anthropomorphic use of paint, a man-centered interpretation not merely of objects, but of the very paint itself. His works are personalized, stylized abstractions of reality that do not dwell on the dimensions of time and place. There is a sense of constant motion in the paintings, a powerful, timeless flowing like the Yangtze, the Tiber, or the Nile. The movement reflects philosophical exploration, questioning, conflict, and struggle in his attempt to carve meaning out of a chaotic world. An undercurrent of instability exists in the paintings, where everything is timeless and in flux—a dynamic fusion of object into paint and a transformation of being into a void.
The most elusive element of Yang's paintings lies in his consciousness of the void. Square in the Cycle illustrates Yang's concern with the void in his capacity as a painter-cum-philosopher. A yellow square dominates the center of the painting. A patch of flat surface is in a field of complex depth, whirring and receding into infinity. Yang's cyclical view of life is represented here by the acutely visual circular motion and by the symbolic depiction of density and depth. In this painting, fire melds into a flower, a flower becomes an antler, and an antler becomes skull and bone.
Yang has at turns declared himself a cynic, an idealist, a nihilist, and a humanist. The irony of the artist's name in Chinese reinforces these tensions: the Chinese character for his surname "Yang" has the same sound as the character for the word "yang" in the well-known "yin & yang" of Chinese philosophy, where it represents hardness, strength, and light. Yet Yang's surname actually means willow, perhaps the most delicate tree in the Chinese arboretum and most favored in the stock of artistic motifs.
His titles stand out for their relevance to the painting at hand in an art scene where works are either untitled or given cryptic appellations such as "A472" or "Hearts 1, 2, 3...." Rather than giving surface-level descriptions, Yang's titles are suggestive of the deeper layers of his work. They reveal his poetic sensibility and his concerns with myth, philosophy, and history.
The artist returns again and again to themes of myth and man. The myth is eminently suited to bringing together the primal and the subtle. It is man's way of grappling with the cosmos and man's earliest attempt at naming the chaos. Yang is a contemporary man trying to create his own mythology in paint in hopes of coping with the chaos through artistic symbology rather than by creating and manipulating verbal symbols.
"What is eternal?" Yang frequently asks aloud. Whatever it is, ephemeral though it may be, that is what his paintings aspire to express. These works are passionate "mindscapes," an idea not at all new in Chinese art. Leonard Bernstein has defined music as "cosmos in chaos." If one expands this to define art as well, and the artist as the grappler with cosmic chaos, Chihung Yang is a fierce, aesthetic Atlas.