Yang Jinsong's latest painting is about the landscape of the sea, clouds and woods. He draws these landscapes in black and white, and like these neutral colors, they are unremarkable: the sea is peaceful, with occasional ripples; the trees were straight, unswept by the wind; the clouds are silent and steady in a spiral in a corner of the sky. These landscapes exist simply and freely, and the black and white colors clean all impurities, as well as the reproduction of meaning and passion. The seas, clouds, and trees all undulate moderately, wiping away the colors and the light that bathed them. They are pure sea, pure trees, pure sky, seemingly escaping any storm attack. In short, these landscapes are indifferent (if we must call them landscapes): indifferent to external forces as well as to the watch and emotion of human：These sceneries are also the exclusion of human, the rejection of human's emotions. Not only the image of human but also his passion do not appear in the picture. The sea, the sky, the woods, they appear naked, they appear as objects -- for Yang Jinsong, the landscape is just an object -- the sea is just a mass of water, the trees are plants, the clouds are just shapes of air.
This is another way of reversing landscape painting. Whether Western landscape painting or Chinese landscape painting, there are strong feelings entrusted to it. People draw the landscape on the screen precisely because it means so much to people. It is the object of perception of the eye, which sometimes arouses a sense of sublime and restlessness (like the raging sea of the British painter Turner), sometimes lets the observers being quiet and meditative (like the flowing and open clouds of 17th century Dutch landscapes or the lush trees and meadows of Constable). The images framed in landscape paintings always try to reach the senses of human. The landscape in Chinese painting not only touches the senses of human, it even provides a place of dreaming for him. It tries to pull its observer into it, which means trying to get him into it. But Yang Jinsong's paintings here are neither sublime(these landscapes do not inspire people to sigh with feeling); nor graceful(it is prosaic and does not make people indulging in pleasures without stop).Moreover, it has no desire to induce people to live and dwell in it-one can no longer to swim in such a sea, nor can he rest in such a forest-his trees are only part of a tree, part of a silhouette, part of a plane, where one has no place to hide.
That is to say, Yang Jinsong tries here to eradicate the meaning and humanistic elements of landscape painting. He keeps his pictures being as silent as possible, not speaking to people, and even leaving them no room for dreaming. Whether the clouds, the sea or the trees occupy the whole space of pictures until to the edge of the frames. They are absolute clouds, sea and trees. They are made up of dense lines sketched by tiny brushes, filling the pictures and squeezing out any possible birth of stories. The waves, leaves, and clouds formed by these light fragments let the pictures showing a feeling of calmness: the sea has not magnificent waves, leaves of the trees don’t shake and shuffle, and the clouds don’t change their forms. Line after line, countless, they have a gentle game. They are dull and innocent, autonomously using frames as the place of the game. This is a landscape without temperature, a landscape that rejects emotions, backgrounds, history and prophecy--a real anti-lyrical landscape.
What do these landscapes without temperature mean, if they don’t speak out? Is this just the silence of the landscape? Yang Jinsong's paintings are all attempts to draw a cross section. Although the pictures are full, they are all in a kind of cross-sectional form: the frames cut off the sea, the clouds and the trees, or so to speak, the sea, the clouds and the trees are desperately spilling out of the frames, only the limited frames roughly cut them off. So these paintings are just a section of the sea, a section of trees, and a section of clouds. They belong only to their own absolute uniqueness, not being confused with any heterogeneity. They belong to a larger whole, to an infinite whole beyond the frame. In other words, they are only a part of the sea without end, a part of sky without borders, and a part of forest of infinity.
In this regard, these paintings, rather than expressing the meaning of the sea, the clouds and the trees they present, are really expressing the sea without end, the sky without borders, and the infinity of the forest with finiteness. They are expressing the infinity with finiteness. It’s a game between finiteness and infinity. But beyond the sea lies the sea without end. Within the clouds there are no illusions, out the clouds there are still clouds. Trees have no attitude, but beyond them there are countless forests. The sea is only a part of the sea, the trees are only a part of the forest, the clouds are only a part of the clouds -- the meaning of the paintings is outside the picture frame, not outside of the picture. More specifically, it's a game between inside and outside the frame. Perhaps the focus of the paintings is not the specific sea, or trees, but the frame that surrounds them.
It is this frame, the working tool of the game between finiteness and infinity, the deficiency and the presence of the frame, which is the meaning of these paintings. We see so called huge “landscapes”. Don’t we want to see the extension of them? Don’t we want to see the panorama of them? When we see a part of a tree, don’t we want to see a whole tree or a whole forest? Don't we always try to look out at the sea? These paintings inspire our infinite desire. We can therefore understand why Yang Jinsong's paintings are so saturated and why they are so great: a landscape is still a part of finiteness, though it’s placed in a huge frame. So they call for a new way of looking at them, beyond the frame, without the frame, over the frame---very different from the game between finiteness and infinity of Chinese classical landscape paintings. For Chinese classical landscape paintings, the infinity is in the painting. To understand Chinese classical landscape paintings, we don’t need to take down their frames for reaching the infinity. It is hided in the landscapes with finiteness, hinted through untouched places by brush. Infinity is in the inside of the picture, in the depth of the picture and unceasingly spreads. But by Yang Jinsong, for getting the infinity, the closed frame must be taken down. The classical landscape paintings include infinity of nature and human. For Yang Jinsong, the infinity is stretching, natural flat spreading and generation of time and space. His paintings, show us a short cross section, an instant moment of generation, an occasional scene --- trying not to be a special visual focus, but an instant engraving of eternity. They have no interest to capture properly the beauty and passion, but try to change the still picture space to a moment of movement through procrastination. |