Yu-Kun Yang at the Fine Arts Center, California, USA, 1996
Exibition Review by Collette Chattopadhyay (Asian Art News Magazine, Volume 7, Number 1, January/February 1997)
Yu-Kun Yang is an artist fluent in the visual challenges of calligraphic gesture, abstraction, and expression. His new, large-scaled paintings create tensions and balances between the subjective richness of gesture notation and the more rationally-oriented interest of a Minimalist aesthetic. Structuring, even subliminally restraining, large lyrically colored brushstrokes within an all-over grid system alluded to with sequences of dashed points, Yang creates works that suggest the human figure rendered in abstracted body-parts.
On one level, these works suggested a kinship with the fierce and primal imagery of humanity created by Jean Dubuffet and Willem De Kooking in their respective Woman series of the late 1950s. Yet, there is a consciousness in Yang's work of the ambiguity of meaning inherent to gestural notation which at once places his images at a remove from Art Informa land Abstract Expressionism, suggesting a rethinking of the meaning and potential of gestural abstraction following the American and European developments of the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, there are elements within Yang's works which share a resonance with the reinterpretation of the gestural mark as transgressive rather than submlime, that rise in works of artists such as Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns, or subsequently in the works of Markus Lupertz and Georg Baselitz.
Central to Yang's gestural marks with war, as it were, with the more rationally structured grid notations, is the issue of choosing between the artistic premises of creating a three-dimensional illusion on canvas or affirming the two-dimensional, flat reality of the painting's surface. In large part to the tension, Yang's figures never wholly emerge into the field of vision. One can not determine with certainty,for example, whether the painted painted images allude to males or females, much less define any specific human event or activity. Nonetheless, the organic quality of these pieces, with their bold yet gentle brushstrokes rendered often with shimmering white, beige, and peach-toned passages, suggests allusions to human flesh and even human struggle. At the same time, the dark bluish dashed points that seem to establish a grid-like structure above or within the loopy, organic notations, create images that take on the monumental questions raised by the juncture between Art Informa land Abstract Expressionism and the reason inherent to a grid structured surface, Yang embraces the ying-yang duality of emotion and reason, immediacy and intention, illusion and reality.
Extending these concerns, Yang's works also broach the complexities and ambiguities of identity, sharing strong affinities with one of the central issues of German Neo-expressionist painting. Indeed, while their mature paintings have unfolded in different ways, Yang and the renowned Georg Baselitz studied together at the Berlin Academy of Arts in the early 1960s and the similarities between Yang and the Neo-Expressionists are thus more than merely coincidental. That Yang, who was born in Hupei, China, and now lives in California, should create paintings that address the problematic of an identity irrevocably separated from a definitive past is telling. Further, due to an immence assimilation of Western art and culture, his definition of identity, as with many of the German Neo-Expressionists, is a mammoth project fraught with complexities and ambiguities of all fronts. That Yang's finished works remain inherently unresolved as they balance between numerous polarities is thus a condition of central relevance to the meaining of these paintings. Like the German artists of the 1980s, who have sought to free themselves from an overbearing, and even individually destructive, cultural heritage, so Yang too struggles to step out from the lengthy shadows of an artistic tradition that continous to exert its presence at the end of the 20th century.
Thus, while Yang's pieces fluently situate themselves within the Western visual dialogue, they also seem to bear subtle analogies tothe contemporary Chinese art interest in extending traditional Chinese calligraphy and painting into new and contemporary art arenas. Creating calligraphic marks freed from wordsand from the repertoire of traditional painting brushstrokes. Yang's work release gestural notation from the specificity of language as well as from the expectation of tradition. Opening up a complex richness of meaning for subjectivity constructed calligraphic marks, his works function to engender multiple, as opposed to specific, constellations of meaning. Playing his freely drawn loopy organic marks against the starting points of calligraphic placements, discussed above as dashed-grid points, Yang thus deliberately combines specificity with ambiguity, tradition with contemporaneity, and the force of reason with the energy of invention.
Written by Collette Chattopadhyay