Emerging in the 1990s, when Chinese artists were attracting attention for short-lived movements such as Political Pop and Cynical Realism, Yang Jinsong found his subject matter in everyday life. This may sound prosaic, but in China at that time every day was an adventure, as the country adjusted to a new economy and new life choices. Jinsong’s paintings reflected the incipient chaos and anxiety that comes with rapid change.
A crowded apartment would supply Jinsong with an endless supply of images: furniture and fixtures, laundry on a line, shelves of consumer products, stray wires and cords, cigarette butts, computer and TV screens, toys, knick-knacks, food on the stove, food on the table... a virtual encyclopaedia of contemporary clutter. In the midst of the mayhem one would invariably find the faces of Jinsong and his wife, Shecai, smiling faintly, serenely indifferent to all that junk multiplying seemingly by its own volition.
Often the heads of husband and wife would be joined to the same body as a testament to their closeness. These paintings suggested that the world may have become an inferno of consumerdom, but the couple were safely at home, behind closed doors, keeping the madness at bay.
Jinsong’s pictures anatomised the culture of excess that enveloped China in the 1990s, and what it was doing to people’s minds. He would paint cats, looking self-satisfied or hungry; watermelons turned into micro-worlds in which tiny figures and objects were embedded; and fish, torn asunder as if by greedy diners. This was both a nod to tradition and a departure. While fish have been popular subjects in Chinese art, they were almost always viewed as symbols of happiness or prosperity.
Jinsong’s fish were expressionistically rendered and thoroughly mutilated, exposing the pink flesh within. They relate to the culture of excess and opportunism that was rapidly supplanting the ascetic values of the Maoist era. When Deng Xiaoping famously announced that it was glorious to be rich, the genie was let out of the bottle, bringing both good things and bad.
Over the past two decades China has gone through a political contraction, shutting down many of the freedoms that artists once enjoyed. Factor in the extended lockdowns that came with COVID-19, an economic downturn and a new wave of international tensions, and the atmosphere is far gloomier than it was in the manic 1990s.
Much of Jinsong’s recent work has been landscape-based, which may be seen as a strategic retreat from the more provocative themes of urban life, perhaps in emulation of the literati painters who would withdraw to the countryside at the fall of a dynasty, such as the collapse of the Ming in the mid-17th century.
The literati landscapes are known for their serenity, as the artist-in-exile created images of nature that reflected his own search for peace and harmony, far away from the turmoil of politics. Jinsong’s paintings are a very different proposition, being busy and agitated, constructed from a mass of tremulous lines and dribbles. These are still distinctively Chinese landscapes, drawn with the brush rather than painted, but there is no invitation to quiet contemplation. The artist’s own apprehensive state of mind has been translated into a view of jagged hills in which spidery lines act like tributaries, bringing an electrical charge to every corner of the work.
Jinsong has painted a few strands of bamboo in an equally anxious manner and returned to the theme of fish on a plate, but without a trace of cheerfulness. These fish are a dull grey, as are the plates they sit on, and their surroundings. The only notable colour is a slash of pink, where the fish’s belly has been crudely sliced with a knife. There is nothing dull, however, about the way the paint has been applied - in vigorous, sweeping brushstrokes that create a sense of dappled light.
There may have been a lot more colour in Jinsong’s earlier fish, which virtually exploded onto the canvas, but today’s fish are creatures of a more withdrawn and cautious age. The crass, excessive China of the 1990s looks vibrant in comparison with the closed society we see today, but Jinsong’s response is just as acutely tuned to the temper of the times. His vision of the present may be sombre, but it’s infused with a nervous energy that is characteristically, eternally Chinese.
John McDonald-Art critic & historian
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