Pure heart: Yang Jinsong
It seems I have known Yang Jinsong forever, but in reality, it has been only a few decades. We met in Beijing. But he is from Sichuan, part of a generation of painters who revolutionized art in China, daring to paint as they thought they should paint and not how the academy had taught them. They were painting a country in the throes of transformation and change, not just a dot on the map, but a world which would collide and shift the world Weltanschauung.
Yang Jinsong always appears in my memories as a dreamlike figure, a small, wiry, agile man with round glasses and an intense gaze. He has a deep charisma, a depth of feeling which is tangible to anyone who meets him. He embraces the world with his gaze. He loves life and you can sense this, it is a though he is winking all the time at everything and everyone.
And yet, he ressembles the scholar painters of old, interested and disinterested in the world around him. He could be from the Song Dynasty or from a postmodern age after Bladerunner.
What I know about Jinsong is that he is a painter. Every sinew of his being is that of an artist. Jinsong paints and paints and paints. He paints what he sees. But what he sees is not only what he paints. His paintings take on lives of their own, not unlike Phlip Guston’s or others painters of the modern age. The simplicity of what he paints conceals far deeper meanings.
I have seen him paint several decades worth of fish. Yang Jinsong’s first fish were like landscapes, peopled with high rises, electrical wires, prostitutes, bulldozers, tanks, barbed wire, tv sets,.. They were more than fish, they were landscapes of modern China. When China!s art studios were filled with gaping foreigners, trying to understand a country that had opened its gates for the first time to the outside world, the contemporary art jet set was mad about Yang Jinsong’s fish.
Eating a fish in China is a ritual. It portends good things. Eating the eyes is particularly well thought of. The entrails of the fish are considered like a caviar. There is an art to eating a fish.
Yang Jinsong fish have shifted ever so slightly, ineluctably over the years. They have aged well, gracefully. They have become more Chinese, understated, and yet inbued with a hidden violence and transgression. They are more real than real, heavy with emotion and feeling. They remind me of Francis Bacon’s nudes or Chaim Soutine’s hanging meat.
They are not the joyful, skittish fish, playing among the water lilies depicted by painters in the Song, Yuan and Ming dynasty, with their secret messages of love or politics. Of those fish of old; only the carcass exists. The remains. The guts.
Raw, disembowelled, scaled, they are murderous and beautiful, raw with the hurt and cruelty of life itself. They have become visions of the world outside, harbingers of truths. They are visions of the brutal and savage world outside, not only in China, but everywhere. A harsh, unforgiving world, which nevertheless reaches out for love. Yang Jinsong reaches only for love and humanity.
Artists look at things with minute attention. Their attention, their gaze transform those things into more than things, into potent carriers of meaning. In this way, Yang JInsong is an action painter. His paintings are messages about truth and about the heart.
Yang Jingsong’s narrative is that of a pure heart, a heart that sees the way things are, philosophically, with no pain or suffering, free from desire. He is a true Buddhist, a Buddhist in ritual as well. I have seen him write out in ink the sutras of the Lotus and Diamond books over and over, every day. He writes them out calligraphically for his parents, now gone, messages to them in the afterworld.
Yang Jinsong paints what he is, what surrounds him. His brush functions like a « camera obscura ». The duo of the artist and his wife, like twin gourds, and later, the trio of artist, wife and son, in the happy , chaotic jumble of the studio, filled with dreams and ideas and proof of life: food scraps, a hot pot, an old, ratty armchair, a radio, a tv screen, discarded newspapers, ironing, empty toothpaste tubes, rolls of discarded film, portable phones, high heeled boots, children’s toys, stubs of cigarettes, empty wine bottles,. It is a depiction of a life rich in emotions, an artist in his studio with his family. When he sent paintings to Arles, he told me he was sending Van Gogh’s chair. He was sending me the chair of the artist, a universal truth.
Yang Jinsong is a philosopher. With his fish and melons, he evokes his country, a great power in the throes of modernization, still entangled in the nets of environmental pollution, social upheaval, political corruption and moral corruption. It has come to this.
What he paints is intriguing: the hills, hairy with trees (and monkeys perhaps) on the Three Gorges, the Yangtze River where he grew up; the overwhelming, free and wild willows in his garden, rendered alive dancing with every gust of wind; the fish, gutted and prepared for his family and friends, a lucky feast; the watermelon, chopped with the heavy Chinese blade, its round, red form bursting with seeds.
One imagines Jinsong carrying the melon home, the fruit, hot and heavy, sweating even, bought from some peasant gingerly smoking, drnking a warm Tsingtao and sitting on a heap, almost a hill of watermelons, on the back of an old truck in Beijing when the crickets are vibrating and humming like Boeings in the steamy summer night. Everyone loves the deep sensuality of the watermelon.Frida Kahlo, Diego Riviera, Giovanni Stanchi, Sarah Myriam Peale.
Yang Jinsong paints what he feels. His paintings, so simple, so very clear, so very pure, are like the paintings of great artists before him, allegories of life with all its narratives, ugly, beautiful and true.
Pia Camilla Copper, February 10th, 2024 |