In the year when the Berlin Wall fell, Yang Yang went to study at the Surikov Academy of Fine Arts in Moscow, and when he first entered the school, the Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union, and the Soviet Union disintegrated into the Commonwealth of Independent States in the second year of entering the school. In the whirlpool of historical upheaval, Yang Yang was in his proud youth at that time, painting, taking scholarships, wearing beautiful clothes, traveling, making friends, falling in love, and the social turmoil could not stop the barbaric growth and even vitality of a young man. These earth-shaking scenes do not seem to leave a trace in Yang Yang's paintings, which are girls, animals, trees, and small flowers, as if they have nothing to do with ugly reality. Zhang Ailing said: "Your temperament hides the roads you have traveled, the books you have read, and the people you have loved." In fact, the sadness and happiness she has experienced, some feelings that she wants to express and are difficult to explain, those real vicissitudes are all hidden in it.
Artist Yang Yang
During the interview, the first story Yang told us was the encounter of a Serbian male friend when she was studying in the Soviet Union. Friends are special forces soldiers, in their 20s, people who experienced bloody battles during the collapse of Yugoslavia. Once a squad went on a mission to the enemy, it was a village, to kill the enemy snipers. One man stood one point at a time and walked forward into an old house, which was common in the Balkans, with a cellar. They went into the cellar and took a flashlight, and when they saw the scene inside, everyone immediately leaned back to back in nervousness, as in the movie - the cellar was knee-deep blood, and it was terrible. How many people have to be killed in this place?
Soldiers have intuitions, and intuitively speaking, this place should be free of enemies. Someone licked it—a false alarm, not blood, but red wine, but the barrels in the cellar that shattered, and the wine that came out of the cellar was halfway out. Europeans are addicted to alcohol, and a few people start drinking. Drunk until unconscious, the next day the sun came out, everyone woke up, looked around, as if in a different world, and then fear struck, all felt afraid, hugged the headache and cried. If there is a real enemy coming, a shuttle of bullets will kill these people. It's all fate.
After-school gatherings of students in the Academy of Fine Arts, Soviet champagne with large sausages (Yang Yang said that he has never thought that Russian sausages are delicious)
Yang Yang was twenty-three or four years old at the time, and when she and her classmates listened to this story, it was like listening to a paragraph, there was no murder in it, only the details between life and death, and could not think carefully, otherwise the back of the spine was cold. They are all about the same age, full of fantasies and expectations about the world, but they don't know the real heaviness. Yang Yang realized at that time that life may switch between humor, humor and life and death at will.
Yang Yang has 6 years of study in Moscow in her life, studying abroad itself is not only that you go to a place and learn the culture of another country, the bits and pieces she has experienced are not just the tidbits of her life that she put into a smile, but also shaped a person's awe and cognition of the world, understanding that the world is not black and white. These experiences and cognitions have also shaped Yang Yang's art world.
Go to the USSR
Before Yang Yanggong was sent to the Soviet Union in 1989, his imagination of it came from a paraphrase of the division commander who had returned from studying in the Soviet Union. In the era without the Internet, young people cannot recognize the world and regard local descriptions as the whole. Yang Yang remembers that when the party opened at the attached middle school, his classmates wore Soviet national costumes embroidered with lace and puff sleeves, which was quite stunning, which was brought back by the classmate's mother when she stayed in the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Sunny, vigorous, with good-looking clothes, and a party every day, these are the study abroad life that Yang Yang believes. It wasn't until she arrived at the Airport in Moscow after an eight- or nine-hour flight that she found the entire hue of Moscow in November dark. In the six years yang yang spent and the three seasons she experienced, the Soviet Union was "dark" in her impression.
A small party in the preparatory dormitory of Moscow University
That year, China sent an unprecedented number of 80 students to the Soviet Union, from colleges and universities in different fields across the country, and there were 9 art students in Central And Zhejiang. These people come in confusion and are assigned to different schools. Yang Yang studied Russian at the preparatory department of Moscow University and passed the professional examination in 1990 to enter the painting department of the Moscow State Surikov Academy of Fine Arts.
The SOVIET Union had two major academies of fine arts: the Repin Academy of Fine Arts and the State Surikov Academy of Fine Arts. In terms of history and fame, the Repin Academy of Fine Arts is better than Surikov. Founded in 1757, the Repin Academy of Fine Arts was originally the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Russia, located on the Neva River, and the original works of Dürer on paper in the library of the academy made Yang Yang envious. Yang Yang initially chose the Repin Academy of Fine Arts without a doubt, so he made a special trip to the school, and then changed his mind.
Repin flaunts a tradition, and the style of painting seems almost stereotypical to Yang Yang: drawing a sitting portrait on the canvas, how big the head of the figure is, how much space is left above, how much space is left below... It's very meticulous. "What I hate most is that there are 10 people in the studio painting, and you can't tell who painted it. They flaunt it as tradition, I think it's dogma. ”
Surikov Academy of Fine Arts is located in Moscow. In 1939 Grabali founded the Moscow State Academy of Fine Arts, which in 1948 was named after the famous Russian painter Surikov. In the process of implementing the teaching plan, the main ones are professors and personal studios. Most of these professors are well-known artists, and most of them are academicians of the Academy of Fine Arts and corresponding academicians. The style is relatively contemporary, allowing students to make a variety of different attempts, "only to see if you paint well, not to see what style you paint." Yang Yang chose Surikov, one is this kind of relaxation, the other is a year of preparatory school in Moscow, she knows the difference between the capital and the provinces. Moscow's various state-level exhibitions, international exchange exhibitions, concerts and ballet performances, the streets of foreigners and people of all nationalities in the Soviet Union, the various picture books and music in bookstores and record stores are a unique environment for university students to grow up. There is a saying that goes, "Moscow and the rest of the Soviet Union are two countries".
At a class reunion in a studio (which should be the studio of the Printmaking Department), at the end of the period, the wine bottle was empty, and the salad basin was bottomed out
Gather at the home of the soviet meritorious sculptor Muhina (author of the opening sculpture at the Moscow Film Studio).
The Surikov Academy of Fine Arts has a six-year program for the master's degree, plus a total of 7 years for the preparatory department. The 7-year study abroad period is extremely long for Yang Yang, an eighteen- and nineteen-year-old student, and makes people feel that they have to stay here for the rest of their lives.
The Soviet art education system is very close to central America, because the art system after the founding of the People's Republic of China was originally inherited from the Soviet Union. In 1990, Yang Yang entered Surikov to further study professional courses, and still found many differences:
The Surikov Academy of Fine Arts has a larger studio, so each student has more space to paint and more perspectives to choose. Each group of models has a relatively long time, but there is no strict class time requirement, for example, 80 class models are required to complete classwork within 80 class hours, and whether to draw 30 class hours or 80 class hours in the end is up to the students to decide. I am a student with a relatively fast hand, and I rarely skip class, so often in the class when other students draw a picture, I draw a large and a small two. The oil painting "Lena" is a small painting improvised at another angle after painting the model's full body portrait on the front, but because of the unique light and perspective, it has become a complete work without classroom work.
Surikov's oil painting major and mural painting major are both in the department of painting, and the department of painting focuses on the concept of "painting", which is distinguished from the "printing" of the printmaking department and the "sculpture" of the sculpture department. The studio I chose later was a memorial painting major in the Department of Painting, and in addition to oil painting techniques, there were also classical mural techniques such as dry murals and frescoes. There was a period of fascination with the material effect of dry and wet murals, met a quite aristocratic art history professional girl, felt that her image temperament and the beauty of classical murals are quite in line, so she created the oil painting "Lisa", the base effect imitated the roughness of dry murals.
Yang Yang "Lena"
Yang Yang can also remember that there is a type of model in the Academy of Fine Arts that is very unique, and the last touch of scenery was seen by her in the first year of entering the Academy of Fine Arts, and she did not see it again in the second grade. In 1990, there was a Soviet film called "The International Girl", which depicted such a group of people: particularly beautiful young girls, high-class prostitutes, socialites, who circled between the powerful, foreign businessmen and diplomats, and the high "communication fee" could even reach 5,000 US dollars a night (that was 5,000 US dollars in the late 1980s). But the Soviet Union required all citizens to have jobs at that time, and no work was not allowed. The girls needed to find a job, and some of them worked as models in the academy. "I've seen them go in and out of the academy, but I haven't had any such good-looking models in my class." Yang Yang said, "The good-looking rate of Russian girls is too high, it is outrageously high. Good figure, good temperament, and can dress up. Such girls have luxury cars to pick up and drop off, and they all wear high heels and mink coats. An imported brand. ”
Students studying abroad in the SOVIET Union generally come from three places in Asia, Africa and Latin America, without racial discrimination, like a big family. The real chain of contempt looks not at race, but at talent. Those selected through CAAM training were ranked well in the Soviet Union. "African students and South American students paint the worst, and Eastern European students do not pay much attention to realism." Yang Yang went to the door after the high score, and there was a scholarship every year. Chinese public students, scholarships are issued in US dollars, at that time the collapse of the Soviet Union ruble depreciated sharply, taking advantage of the exchange rate is very cheap, life can be said to be very superior.
Yang Yang with Russian and American artists, 1994
The coin-operated public telephone outside the dormitory, the girl on the left is the first batch of self-funded students after the establishment of diplomatic relations between South Korea and Russia
The collapse of the Soviet Union
Yang Yang painted an oil painting "1990" in 2016, in which a girl with black hair hanging on her shoulders stands in the shade of a tree, looking at the fountain and golden statue in the distance, which is the Exhibition Hall of the National Economy of the Soviet Union, a bygone era. The girl was holding a vinyl record in her hand, and the cover was written with the four letters KINO.
Yang Yang, 1990, 2016, oil on canvas, 110x110cm
The vinyl record, which Yang Yang bought in 1990 at the age of 21 in a record store in Moscow, cost 10 times more than a regular record, and was the "Black Album" by victor Choi, a famous rock singer and youth idol of the former Soviet period. "I don't know what this record in my hand stands for. It was just an intuition, and there was a kind of inner strength in the songs that I couldn't understand at the time, that belonged to me, to the youth who stood at that turning point in history like me. ”
The all-black cover is printed with only the simple four letters KINO (Choi's band name, which means "movie, film, cinema" in Russian). The cover paper is rough, the printing is rudimentary, and the photos of the band members on the back cover are not aligned. Victor Choi died in a car accident in 1990, but did not foresee his own death when the album was published. The album seems to hint at the fate of him and the era in which he lived.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Yang Yang did not notice too many changes around her, she believed that "before it was not good, the disintegration was a trend." A country, a system does not collapse suddenly for no reason. The Soviet leader at the time, Mikhail Gorbachev, did not believe that the country would end in his own hands, and that he would be able to survive the "culmination of the crisis" in 1989, but in fact the national standard of living was already very bad. "The issuance of money grows, the purchasing power of the ruble continues to decline, the prices of daily necessities and services continue to grow ... Ordinary people find that money is becoming less and less valuable, and there are fewer and fewer goods, so they begin to hoard all kinds of goods. Not only food stores, but even jewelry stores have long queues early in the morning. (The Last Year of the SOVIET UNION)
"After 1991 was a time of hyperinflation. I usually go out with $5 cash, see the front butcher shop there is a queue, selling a large piece of beef with bones, you have to count the number of people in the queue and meat, it is estimated that the last line can be bought, just say to the people at the end of the line said I will queue up in a while, I will be behind you. There is definitely a change of money within 100 meters of the butcher's shop, run over to change the $2 ruble. A piece of beef two or three kilograms is not much money, 2 dollars can not spend it, after buying meat, carry it forward, encounter other things and then buy. Usually I go out once a week with $5-10 and come back with things that I can't move and have some money left to hitchhiker. ”
The costumes and facial expressions of the Soviets at that time were heavy. Outside the Academy of Fine Arts was a very important ring line subway station, there was a big food supermarket, usually when she went in there was nothing to buy, only a few kinds of cans that had been neatly filled with yards on certain shelves, and those cans would not be bought, because they were too unpalatable. There will be 20 old ladies standing in a row selling bread in front of the supermarket – in the early morning the ladies buy some when the bread is just baked, and sell it at a slightly higher price during the day to earn a little living. These elderly people who have worked all their lives for the country are the most direct victims of the collapse of the system, pensions have become small figures, and wealth has been washed away. Youth and strength are gone, and old people never have the opportunity to turn over again.
The two-person dormitory of Surikov Academy of Fine Arts, although it is very messy, has flowers and TV
In Yang Yang's impression, the lack of the Soviet Union was not that the people were begging along the streets in rags, but only the lack of cash flow. The Houses of the Soviets were modernized, with plenty of central heating and water and electricity, refrigerators, color televisions, many families with cars, and summer villas in the countryside – that is, their own small piece of land, and the houses were built by themselves. Yang Yang's university dormitory has a two-room suite for four students, furniture and bedding are provided by the college, and the unified white sheets and quilt covers are slurred and ironed, neatly folded and replaced regularly. This is the standard state of life for Russians. At a time of upheaval, the Soviet Union still gave foreigners living here a glamorous appearance.
The first McDonald's in Moscow, 1990
Behind him were a large line of Muscovites waiting to enter McDonald's
Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall
Because the holidays were long enough, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yang Yang traveled to Belarus, Central Asia and the Baltic states that later became independent. She found a law that the differences in the nationality and the degree of civilization in the Soviet Union were geographically differentiated, "the more west the Vietnamese civilization, the west to Belarus, the appearance, temperament, dress, people feel a little more elegant than Russia." Further west is Poland, where Poles are a little better than Belarusians. Going east to Central Asia is a different situation, it can't be said that it is uncivilized, the locals are warm and simple, but they just don't line up according to the rules, just like the Chinese in the eighties and nineties of the last century. ”
In Moscow there is an airport dedicated to flying to Central Asia, there is no covered bridge, walk to the plane and then board the plane. Yang Yang once went to Bukhara and saw a Central Asian old man in the crowd crowded by the gangway, carrying a cage in his hand, which contained a rooster. Yang Yang understood that in the Soviet Union, airplanes were like long-distance buses, frequent flights and cheap fares, like Chinese rushing to sit in a car, and passengers carrying all kinds of strange luggage.
Bukhara, 1991
Samarkand, 1991
When Yang Yang went to Eastern Europe, the Berlin Wall had already collapsed, because with a service passport, Eastern European countries and West Berlin were visa-free. West Berlin is like a small window, allowing 21-year-old Yang Yang to see the real appearance of the Western world. East and West Berlin are separated by a wall, and the gap is huge. Whether it is the city or the spiritual outlook of the people, there is a great contrast in the attitude towards tourists like Yang Yang. Yang Yang thought at that time, it is really good to be rich, and people who are rich are very nice.
The first time Yang Yang went to East and West Berlin, the wall had just been torn down, and the second time he went to East and West Berlin, it had already been merged. Neo-Nazism was raging throughout Eastern Europe at the time, and in the early 1990s the skinheads were rampant, with the aim of exterminating foreigners and attacking Asians for no reason. The public students in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union had their own communication networks, and everyone would warn each other. Yang Yang was still attacked in East Berlin.
Berlin, summer 1990
Berlin, autumn 1990
At that time, Yang Yang and his classmates stood in the subway escalator to go up, and three bald-headed parties ran down the escalator on the right side, their hair was very short, and their clothes were somewhat heavy metal, which was different from ordinary people. Just in a flash, Yang Yang's eyes suddenly tingled, and he couldn't see anything at once, and tears rushed out. The skinheads sprayed gas into Yang Yang's eyes.
At that moment, Yang Yang didn't know what was happening, but he just felt terrible, because the eyes were the most precious thing for the painter. But she had the advantage of not panicking when things went wrong, and went upstairs to let her companions find the station infirmary. The doctor did not ask much and quickly cleaned Yang Yang's eyes. "It can be seen that this kind of thing does not happen once or twice. I'm lucky because I love beauty and I wear contact lenses during the day. Tear gas did not directly hurt the cornea, otherwise the attack at such close range did not know what the consequences would be. ”
Eastern Europe, 1990
A monastery in the mountains of Bulgaria
Boat in the Polish port city of Gdansk
Budapest
Traveling abroad, it is indispensable to these unfortunate encounters, more is the diversified stimulation brought by different cultures in different worlds, such as Bukhara and Samarkand in Central Asia, elegant, desolate, as if a thousand years of history is in front of you; such as Hungary's calmness about pornography magazines, let Yang Yang feel a free mentality; and at that time, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria and other Eastern European countries had an open attitude towards the body... Later, Yang Yang recalled this and wrote:
This relatively diverse visual stimulus played a much greater role in shaping my artistic interest than itinerant and Orthodox iconography. In the face of the rich works of Western European masters in the Winter Palace, almost all the works in the exhibition of Russian master Repint from his prime years to his later years, I can clearly see that the inheritance and source of Russian painting masters and many outstanding painters of the Soviet Union are actually in the same line with the art of Western Europe. The understanding and reflection of this period made me understand that the formation of personal style should be based on the integration of traditional aesthetics and painting practices, rather than following the brushwork and dogma of a certain school.
Graduates have independent studios, one for 2 people, and graduates often take turns to use the studio very tacitly. Yang Yang shares a room with an Ethiopian sixth-grade boy
Surikov has a rule that allows all-eugenic students to graduate one year early, provided that all courses and national examinations are completed at the same time in the fifth grade, as well as graduation writing and defense. Yang Yang has maintained full honors since she entered the school, and she weighed the workload and submitted an application to the college for early graduation. From the autumn of 1994 to the beginning of the summer of 1995, it became the most intense semester of Yang Yang's study abroad life.
Yang Yang's dedication to creation made a qualitative leap in her level, and it was during this period that she created several exploratory works such as "Love in Heaven and Love on Earth", "Sitting Maria" and "Martha" that were later collected by the National Art Museum of China. Among them, "Love in Heaven and Love on Earth" as Yang Yang's graduation creation work won unanimous praise from professors in the defense, and received a full score of 5 points.
"Compared with "Spring Walk", which is almost the designated theme of the tutor, "Love in heaven and love on earth" and "Sitting Mary" created at the same time are my own more proud works, using the thin painting method I was exploring at the time, so that the pigments present fluidity, highlight the role of lines and brushstrokes in emotional expression, so that the picture highlights the solemn and deep inner emotions at the same time, without losing the sense of breathability. So far, my understanding of multiculturalism, the trial of various techniques, and the exploration of my own style have enabled me to embark on a professional path to true artistic exploration from a starting point for the first glimpse of art. ”
Yang Yang graduated from the Surikov Academy of Fine Arts in 1995, but her graduation certificate still bears the words CCCP (Soviet Union).
Yang Yang, Divine and Earthly Love (now in the National Art Museum of China), 1995 Oil on canvas, 146x114cm
After the Soviet Union
Yang Yang now feels fortunate that the best time of six years has been spent so colorfully and thrillingly, and there is some sense of youth that has not been wasted. But when you see Yang Yang's current works, it is always the protagonist of kawaii, and the contrast with her personal experience and age is huge. "A lot of people even think I'm a post-90s."
"Everybody loves cute things, kids, puppies, kittens... These cutenesses and beauty, including youth, are the foundation of life and something to be praised. The subject matter has nothing to do with age. Because of studying abroad, I was the most exposed to anime in my generation in my youth and youth. At that time, the Soviet Union's state station was broadcasting a full range of Western programs. After 1992, videotape rental business in Moscow was widespread. The Russians remade American videotapes with the advantage that there are no subtitles, it is interpreted, and there will be a track for full interpretation. I learned Russian halfway and didn't read and write well, but listened ok. At that time, I liked to rent cartoons, all kinds of cartoons, like Disney's new "Beauty and the Beast", I was the first to see it. ”
But Rome did not step over in one step, from Yang Yang in the Soviet Union to Yang Yang in the current yang, there have been countless transmutations in the middle.
In the first few years of her return to China, when she re-lived in the four seasons and the sunshine, she had a new impulse to explore art. She puts aside models and materials and relies entirely on imagination to shape characters and scenes. "The only thing I regret is that at the age of 27, I can't master all the details in the big picture very well, and the inertia of dark colors caused by years of living at high latitudes will take nearly a year to completely change."
Yang Yang, Propositional Game A Game with Themes, 2000 screen prints, 73x56cm, print count: 75
After the birth of his son in 1997, Yang Yang could not have a large amount of continuous time to carry out in-depth and concentrated oil painting creation, so he shifted his focus to silkscreen prints and experimental ink painting. From 1998 to 2014, Yang Yang owned the most advanced private printmaking studio in China, and the conditions for the creation of silkscreen prints were very unique.
During this period, Yang Yang's "Propositional Game" explored one limit of silkscreen printmaking: precision. In this work, Yang Yang used dozens of versions of colors to achieve rich color changes in the picture. The composition of the picture takes a monochromatic background as the foray, and the decorative vaults and leaf patterns as the middle scene, highlighting the central figures and playing cards as the foreground. "PropositionAlty Game" became a representative work of Yang Yang's early prints, and was later selected for the 10th National Art Exhibition in 2004. In 2005, after Yang Yang created prints such as "The Window of Siena", his exploration of the expression of silkscreen printmaking came to an end.
In Yang Yang's view, the 2006 quadratic oil painting "Four Little Goddesses" is a landmark work of her artistic style transformation, and it is also one of her most important works in that period. Standing at that time node, Yang Yang has experienced ten years of growth with children and self-growth, whether it is spirit or ability, has reached a moment of transformation. All this is reflected in the innocent and complex face of the little girl in these four paintings.
Yang Yang group painting "Four Little Goddesses" (partial), oil on canvas, 2006
After 2015, Yang Yang's paintings have entered a different kind of appearance: fewer and fewer elements, more and more simple backgrounds. "In 'The Carousel in the Sunset,' I began to move from complexity to simplicity, leaving aside the objective details of objects in the creation of oil paintings and focusing on another real world I created. The world has a similar appearance to the real world in which we live, but more purely, omitting the trivial details of the real world and the information that those details convey that have nothing to do with the emotion of the picture. ”
Carousel in Dusk, 2016 Oil on canvas, 105x100cm
Nowadays, Yang Yang's pictures are constantly simplified and pure, and he prefers fairy tale themes in terms of materials. The appearance is cartoonish, but the core is realistic. This seemingly simple and sweet picture has a great impact on the viewer. This was a surprise discovery by Yang Yang. She usually empathizes with the characters in the paintings, "I read those books, I go to observe, I go to make friends... Many details of my life have been poured into this person, and there are many things that I want to express but can't say clearly. If what I know about the vicissitudes of history can be written in articles, if the factors that make up grief can be clearly described in words, then I may not need to express it in painting. ”
Today, the world is again marked by war and separation, which are destined to affect the face of art.
In Yang Yang's latest oil painting, Little Red Riding Hood in the Forest, the heroine wears a scarlet hooded cape, which reveals a long skirt with big red velvet. She walked alone in the dark forest, holding an exquisite little suitcase in one hand and clutching the neckline of the hooded cape with the other, with only two large eyes with complicated eyes on her round face, looking at the world outside the picture, with uneasiness and doubt.
Little Red Riding Hood in Forest, 2021 Oil on canvas, 130x130cm