Expression comes from inheritance
——From Caixin.com
“I am always in a state of uncertainty, and I change with the changes of time. Change. In such an uncertain or even confusing state of life, I have found a more appropriate expression in painting." Sun Yao explained himself this way.
Against the huge background of time, the young painter Sun Yao revealed his imaginary landscape from scratch on the canvas. For him, painting creation cannot be achieved with bare hands. Art works are more images that require him to use his mind and emerge from his inner consciousness.
Most of Sun Yao's creative themes describe the confrontation between man and the outside world - "Human beings are increasingly accustomed to putting themselves before anything else, and the power of reason seems to make us confident enough to bring success to the world." However, my recent works want to question this self-confidence,” he said when explaining his creative motivation.
In 2010, he began to create the "Dense Forest" series. Light and shadow, brightness and darkness, give the "Dense Forest" series an effect that is half like Chinese paintings and half like Western abstract paintings. In this group of works, Sun Yao combines traditional Chinese landscapes with human face portraits, using black and white monochrome paintings to demonstrate the artist's ability to control the medium.
In "Dense Forest", Sun Yao deliberately allowed himself to regain the feelings of romantic art, and even immersed himself in history, going back to the Renaissance in northern Europe. At that time, northern European Renaissance artists distanced themselves from the expression of specific people and things, but showed an unusual interest in landscapes. They pay more attention to the symbolic meaning contained in natural things for the ultimate destiny of man and the world.
“Artists of this period preferred to depict a large number of infinite wilderness, vast forests and natural scenes of morning and sunset in their works, and buried the happenings of human life in the natural calendar in the picture. "The profound influence of Gothic art has allowed artists to project their understanding and experience of religion into many natural objects," Sun Yao said when explaining "Dense Forest". Several centuries apart, Sun Yao was moved by the artists at that time's profound insight into and experience of the primitive energy contained in nature. "I want to use the artist's understanding of the world at that time to re-examine the current relationship between the self as a subject and the world."
Two years and 23 paintings, "Dense Forest" is coming to an end. It silently confides to its viewers: Even if we are influenced by the outside world, there is still a pure psychological space inside us. It is nothing more than obscured by the dense forest. As long as the leaves are removed, all the clouds will disperse. .
Even though they have the same theme, these 23 works have undergone great changes in form. In the past two years, Sun Yao has been constantly rethinking the complex relationship between concepts such as "body and nature" and "image and reality" that have troubled him for a long time. In the early scenes of "Dense Forest", there is usually a small human figure hidden in the scene. But after four or five drawings were completed, Sun Yao found that the meaning of this expression was too clear. So, he slowly weakened the human body until in the end there was only an empty landscape. The features of the faces in the painting were gradually broken up, from the initial clear shape to blurry and difficult to distinguish.
Each theme expressed by Sun Yao is the inheritance and development of the previous theme.
If "Dense Forest" is a salvage of the mutual dependence between man and nature, then the creative inspiration for "River Flows", which was launched in 2011, came directly from man's lament for the infringement of nature. .
The name of this series "A River Runs Through It" comes from the movie "A River Runs Through It" shot by the famous Hollywood director Robert Redford in the late 1990s. This series uses a unique style to express the invaded land and the passing landscape after natural excavation by humans. Sun Yao used the expressive technique of collision to simultaneously display grandeur, solemnity and fear. “Although we feel sad and disappointed about these devastating violations of nature, we are also attracted to images that show destruction and disaster,” he said. “When we see this kind of destruction of nature, it shows The strange beauty of it will arouse a kind of regret and pity."
Some artists’ creations are more directed to social energy, while others only pay attention to beauty. Sun Yao does not struggle with the choice between the two. In line with his own state, his works are in a state of chaos. "What I care about is the relationship between the work and the viewer." For him, after a work is created, the relationship between the creator and the viewer changes immediately, and the creator's thinking is brought into a new context for updating. Broad exploration, this is what is most important, and theme, plot, and form will take a back seat.
The times have left a profound imprint on Sun Yao’s creations. As a person born in the 1970s, Sun Yao's most vociferous growth was at the prelude to materialism in Chinese society in the 1990s. Some art critics believe, "At that time, under the stimulation of material desires, the various desires of the Chinese people began to revive and were released without scruples. As a reaction to the high pressure on the body since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the body became the starting point of everything. , the various sensations of the body have become the highest criterion for personal judgment and experience. Sun Yao's paintings are based on the climate of the times, starting from his own personal experience of the surrounding environment, emphasizing the body's bearing on consciousness, thoughts and desires. Function. The body is neither the subject of observing the external world nor the object to be observed, but the entire self."
For more than ten years, Sun Yao has been exploring the connection between the human body and external nature. . In his understanding, the human body is a complete nature, and he uses the body to symbolize the broader nature.
He once titled one of his solo exhibitions "Self-Topography." This exhibition explores not only the dynamic relationship between self and place, but also the connection between the individual and the collective, and their separation from their environment. Through "self-topography", he used his works to once again emphasize that nature is by no means natural.
Northern Lights on Canvas
——From the Norwegian Consulate
On June 26, 2010, the unveiling ceremony of the oil painting "Aurora Traces" was held at the Norwegian Pavilion held. As one of the cooperation projects between the Norwegian Exhibition Organizing Committee of the World Expo, the Consulate General of Norway in Shanghai and three Chinese artists, Sun Yao used his paintbrush to show the magnificent scenery of the polar night in northern Norway.
Chasing the Northern Lights
Last December, Chinese artists Ma Qiusha, Sun Yao and Qiu Anxiong arrived in northern Norway for a week-long trip in order to explore the vast landscape of Norway. Draw creative inspiration from nature. The group experienced extraordinary experiences such as dog sledding and chasing the Northern Lights at minus 40 degrees Celsius, and poured their feelings from the journey into their subsequent creations.
"Trace of the Aurora" - the first piece of this series of works, lifts the veil in the Norwegian Pavilion. First, Mr. Halvard Ingebrigtsen, Deputy Minister of Trade and Industry of Norway, delivered a speech. Mr. Noppin, Consul General of Norway in Shanghai, and the artist himself were also present. Einar Larsen also played a song on Norwegian folk violin. A short piece of music added to the excitement of the opening ceremony. The oil paintings were unanimously praised by the guests present. “This painting perfectly complements the Norwegian Pavilion. It not only abstractly displays the natural landscape, but also conveys the message of protecting the environment,” Mr. Noppin praised.
Against the overall dark blue background, the ethereal and quiet green aurora falls from the sky like a holy spirit, and follows its shape to dwell in the long night. The gorgeous and persistent warm red in the corner of the picture is indifferently eroding the blue of the night, expressing the author's concern about the threat of global warming in the Arctic.
New Impressions of Norway
After the Expo Year, "Trace of the Aurora" will be sold, and the works of Ma Qiusha and Qiu Anxiong will be exhibited in the summer and autumn of this year respectively. Sun Yao was very satisfied with his trip to Norway and was planning to go there again. “I want to return to Norway to find new inspiration,” said Sun Yao, who is also a lecturer at Shanghai University.
Self-Topography
Author: Raul Zamudio
Painter Sun Yao’s solo exhibition title “Self-Topography” alludes to the relationship between landscape and identity ***student relationship. Geography has historically been considered immaculate, objective, and transcends cultural boundaries. Because in a sense we are born into culture, not into nature.
However, this is a misunderstanding: not only is place closely linked to our conscious awareness, but also, in the context of globalization, any environment, be it a country or a city, transcends its geographical boundaries through its inhabitants, because These residents are able to bring an aspect of the place into a vast area of ??the world. For example, a Spanish vintner or a New York businessman both represent their respective cultures and regions in some way, even if one is from the countryside and the other from the city. Therefore, when they go abroad, they carry with them and unpack this social baggage. This is, of course, further complicated by the fact that cultures and regions are often distinct rather than merged into one, for example, regions are constantly changing under the influence of communications and computer technologies such as the Internet.
With the emergence of globalization, different regions and cultures are becoming closer and closer. The structure of new culture is constantly changing, just like the postmodern self-state, which is both determined and Essential or fixed, but also fluid, changeable and open. The exhibition "Topography of the Self" is an exploration not only of the dynamic relationship between self and place, but also of the connection between the individual and the collective, and their separation from their environment. Through concepts as diverse as the sublime and the contingency of the self, this exhibition tells us that nature is anything but natural.
Sun Yao's paintings emphasize that the world we inhabit is intrinsically linked to our psyches, just as some landscape painters do. For example, the German romantic artist Casper David Friedrich gave nature a sense of sublimity in his works, albeit with some metaphysical implications. The British painter J.W.M. Turner after him had another understanding of the sublime, and they adopted different ways to express this feeling. Friedrich presented the sublime as an extension and manifestation of the transcendent, while Turner read it as an extension of moral absolutes. But in any case, both views on the sublime can be traced back to the philosopher Edmund Burke. In APhilosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), Burke proposed that the sublime and the beautiful were mutually exclusive but contradictory Contacted. Burke believes that sublimity is the awe of the beauty of nature and the fear of the uncontrollable violence of nature. People in nature can only be at its mercy.
In other words, sublimity has two qualities. On the one hand, it refers to grandeur and solemnity, and on the other hand, it contains fear. This feature is reflected in all terrible natural disasters, even though they are devastating. We feel regretful and disappointed, but we are also attracted to images of destruction and disaster. There are many videos on YouTube about natural disasters such as tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, storms, earthquakes, etc. From these we can see that the human brain is both disgusted and fascinated by the terrifying destructive power of nature. The superficial, common response to the mass death caused by nature is to explain it away as an “act of the gods.” In other words, the destruction of life caused by the cruel violence of nature is so profound and incomprehensible that it can only be attributed to divine will. Burke argued that the reason why we are reluctant to look at images of disaster is not because we are morbid or insensitive to the destruction of life, but that the duality of our disgust and attraction to the sublime is similar to the human aesthetic instinct for beauty. The understanding of things is inherent in human consciousness, which also makes it difficult for us to look away from the violence of nature. This is crucial to understanding the sublime in the work of Friedrich and Turner, and is key to understanding why Sun Yao’s art is so compelling.
Sun Yao's work is powerful and poetic, a quality that is partly due to his utilization of landscape traditions and giving them new forms.
This will become apparent when one juxtaposes Friedrich's The Monk by the Sea (1808-1810) and Sun Yao's Jungle No. 15 (2010). The latter is part of "Dense Forest", which is generally about various interpretations of the combination of plants and the human body. This work is reminiscent of both water and land. The reason why this effect can be achieved lies in Sun Yao's handling of color and his exquisite use of light and shade: in his works and in the space of the picture, the colors swirl and flow, and "explode" like disordered arabesques. ". He creates rich painterliness through rich changes in thickness and thickness. In addition, Sun Yao's works always have a kind of grandeur, which also creates an atmosphere similar to "The Seaside Monk".
In this famous work by Friedrich, a monk stands solemnly on the seaside. He seems to be in sacred meditation and looks at the magnificent and boundless infinite space in the distance. The monk is surrounded by the sea, just like the anthropomorphic form created by Sun Yao that condenses the invisible trees, making it impossible to tell which one is in front and which one is behind. So, which one is more important, the characters or the scenery, in the picture? Sun Yao creates an ambiguous aesthetic riddle, and he gives the work a meaning beyond the visual: a spiritual hallucination effect animates the work, as if we are seeing an unpredictable projection slide emerging from the abyss of the unconscious. We are indeed looking at a painting, but we can feel that there is something underneath or in the picture, which not only attracts us, but also creates a certain aesthetic dispersion. Like Sun Yao, Turner created a sense of the sublime, but his works were often imbued with an ethical, if not moral, quality.
Turner's Slave Ship (1840) is perhaps one of the British painter's most famous works. Those slave traders encountered strong winds and waves at sea, and the ship capsized and people died. But this work is not a 19th-century version of a Hollywood disaster movie. The content of the picture is consistent with the title of the work. Turner not only showed the capsizing caused by bad weather, but also alluded to the demise of slavery. It was not the ancient sea that destroyed this system, but God's treatment of mankind. The punishment for enslaving people. Obviously, Sun Yao's works are also metaphors for the human condition. He presents us with a dramatic scene involving existential issues such as our correct position in the world. Among them, we not only conflict with nature at times, but even Part ways with yourself.
This work by Sun Yao, like his other works, can be seen as a mirror, reflecting the unstable nature of human nature, perhaps even reflecting a state of imbalance. Sun Yao emphasizes this effect formally and conceptually in many ways, including the undulating strong light cast from the upper right corner of the work, which directly hits the lower left corner of the painting, forming a diagonal line and also the outline of the plants. and edges create a spiral of light. This cascade of light cascades down, holding material things in place but also spreading in all directions. Light and shadow are intertwined to create ever-changing effects. In Sun Yao's wonderful composition, the two complement each other, just like silence to sound and chisel to sculpture. In Sun Yao's monochromatic paintings, there are many layers between the two poles of dark and light, creating a dialectical interaction and balanced relationship. Like other works in the "Dense Forest" series, this work's black and white form comes from the historical context, and it integrates traditional art forms, ultimately forming Sun Yao's own artistic style.
Sun Yao’s works remind me of another artist, Mark Tansey. Although his works also adopt monochromatic forms, they have figurative themes. Tansey's picture narrative is spiritual. This narrative dissolves the history of monochrome painting. In the past, monochrome painting was always considered to be the patent of minimalism, early pure formalism, and geometric abstraction.
Sun Yao not only used this artistic rhetoric method skillfully, but his works also traced back to grisaille (full name: "monochromatic paintings painted in gray"). Gray painting is often used to copy bas-reliefs, so it is particularly Suitable for expressing architectural themes. Since the Greek painters did not yet have the method of light and shade, they mainly relied on gray painting to express tonal shapes. Later, some miniaturists in the Gothic period also used the gray painting method - the origin of the translator's note). For practical and aesthetic reasons, many artists in the history of art have adopted grisaille, including Gothic artists Jean Pucelle and Giotto, Renaissance painters such as Peter Bosch the Elder, Pieter Bruegel, Mantegna and the Mannerist painter and sculptor Hendrik Goltzius, etc. As we all know, greyscale painting cannot be done by an expert, which also means that gray painting can better reflect the artist's talent than color painting.
Sun Yao's monochrome paintings demonstrate his talent, because monochrome paintings better reflect the artist's ability to control the medium. We know that light and shade are the core of his artistic practice. As in his other works, in "No. 15", light plays an important role. It not only adds formal texture and compositional vitality to the picture, but also enhances the emotional content of the picture. It is in this sense that Sun Yao breaks away from the previous romantic artists and brings his art into a more contemporary artistic realm. His aesthetic vocabulary is closer to Anselm Kiefer. (Anselm Kiefer) Vast landscape painting. However, Sun Yao's paintings have multiple aspects. He brings these works into a more open narrative, exploring in a poetic way the personal situation that gathers the geographical gestalt. His forest images are full of anthropomorphic forms. Looking at his paintings, individuals seem to have been evaporated, because he has injected not only human-shaped ghosts into them, but also the seamless combination of figures and landscapes, which releases emotions. We might as well observe this experience through another of his works, "Dense Forest No. 14".
"No.15" expresses the dense forest in a majestic way, and this ethereal feeling is also injected into most of his works in this series. The dialectical interaction between the tangible and the intangible gives the work a visually poetic character of lightness and weight. If "No.15" embodies the mixture of light and dark, density, center and edge in a diffuse painterly manner, then "No.14" adopts a more earthy material form. Sun Yao adopted the consistent themes of forests and fantasy. Compared with "No.15", the face and body in "No.14" can produce different sounds, because the face is on the surface and the body dives underground. It is on this terrain that Sun Yao expresses rich The vast range of human emotions. He took diverse and complex images of bodies and faces and gave them the same cohesion, yet he seemed to be able to approach the shapes in other ways as well. For example, in "No.7", the huge face occupies the entire picture, so the body and plants such as woods seem to become its appendages.
This is an archetypal hallucination face: looking at this huge face we can’t help but think of Jungian psychology and archetypes. The famous psychologist proposed that these archetypes emerge from the collective unconscious. Similarly, the various shapes in "No. 7" are connected together to form eyes, nose, mouth, etc., facing the viewer in a more direct way. While other of his works employ the use of tree signifiers to piece faces together, No. 7 is one of the most unsettling. Although the artist never mentions the origin or meaning of this painting form, we can guess that this huge face with other images on it is a portrait of the artist himself. This is not a portrait in the traditional sense, as the portrait does not resemble the artist himself, but the face occupies the entire frame and forms a recurring motif, so it may be the artist's alter ego.
In this sense, Sun Yao is back to where he started. Although other artists have also expressed sublime themes, they were all presented as external nature, while Sun Yao's sublimity is internal.
Sun Yao’s art seems to be a journey into the deepest part of our hearts, a place we are unwilling to go to, face, or compromise with. This is not only due to our complacency, but also because we deviate from Socrates' "Know thyself" proposition. However, knowing oneself is not easy and requires great sincerity, and Sun Yao's paintings are the embodiment of his artistic sincerity. He engages in artistic activities not only for aesthetic reasons, but also for the exploration of life and philosophical issues including the nature of existence. On a pilgrimage he calls art, he teaches us through these beautiful works that the self is obscure because we are ourselves. The more we distance ourselves, the more distant we become. If Sun Yao travels through the forest of imagination, then his works are poetic visual maps. In short, this is self-topography.
Opening the Image—Reading Sun Yao’s Paintings
Text: Duan Jun
Society contains many well-hidden conspiracies that prevent us from seeing Certain landscapes. More precisely: it prevents us from seeing certain parts of the image. The desire to traverse social consciousness with bare hands in order to see the image without missing a beat is difficult to achieve because the image is not entirely conveyed in an external form, but appears from the inside in a mental form. Sun Yao's paintings expose the conspiracy theory of social images: some parts of the image structure that are prescribed as invisible are actually visible.
In his many series of works such as "Look", "Face", "Crossover", "Climax", "Landscape" and "Holy Family" painted between 2005 and 2007, he combined human faces, The torso, as well as the scenery or artificial objects that match the face and torso structure, are integrated into absurd "mountain-human" landscapes with permeable brushwork. In this batch of metaphysically profound works, Sun Yao focused on simulating the brushwork effects of classical Chinese landscape paintings. According to the yin and yang of the form and the fluctuations of the structure, the human facial features or torso are transformed into strange pictures like ink landscapes. In a time and space that transcends experience, the painter rethinks the complex relationships between concepts such as "body and nature" and "image and reality" that have troubled mankind for a long time.
Due to the traditional constraints of Confucian culture of "denying oneself and restoring propriety", Chinese people in history have ignored or rejected the body most of the time. Chinese people have long advocated restraining physical desires and animal impulses to a minimum, and replacing the body with "heart", which is regarded as the absolute center of thinking and the main organ of cognition. It was not until the introduction of modern physiology that Chinese people gradually shifted their attention from the heart and lungs to the brain. Precisely during the period when Sun Yao lived consciously - since the 1990s, it was also an era when materialism was prevalent in Chinese society.
The posture of the body indicates the cultural attitude towards the body. In Sun Yao's paintings, body postures are both social and individualistic. The complicated rules of society and the rigid taboos of culture have tangibly or intangibly stipulated the posture of the body. The depiction of the torso in Sun Yao's works shows scenes of gloomy scenes of people struggling and resisting in lowercase letters. Therefore, nothing is clear enough in Sun Yao's paintings. The only thing that is clear is that both the overall mood and the texture of the language are in the midst of a strong natural storm. What the painter wants to recall is the break between human beings and nature. Human beings are actually nature, not outside of nature, but within nature, they can only experience each other but cannot look at each other. The practice of separating humans from nature goes against both human nature and the way of nature. What Sun Yao depicts is that kind of scene that has never been separated: human beings are a way of natural existence. What kind of obstacles and threats are human beings encountering at the moment?
The picture after the fusion of landscape, face, and body is both illusory and in need of confirmation; it is both questioning and sympathetic. Sun Yao used anthropomorphic techniques to incorporate a series of mental states into the mountains and rivers, forming a cyclical and benign relationship between the two layers of images.
Sun Yao first used image software to process the pictures on the computer. This is different from manually overlaying pictures - the manual overlay drawing method has obvious traces of splicing. Powerful image processing software can connect two or more different pictures. It's perfect. Sun Yao's description is not only a reconstruction, but also an erasure, and it is also an opening of the image. He selects only the necessary features and surprises, leaving the rest unimportant.
The world has revolutionaryly entered the era of image processing and modification. The altered images appear to be real, surrounding us, gradually becoming daily, and even becoming a real reality. Then, only by grasping the changed image can we grasp the totality of reality. Images are already too dense. People must choose images. Choosing images means choosing the world. The consequences of technology should be controlled by the positive possibilities of technology. Sun Yao is not completely limited by technology. Technology is only regarded by him as an extension of the artist's ability. He relied on photography's special observation forms, such as large fields of view, overhead shots, negatives, etc., to make paintings present scenes that were different from the past. Moreover, in the process of hand-painting, he will adjust the image and drawing method at any time according to the situation to achieve the cooperation between technology and nature.
Different from the photo-painting expert Richter, Sun Yao's paintings have relatively strong emotional characteristics, unlike Richter who appear unusually calm and neutral. But when it comes to showing the artist's inner sensitivity, Sun Yao and Richter reach the same goal. The unprecedented scene described by Sun Yao is not so much his personal utopia as it is the psychological relationship between the world he yearns for, the real world and the cognitive world in his heart. He not only broke the closedness of a single world, but also established a free passage between fantasy and reality.