Writing about God in form is full of fun

Some of the Winter Olympic theme works created by Yang Gang (partial). Profile picture

●Chen Lusheng

Yang Gang has always been like an "alternative" in the Chinese painting world. Today, when people look at his paintings, just as they look at Impressionism, Van Gogh and Picasso, they are different from the uniformity in people's vision. He was like a stream, free and free, following his own current.

The particularity of Yang Gang lies in his enviable professional origin, but he has always walked on his own lonely artistic path.

When he underwent rigorous training from the academic school and the creative tempering of the times, he stepped out of the paradigm of the system and gained freedom after "going out without doing".

He once said: "When I am free, I often leave the light car and seek my own freedom, and then through continuous efforts, I reach new freedom." This is in great contrast to the consistency of many people who now cherish the kind of "light car familiar road". Although today's painters often pay a lifetime of hard work or half a lifetime of hard work in order to get a familiar road. The difference and valuable thing about Yang Gang lies in the abandonment after obtaining it. This is a quality that many painters in the world do not have. Just think, if you don't give up, where are the Eight Greats and Shi Tao, where are Van Gogh and Picasso?

For the sake of "new freedom", people saw Yang Gang's vividness. People have also seen such a very pure artist in the midst of the complexity of contemporary Chinese painting. Obviously, the way he painted in the last period of his life can see some similarities from his teacher, Mr. Ye Qianyu. In order to obtain a vivid image, Mr. Ye Qianyu sketched countless dance dynamics in front of the stage, while Yang Gang obtained a lot of vivid sports images in front of the screen, and his works were different from the normalized and general character shapes that people saw. Its basic characteristics are: drawing it roughly, informally, writing about God in shape, and being interesting. In his vivid modeling, he often unexpectedly grasps the most core content of the character modeling. These paintings are like paper cuts, which not only give up many details, but also give up the five colors of ink. This is the basic skill of sketching that painters cultivated by the new Chinese art education. When the shape shows the structural relationship of the figure modeling in its wholeness, the composition that people see is those key parts, which are shortened to one point can not be reduced, and cannot be reduced to one point. Today, when more and more attention is paid to modeling and ignoring the essence of modeling, Yang Gang's portrait textbooks can give many painters guidance.

Under the influence of Gu Kaizhi's idea of "writing gods in form" in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, the art of literati painting once reached a high cultural realm, and the theory of Su Shi and Wen Tong was to break the shackles of modeling and let painting gain freedom in self-expression. However, the historical development since modern times has made people more and more inclined to those images captured in camera lenses; the result of "comparing work" with photography has in a sense caused the loss of the modeling ability to use photography as a reference, and at the cost of ignoring those characteristics originally in Chinese painting. Obviously, the response of Chinese art cannot be made unique by a simple realistic approach. Yang Gang's approach allows people to see the forms and concepts that he gave up in his artistic expression in order to gain freedom.

What is important is that Yang Gang bases realism in a way of self-expression and shows a rare state of freedom. Therefore, Yang Gang's art has a unique interest, which is the feeling of painting. This kind of interest is not what people call pen and ink, nor is it the form or other that people often say, but the freedom that belongs to his heart. With the freedom of the heart, the freedom of art presents a different style.

Therefore, when Yang Gang died, people discovered his existence and suddenly felt that such a painter who had once been in the limelight was getting farther and farther away from us. However, he is like a star in the night that shines with a shining light, and its flash in the night is exactly what we need in our art today.

On the occasion of the Beijing Winter Olympic Games, Yang Gang's works on winter ice and snow sports and Olympic competitions let the audience understand and recognize Yang Gang's art, but also make people realize that using these works full of life and passion to popularize the Olympic spirit is not only higher, faster, stronger and more united in another sense, but also makes the charm of sports presented to the world in a more artistic way.

(The author is the artistic director of Shenzhen Art Museum and senior art critic)

■About the painter

Yang Gang (1946-2019), an artist of the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts, a national first-class artist, was admitted to the Affiliated Middle School of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1963, assigned to work in Xilinhot, Inner Mongolia in 1973, and admitted to the postgraduate class of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1978, under the tutelage of Mr. Ye Qianyu, Jiang Zhaohe, Liu Lingcang, Lu Shen, zhou Sicong, and in 1981 to the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts. He is good at ink painting, sketching, oil painting, brushwork, etc., and has held exhibitions in China, Spain, Germany and other places for many times, and has published "Yang Gang Sketch", "Extremely Ancient and New - Yang Gang Painting Collection", "Yang Gang Oil Painting Collection" and so on.