“But the tyrannical truth struck me down with ease. Pain has no moonlight tenderness.
In an iron box filled with lies I struggle, trying to convince myself to be a quiet patient, swallowing a breath of resentment into the motherland’s heart.”
When writing this critical essay on Yang Jinsong, these crystal‑shattered lines from poet Shi Tao’s elegy suddenly pierced my thoughts. Like the fragmented, blood‑hued fish in Jinsong’s paintings, they startle and provoke reflection.
Humanity needs spirit, society needs morality, and history needs memory. If these are severed and erased, civilization will wither and die. Should art turn a blind eye to them, it will eventually be rejected. The catastrophes that have destroyed civilization and nature over the past half‑century, along with their root causes, remain far from being fully recognized. If the wellspring of spirituality is cut off, where will the river of life flow, and what will nourish the earth? The crucial question is: What constitutes the contemporary spirit of art? Where does it originate, and where does it point? Art dies only when the spirit dies. Is it true that one prospers in adversity and perishes in comfort? What kills art is not Auschwitz, but complacent vulgarity, the petty calculations hidden within the “freedom” bestowed upon us.
Yang Jinsong’s oil painting can be divided into two periods. Before 2003, his work focused on everyday life, using the small to reveal the large and depicting the individual’s living environment. His approach combined figuration and freehand brushwork, filling the canvas with trivial, intricate objects. This “postmodern life,” with its relentless detail and constant dislocation, dazzles the eye and evokes mixed emotions. Yet upon closer examination, his intention is to gaze inward, to listen to the clear voice of the individual, and to safeguard the love and hope that struggle to grow in the cracks of reality. A poetic solitude resists the overwhelming noise and illusion of the external world.
After 2003, in a series of works featuring dissected fish, symbolic and metaphorical language introduced new poetic transformations. Years of intense life and sustained artistic practice in Beijing brought new vitality to his painting. His images reversed from multiplicity to condensation, merging symbolic imagery with the expressive force of calligraphic writing. Colors became more refined and subtly modulated, and his personal style became increasingly pronounced. His imagery grew clear, introverted, spiritual, suffused with blood and bone.
In the past five years, Yang Jinsong has moved beyond the superficiality, fashion, and spiritual impoverishment of Chinese avant‑garde art. The voice from within carries a profound sense of revelation regarding life, nature, culture, and reality as a whole. The rediscovery of symbolism and metaphor maintains a reflective distance from reality, restraining impulsive gestures and unexamined “concepts.” This creates an aesthetic distance: between the work and the artist’s reflections; between the work and real life; and between the work and the viewer’s perception. These intertwined distances endow the work with tension and an allegorical structure. The work turns inward, touching deeper realms, and its form becomes clear and pure. It demonstrates a tendency toward stylistic development and maturation, unshackled by external influence. For an artist entering middle age, the self and character have been strengthened and refined through solitary reflection.
In the metaphorical language of his “cats” and “fish,” we sense concrete, authentic experiences: pain, depression, cries, joy, or the pursuit of spirituality. They reveal—not represent—the artist’s inner and physical struggles and renewal. True, vivid, and spontaneous, they shed affectation and pretense. His means of expression grow increasingly abstract, breaking open the hard shell of the material world.
Although we may relate these fish to art‑historical iconographies of fish—folk, religious, or anthropological—and thereby identify his unique creativity, what matters most is that Yang Jinsong expresses life itself: concrete desires and states of being, suffering and longing. Through the image of fish that are dismembered, slaughtered, and cast outside life, the artist deepens his understanding of himself and the symptoms of his time, transforming lived suffering into transcendent beauty. In this way, painting becomes intimately connected with the artist’s spirit and body, with his spiritual insight, merging into an organic whole that generates meaning beyond form. Thus, Yang Jinsong is not painting a “cultural tradition” of fish, nor is he simply asserting an “anti‑cultural tradition.” The implication, charm, and realm of his fish are closer to an awakening and a warning regarding human and ecological conditions.
His unique style is grounded in a deep understanding and integration of classical Chinese painting and calligraphy. Classical Chinese painting perfectly unites form and meaning, as seen in the flower‑and‑bird works of Bada Shanren and Qingteng. This is also a concern and method of postmodern art. Although the imagery, feelings, and ideas may differ, postmodern works still require form and meaning, and demand research into and refinement of the ways in which ideas and images connect. The attention to detail in classical painting endows works with intense beauty and spiritual impact, stemming from the ancient artists’ powers of observation and precise depiction.
Deeply comprehending the spiritual dimension of freehand flower‑and‑bird painting, Jinsong incorporates symbolic calligraphic writing. Before 2003, he often used lotus leaves, gourds, old porcelain bowls, ancient pottery, and fragments of mountains and rivers as metaphorical subjects. Industrial, fragmented objects appear among them. By grasping and accurately rendering details, then connecting them abstractly, he simultaneously perceives both the objects and their abstract implications.
His “Fish” series opens the innermost truth of things. In a moment, beneath swiftly moving brushstrokes, matter dissolves into qi, and details become vehicles spreading outward and inward. In the connections between objects, spirit is maturely and perfectly conveyed. Form and meaning support and borrow from each other, evolving into a spiritual beauty of painting.
The poet Zhou Lunyou writes in “Imitating Bada Shanren’s Painting of Fish”: “I now try to let the fish swim out from the ink and rice paper / add some salt and sand to the everyday water / the fish emerges halfway, the other half still remains in the Qing Dynasty / the part that touches reality immediately rots and stinks / the remaining half of the fish still plays on the paper / splitting the painter’s mood in two / the fish sees itself sliced open by a hand / when I feel the pain, I experience the sharpness of the same knife.”
From a comparative poetics perspective, Yang Jinsong’s “Fish” series and Zhou Lunyou’s poem share a common critical theme: between the aesthetic of traditional culture and the lived reality of contemporary society, how can external contradictions be transformed through poetic means into bodily experience? How can abstract thought be converted into a bodily practice of resisting nihilism? The decay of reality and the putrefaction of the body are exposed in the same space‑time; no one can escape. Self‑reflection is a mirror that illuminates the real predicament of individual existence within social structures, making self‑education the starting point of resistance against nihilism.
The triumph of postmodernism was a painful one. Since the late twentieth century, postmodernism has faced a crisis of confidence in the functions of art and culture, yet its greatest achievement lies in its resilience. It broadened the horizons of artists and historians, prompting a re‑examination of works and techniques neglected during the modernist era, and enabling the rediscovery of local and specific artistic expressions, thereby revealing cultural diversity and difference.
Jinsong’s renewed use of symbolism and metaphor stems not only from theoretical and creative awareness, but also from insight into the crises of reality and the times. He clearly recognizes that the power of modernism derived from its spirit of resistance—rooted partly in opposition and alienation. In Western culture at least, as art becomes increasingly fused with commodities, modernism’s rebellious potential risks disappearing, leading to the erosion of art’s power and utopian ideals.
Postmodern art inevitably reflects the consumer age. The whole dissolves, and the individual emerges to dominate all. Popular culture grows ever more refined, colonizing everyday life. Few artists, however, can find a path beyond irony, parody, and deconstruction. Yang Jinsong’s postmodern or contemporary practice returns to the exploration of detail. Attention to detail is attention to the individual, and resistance to uniformity, totality, and cultural authoritarianism. Without detail, there is no everyday life, and thus no contemporary art. A deeper understanding of postmodern art reveals its formal affinities with classical Chinese art.
In summary, Yang Jinsong’s recent works emphasize detail with precision and refinement. Yet if he stopped there, he would repeat the positivism of realist painting. Instead, he focuses on exploring the essence of individual phenomena and on connecting details to form an expansive, thoughtful whole, achieving an abstract beauty of precise sensation. Realist theory claims that art reflects life, but it should be understood in reverse: only changes in life and attitude can change artistic language. Only through the renewal of language can an artist truly “reflect life” and move the soul.
Thus, the inner is a way of life and an attitude, a choice: to live an intellectual and spiritual inner life, with sincerity and goodwill; to turn power inward rather than outward; to elevate life through poetic resistance; to continually recognize one’s own flaws, acknowledge them, transcend them, and renew oneself. This attitude transforms art. The work becomes pure, vital, filled with spiritual resonance, connected with heaven and earth—broad, profound, and wise. Such creation grows robust and expansive, embodying the revelatory power of philosophy.
Language and reality often become prophecies for each other. The dissected fish symbolizes a totality from nature to society to individual spirituality—a death of natural life, a death of the spirit. In contrast, a black cat wandering and struggling in a garbage dump is the survivor of this fate. It is the artist’s self‑representation, self‑mockery, self‑reproach, and a symbol of a free, spectral existence. Shocked by people’s shock, disturbed by the cries everywhere.
For the Chinese, the emptiness of death is more striking than the sheer number of deaths. Compared with the dead, the survivors bear an even heavier fate. An innocent fish faces only a moment of death. When the only currency circulating in the world is selfishness, indifference, and cynicism, even death becomes capital for its makers. Barely more than a decade later, the dead have been thrown into the colorful “Chinese myth,” into a black hole of forgetfulness.
Looking both East and West, the defining feature of our time is the terrifying poverty of social thought, leading to a general enervation of human nature. Trapped in a spiritual “dead fish” state, can we be “reborn”? And if so, through what? This is the real challenge. “Poetic distance and resistance” means spiritual perseverance in isolation. What informs a person’s character is first and foremost purity of taste, just as the realm and intention of a painting are shaped by its essence.
The harshness of existence, the barrenness of cultural ecology, and the scarcity of spiritual values all point to the depth of our predicament and our self‑awareness. Although “depth” is taboo in postmodern fashion, throughout history it is the serious, rigorous, profound, and refined works that uphold the backbone of human culture—not the trivial, the sensational, or the glib.
Today’s artistic thought can stand opposite the sedimented twentieth century and reflect on the superstition of “newness for newness’ sake.” An independent artist’s “independence” lies precisely in being both deep and new—so deep that new forms become necessary. Poetry and distance imply a refusal of simplification. In life, one holds a clear political attitude without letting it replace the complexity of lived experience. In art, one upholds moral values without limiting the work’s inner richness. The human condition—including all its contradictions—is fully present in great art.
This is not to say that Yang Jinsong’s recent works have become a new artistic paradigm. Although many imitations of his “Fish” series have appeared in China, his work has undoubtedly opened another path for the contemporaneity of art: inheriting the humanistic tradition, ignoring power and fashion, and refusing to be controlled by the market. Standing in truth, speaking honestly and completely, painting what is in his heart. China needs such artists—individual, even anomalous—who will bring blood, bone, and spirituality to visual culture and carve out new territory amid chaos.
The cruelty and decay of the world originate in human numbness, in the loss of the ability to perceive the beauty of life, in the collapse of value judgments. Jinsong asks: “Does this age still need art?” And through his own art, he answers: poetic distance and resistance are upright and fierce, but ultimately depend on spiritual enlightenment. Without it, not even paradise or love can survive. The foundation of spirituality is existence itself; its opposite is nihilism. Purifying one’s vision and cleansing the self is a necessary means of resisting nihilism. Resisting nihilism means returning life to the source of creation (heaven) and to the embrace of humanity (human beings). Only when the open heart is filled with the ceaseless energy of the interaction between heaven and humanity can spirituality approach the sacred.
As Leszek Kołakowski noted: “The word ‘sacred’ is often used seriously and earnestly by people who do not consider themselves religious. How is this possible?” The philosopher John Dewey distinguished between “religion” as a noun and “religious” as an adjective. He rejected the former but affirmed the latter. For Dewey, a person is “religious” if they approach certain things with reverence—whether in art, science, morality, friendship, or love. In other words, it does not matter whether one believes in a religion; what matters is whether one has ultimate concern, whether one recognizes values that transcend individual life. Religion constructs a perfect metaphysical world to anchor these values, then uses that world to illuminate and transform the real world. This is why saints can uphold ideals, endure suffering, fear no isolation, and fear no obscurity. For those without religious belief, this requires even greater inner strength.
Strictly speaking, those capable of creating spiritual art today should embody a saintly spirit.
Tsinghua University
Sep. 2008
Criticism Autor:
Dao Zi
Professor of Tsinghua University |