杨勇的神话

作者：田霏宇

相关展览：《国际通道——世界属于你》，北京当代唐人艺术中心，北京，中国，2008

在深圳最富创意的地区边缘有一幢腾空了的厂房，里面有一间干净整洁的工作室，杨勇就是在这里进行他的创作的。像这样的区域如今在中国各地正不断涌现：它们是“旧物改造”的新港湾，就坐落在以前的工厂厂区里，大致都是按照北京798的模式建立；不同的是它们没有经历那段烦扰而混乱的阶段——那时的艺术家把自己看作打破旧秩序，建立新秩序的斗士，是闯入一个正在消亡的体系中的正义勇士。深圳从来都不是一个教条主义盛行的地方；在这块杨勇与一些建筑师和平面设计师们分享的土地上有着一个当地的当代艺术馆的分馆，几家画廊，一些咖啡厅，甚至还有出售设计拙劣的家具的所谓新生活方式店铺，但这都不曾影响杨勇。杨勇与一两个助手在一间内部宽阔的混凝土房子里面进行创作，调整他的LCD投影仪，好让某个设定的数字画面精确投射到一张画布上，然后再在画布上依此图画。

如今的很多艺术家用这种方式作画，摒弃了双手和画笔带来的快感和精确，代之以训练有素的助手和数码影像带来的观念化的态度。我曾经为《Artforum》的“艺术的生产”专题撰写过一篇关于大芬村的文章，其中单独谈到了杨勇。这个村子因为把油画当作纯粹的产品生产而饱受批评，而它就在杨勇工作室的半小时车程外。那篇文章最后以杨勇的一幅两米乘两米的油画结束，它是通过用投影仪把齐达内的脚投射到画布上进而转化成艺术的影象而展现出来（使人想起道格拉斯戈登和飞利浦帕雷诺的作品）。当然，当绘画变成了制作的时候，艺术家的工作便不依赖于画架而在于对图像的选择和分类上。而对于杨勇来说，如今这一系列借用隐晦的毛主义式的语录“世界是你们的”为主题的架上和实物绘画作品堪称对于继承和颠覆的双重矛盾的延展探索。

杨勇延续了他一直以来对于那些几乎超人般人物的热烈迷恋，这些人物存在于主流国际媒体视线之中。对于这位永远年轻的来自四川的图像艺术家来说，诸如斯蒂芬·霍金、已故教皇约翰·保罗二世、弗拉基米尔·普京、向政界要员和商界领袖提出尖锐问题的英国“神奇小子”或者在2006年德国世界杯上漂漂亮亮地带领德国队取得第三名的德国足球队主教练尤尔根·克林斯曼都赫然在列。这些人物都是那些具有非凡本领与力量的神话人物在现代的化身：它们有着无暇的道德、惊人的智力和健硕的魅力。对于杨勇这个以创作那些生活在中国新兴都市中圣徒般的普通（虽然富有吸引力）城市妇女而闻名的艺术家来说，这次注意力的转换标志着其艺术视角和个人定位的同时成熟。在深圳参差错落的美景中生活了多年以后，杨勇意识到这个世界是被那些他所不知道的游戏者们所占据的，控制这个世界的力量亦非他所及。这些画作代表了一种对这个人为强加的，充满奇闻轶事的世界秩序的穿刺。

如今这些形象不仅出现在他之前系列的油画作品中（杨勇的这种艺术转型早在2006年便开始了），还出现在日常生活中的物品上；艺术家最近找到了另一种动力将他的艺术探索带入到超越艺术传统的视觉语言之中。因此，已故教皇的形象出现在了一台冰箱上，而俄罗斯总统被画在了一个廉价的陶瓷缸上。艺术家用不折不扣的写实手法处理这些形象。尽管没有出现上帝之手，这种写实手法带来的颜色与纹理仍具有强烈的个人风格。无名的美女再次出现，这一次通过艺术家的照相机传递出来，并且出现在用丙烯颜料涂画的沙发和行李箱上。其他的形象，比如来自一部法国电视系列节目中的巨大的，倒下的马，也出现在他的作品中。这些作品为观众呈现的整体感觉是离开了传统观念中的舒适世界前往一个恐怖的游乐场——在这个游乐场中，生活在毫无全球社会意识的集体中的图像和人物可以自由出现，显示自身的含义。这是一种奇特的感觉，遇到的人不仅有教练和教皇，也有衣着暴露的女孩和智力早熟的男孩，所有这些都和平相处，却也同样疏离。

与其说杨勇是世界末日的预言者，不如说他是一个生活在为整个国家制造视觉梦想的城市中的普通“创造者”。这不是中心的艺术，也不是一个需要不断与他的艺术界同僚一决高下的艺术家的艺术。取而代之，这是一个色彩丰富、目标多样的绘画载体；正是它从一个独特而又显然处于外围的视角中为我们呈现了关于这个世界的另一面现实。

Yang Yong’s Mythologies

Author: Philip Tinari

Related Exhibition:  “International Passage–The World is Yours”, Tang Contemporary Art, Beijing, China, 2008

Yang Yong works from a clean studio in a cleaned-up warehouse building on the edge of the most creative district in Shenzhen. Areas like these are popping up in cities around China now: havens of adaptive reuse, situated in former factory compounds and conceived vaguely along the model of Beijing’s 798, but without ever having gone through that pesky, delusional phase where the artists considered themselves fighters for a new order against an old one, righteous interlopers into a dying system. Shenzhen has never been a good place for dogma, and even if the area around the floor he shares with the architects of Urbanus and some old graphic-designer buddies is home to a branch of the local contemporary art museum, a few galleries, some cafes, and even lifestyle stores selling badly designed furniture, this does not impact Yang Yong, the painter who works with an assistant or two in a cavernous concrete room, adjusting his LCD projector such that a given digital image is cast with precision onto a canvas waiting to be painted in its image.

Lots of artists paint like this today, trading the pleasures and rigors of the hand and the brush for the conceptual posture of the trained assistant and the digital photograph. I singled Yang Yong out in an article I wrote for Artforum on Dafen—the much-critiqued village of oil painting as pure production just a half hour’s drive from his studio—ending that piece in the magazine’s “Art of Production” issue with the image of Yang Yong projecting Zidane’s foot (as interpreted filmically by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno) onto a two-by-two meter canvas for transmutation into art. Of course when painting becomes production, the artist’s task lies not at the easel but in the selection and assortment of images. And for Yang Yong, this current series of paintings and painted objects under the vaguely Maoist axiom “The World is Yours” is an extended exploration of inheritance and defeat.

Yang Yong maintains an ongoing fascination with the almost superhuman characters who populate the periphery of the mainstream international media dialectic. For this perpetually young image-maker from Sichuan, characters like Stephen Hawking, the late Pope John Paul II, Vladimir Putin, the British “genius boy” who poses tough questions to politicians and business leaders, or the German football coach Jurgen Klinsmann who brought his team stylishly to a third place finish in the 2006 World Cup loom large. Such individuals are our latter-day equivalent of mythical creatures endowed with special traits and powers: moral infallibility, staggering intelligence, athletic charm. For Yang Yong, an artist who made his name creating hagiographic urban portraits of ordinary (albeit attractive) women inhabiting the rising Chinese city, this turn of attention marks a maturation of both artistic lens and personal disposition. It is as if after years of dwelling on the beauties crawling the streets of his adopted Shenzhen, he has realized that the world is inhabited by players beyond his own acquaintance, controlled by forces beyond his grasp. These paintings represent a stab at this perceived order, in all its anecdotal glory.

That such images now populate not only the canvases of previous series (Yang Yong made this painterly turn as far back as 2006) but the objects of daily life speaks to another drive recently perceived by the artist to bring his explorations into synch with visual languages that transcend art proper. Thus, the late pope finds his image emblazoned on a refrigerator, the Russian president on a cheap porcelain urn. These images are all rendered in the same unflagging realist register, which emerges in terms of palette and texture as having an individual style despite the absolute absence of the maker’s hand. The anonymous beauties reappear, this time filtered through the artist’s camera and onto sofas and suitcases in acrylic paints. Other characters emerge, like a giant, fallen horse from a French television series. The overall feeling offered to the viewer is that of having left a comfortable world of solidified understandings for a macabre funhouse in which the odd images and individuals who populate the mediated collective unconscious of a global society are allowed to appear and signify on their own terms. It is a strange sensation, encountering coaches and pontiffs, scantily dressed girls and intellectually precocious boys, on equal, and equally alienated terms.

And yet Yang Yong is less a prophet of coming global doom than an ordinary “creative” inhabiting the city that manufactures visual dreams for the entire nation. This is not the art of the center, nor is it the art of an artist who needs to constantly measure himself against his painterly peers. It is instead a body of vociferously colored and targeted painting that pulls at a set of global realities from a distinct, and distinctly peripheral, perspective.