Current exhibition • “Les images analogues” • Opening Thursday, October 17

“Peacefully, let us concentrate on examining the scenes from the past that emerge from our hearts as if in a dream”.

The moment we contemplate our present, it becomes the past; if we examine our successes and failures, our joys and sorrows, our achievements or losses, or even old age and illness, everything is but an illusion, like a flower in a mirror or the reflection of the moon in water. This introspection is like a shadow, both invisible and omnipresent. My painting is the practice of this gaze, a breath, a stroke, a touch, an awakening…”

Yang Liming

Exhibition from October 17 to November 30, 2019

Opening reception Thursday, October 17

Starting at 6 p.m.

In the presence of the artist

YANG LIMING and LES IMAGES ANALOGUES

Energy, vibration, breath

An artist creates with his hands, but also with his heart. 

To reduce the works of Chinese artist Yang Liming to pure abstractions would be a misinterpretation born of our Western perceptions. 

Yang Liming was born in 1975 and graduated from the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, but quickly distanced himself from what is commonly referred to as the “Sichuan mei yuan Situation,” a phenomenon that leads the majority of artists of this generation, who hail from this province, to produce similar and uninnovative works.

In the early 2000s, he decided to study Western art, from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism via Cubism, and to explore these different painting styles in his own works. He also devoted himself for a time to dripping, fascinated by the significance of dynamic lines in the construction of Pollock’s works. However, he quickly returned to a technique of working with lines painted with an oil brush. But he was not satisfied with the “touch” either. As oil brushes did not stretch far enough, he preferred to use Chinese brushes, in a style similar to the calligraphy he practiced as a child. A great lover of Western classical music, he then discovered the enormous potential of the “musicality” of the brushstroke. The painter’s gesture, like that of the calligrapher, expresses “qi,” both vital energy and tone, to reflect his own feelings. The result is an image that “concretely” translates the vision of this feeling. This concept, which is impossible to translate into English but could be defined as an ‘analogy’ or an “analogous image,” is therefore imbued with the precepts of Chinese Taoist philosophy, musical composition, and calligraphic gesture. Yang Liming’s work is therefore situated in the interrelation of the senses (sight, hearing), the heart as the central element of the body and the driving force of emotions, and the hand, extended by the tool of the brush.

In 2006, the artist’s first series devoted to expressing the “analog image” through lines mainly explored the structuring of linear segments. A few years later, the artist’s perception gradually changed. Straight lines and right angles gave way to curved and cyclical lines, forming spatial ensembles made up of rotating circles. These compositions are, in fact, the pictorial translation of the artist’s peaceful mind. As he expressed in a 2015 interview with Liao Wen, “When I am calm and meditating on my inner mind, I can feel a rotating space that slowly lights up and produces many more rays of light. What I paint is not just abstract painting; it is literally a ‘concrete’ projection of what I feel. For me, absolutely all of these elements are tangible, including color, structure, circles, and the direction of light.”

The use of color also reinforces this desire to paint the “tangible reality” of sensations. For Yang Liming, red symbolizes passion for life and warmth. It expresses something akin to blood, the bearer of life, but also sometimes a hint of pain. As for black, it represents family. Infinite black is not something dark that comes to destroy us; in reality, it carries warmth and light that emerge from within to help us. The different types of black tones, cold or warm, find their balance in the luminosity created by color contrasts.

The encounter and blending of these two colors gives rise to vibrations, veritable ripples caressing the surface of the canvas like the concentric circles formed by a stone dropped into the heart of a lake.

Ricochets of the heart, energetic echoes of the hand on the surface to be painted, testimonies of the past meeting the present to bring forth the future. 

Analogies without references and doors opening onto the artist’s soul. Works that are as poetic as they are prosaic. Living spaces.