我不是我？— 杨勇的作品
作者：侯瀚如
相关展览：《第五系统：“后规划时代”的公共艺术》，第五届深圳国际当代雕塑展，何香凝美术馆，深圳，中国，2003
在过去十年，摄影在中国艺术界已成为最具创造力的领域。以摄影作为他们的主要语言和媒介，新一代的艺术家们在当代艺术前沿崛起。他们的作品大多反映疾速的都市化和都市扩张。他们不仅将这一疯狂发展的奇景展现在他们的影像作品中，而且主动参与了这一奇景的创造。换句话说，相机成为他们以都市游击队的方式干预现实的武器。
毫无疑问，杨勇是他们当中的领军人物之一。
出生成长在四川，杨勇于90年代初来到深圳并定居下来。在过去十年，他痴迷于创作这个新兴城市中人们的肖像。他尤其敏锐地深入到青年的世界，他们是与这个城市一起成长的。
人们会很容易将杨勇的作品与Nan Goldin 和 Larry Clark这些艺术家联系起来，因为他们的作品都反映了都市青年的边缘生活。虽然不能否认这种可能影响的存在，但是他的作品值得更深入的研究，尤其是将它们与特定的背景，深圳，联系起来。事实上，杨勇的作品是一种影像传奇，展现了青年人群的特定状态。这些青年从中国各地移民而来，在这个人为创造的经济特区，中国都市化和现代化的试验田，重塑自己。杨勇既是他们生活敏锐而准确的观察者，也是这个特殊群体中的一员。然而同时，他的作品又决不是记录片和现实主义的。他们都是由艺术家自己设想、构思、导演和创作出来的。反过来说，这个艺术家确实是位真正的导演。这就是为何杨勇的作品总是散发出一种特殊的电影摄影般的闪耀魅力。
事实上，建设深圳的历史值得用真正的电影摄影来展现。这是一个神奇崛起的都市。二十年间，这里由一个边陲小渔村变成为拥有700多万人口的大都市。它完全是一个人造的都市，一个共产主义的计划经济追赶资本主义、消费主义市场经济的跨越的产物。这是国际大都市的翻版，一个复制的世界城。它被设想成为未来中国都市社会的模版。这一构想正在逐渐变成现实，在全国的新兴的城市扩展浪潮中，很多场景都是它的翻版。
深圳的都市景象极其令人兴奋。成百上千座崛起的高层建筑、高速公路网络、繁忙的交通、闪烁的霓虹标牌、无休止的噪音和异味……社会主义模式的城市规划和混乱的、拼贴画般的城中村混合在一起。同时，人们很难逃离一种空虚的感伤：所有这一切都是一夜之间在荒芜之地建成，还在无止境地扩张，并不给人们时间理解原委。这里没有地理和历史条件上的自然联系。所有的一切都是人造的。这里总是缺乏使人安居下来的确定感。这可能就是它在本质上与香港，它的后殖民地近邻，的区别。这也是令中国都市与真正的国际化、全球化都市不同的原因。
相应地，这样的人造城市造就出了“人造”都市人群。他们中的很多人，来自全国的其他地区，通常是农村地区，现在转变成为“白领”，拥有最美丽、新潮、时尚的衣妆，享受着体现新贵梦想的舒适生活方式。然而，无可避免是，他们年轻的面孔后面隐藏着忧郁的失落感。他们的灵魂实际上是空虚的。让他们在这个庞大而毫无个性的城市定居下来的原因仅仅是因为工作的需要，也就是为了致富。大多数人可以企及的文化生活仅仅是诸如卡拉OK、伴着流行歌曲的香港电视节目和一点盗版好莱坞电影DVD这样的简单娱乐。他们明白自己永远不会在这里生根，只能尽可能享受现有的条件。唯一可以做的就是消费，去买任何他们买得起的东西并尽快从中得到乐趣。但是，所有这种快餐式的舒适生活根本不能缓解他们深深的失落感，不能填补真实的灵魂乃至真实的生活的缺失。为了掩饰这种焦虑，他们不断地借助其他的身份来伪装自己——冷酷而疏离，开着不当真的玩笑，自愿模仿着香港和好莱坞的电影人物……在时尚的语言中，他们被称作“残酷的青春”。用杨勇的话来说，生活对于他们就是逃亡，从逃避到自杀。或者生命不过是场游戏。你能扮演快乐的人，也能扮演失败者。但是他们从来都没有从“我还是我吗？”的疑问中解脱出来。他们从来不曾去寻找任何严肃的答案。[1] 真假之间没有区别，我和他人之间没有区别。这只是个虚幻的世界。它是残酷的，也是冷漠的。
他们所代表的是未来一代的真实形象，正是他们在重塑着中国的都市社会并促进了全球的转变。
这就是杨勇在作品中捕捉和展露的内容。他说，用虚拟来完善的真实，让我兴奋。这个暧昧的地带成为杨勇展现个人艺术天赋的独特游乐场。非常自然的，摄影成为他最恰当的媒介——摄影是抹去真实与虚拟、现实与假想之间区别的最好方式——这一切都伪装在所谓摄影“真实性”的假设下。
在像“青春残酷日记”这样的标题下，杨勇的影像传奇揭示了这些青年，尤其是时髦的女郎们，的都市轨迹。这些主角总是装扮靓丽、浓妆艳抹、些微暴露、性感妖娆，准备去参加豪华派对。她们努力地模仿着在电影、电视、杂志中见过的流行明星，扮演着各自的角色。她们有她们的乐趣，但这种乐趣是怪诞的；她们聚集在一起，但每个人都显得那么孤独。她们总是处在一种与忙碌的都市生活相隔绝的梦幻般的背景中，比如酒店客房、酒吧间等暧昧的、刻意渲染的神秘空间。偶尔她们也会出现在街道和市场等公共场所，但她们的影像仍旧与环境割裂。她们的仪态和举止与场景完全不相干，所以总是与场景疏离。她们是都市中最孤独的人群，试图编织她们自己的朋友网络和生存方式……她们自己的世界。而反过来，这些幻影般的映像形成了都市的面孔。
所有这些都经过杨勇的精心构思、导演而拍摄的。他努力去捕捉和证明生活在超现实中的这一代都市人群的真实心理状态。在这种过度粉饰的背景中，追逐时尚的外表显露出掩盖生命空虚的渴望。这种假面掩盖了他们不确定的人生、他们的焦虑和价值缺失。他们完全反映出这座城市的社会和物质状况，而且进一步反映出整个中国的都市化和现代化真实状态——他们是，在不具备必要的文化条件（即文明社会的价值体系）下，由国家规划的、向消费主义社会大跃进的矛盾产物。这是个充满矛盾与冲突的世界，有时甚至是爆炸性和失控的。这就是为什么在集体的妥协下，社会尽所有努力去创造越来越多的辉煌成果（在建筑、城市景观、广告中，等等）去暂时掩盖不稳定的现实。
当然，杨勇叙述着他这一代人的故事，他们出生在70年代，成长在中国的改革开放和现代化进程中。这个艺术家很大程度上有着与这些年轻人同样的生活方式。与那些经历从文化大革命到开放的转变过程，从争取言论自由到直接政治对峙的前一代艺术家不同，他们对探索个人生存和自我实现的开放空间更有兴趣。他们期望新的身份，更多元化和复杂化，也更适应被全球化影响的新文化，他们主张新的存在方式。他们将自己称为“新新人类”。
在世纪之交，杨勇的作品朝更广阔的兴趣空间和艺术实践发展。他越来越多地关注城市场景与人物之间的空间关系，更多地将都市的各种物质形态联系起来。受到视觉效率和商业广告的启发，在新科技和影像交流的年代，他将新的媒体，例如灯箱和视频，引进摄影作品。这给他提供了在更公共和更开放的空间创作的可能。杨勇也应用计算机程序去构思将摄影影像和建筑相关联的新形式，以实现更深刻的表达和进一步超越摄影自身的局限。更有意思的是，这种趋势实际上将杨勇的作品直接卷入社会现实，超越出自我封闭的“残酷青春”。最近几年，他正在尝试到公共空间创作特定的场景项目。最成功的一个创作是他在深圳华侨城波托非诺的“第五届深圳国际公共艺术双年展2003”上完成的“第五系统后规划时代的公共艺术”。在这个项目中，他在这个城市最富裕和最穷困的地区之间的湖上搭建了一座桥。但是这座桥的两端是未完工的。他们永远不能到达彼岸。富人和穷人永远被分隔。
这就是我们的现实。
[1] 杨勇自述《关于“青春残酷日记”》, 1999
Am I Myself? – Yang Yong's Work
Author: Hou Hanru
Related Exhibition: "The Fifth System: The Popular Art of 'post layout'", The 5th Shenzhen International Contemporary Sculpture Exhibition, He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China
Photography has become one of the most innovative fields in Chinese art scene for the last decade. A new generation of artists, resorting to photography as their main language and medium, has emerged at the frontier of today’s art world. Their works are frequently related to the phenomenally rapid urbanisation and urban expansion. They are not only representing this spectacle of frenzy development in their photographic works but also playing active roles in the making of the spectacle itself… In other words, photo cameras have become their weapons to intervene in reality in an urban guerrilla manner.
No doubt, Yang Yong is one of the most outstanding among them.
Born and grown up in Sichuan, Yang Yong moved to Shenzhen in the early 1990s and settled there. For the last ten years, he has been obsessively producing photographic portraits of the populations of this brand new city. He particularly probes into the world of the youth who have been growing up together with the city itself.
At first glance, one may easily relate Yang Yong's work to artists like Nan Golding and Larry Clark for their presentations of the marginal life of urban youth. However, without denying totally this possible influence, one should examine his work more closely, especially connect it with its specific context, the city of Shenzhen itself. In fact, Yang Yong's work is a kind of photo-roman that exposes the specific state of being of the young population, immigrated from all around China and reinventing themselves in this artificially created “Special Economic Zone” that is supposed to be a test-ground for China’s urbanisation and modernisation. Yang Yong is a sensitive and accurate observer of their lives while he himself belongs to this particular group of population. In the meantime, however, his work is by no means documentary and “realistic”. They are all imagined, conceived, directed and set up by the artist himself. In turn, the artist is actually a genuine metteur en scène. This is why Yang Yong's work always radiates a certain flare of cinematographic charm.
In fact, the history of the making of Shenzhen itself deserves a veritable cinematographic presentation. It’s a miraculous boom city, a city of over 7 million inhabitant being entirely created from a tiny village on the borderline between the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong within two decades. It's an artificial city, a product of the leaping forward of communist style and economy of planning to catch up with capitalist, consumerist market economy. It's a forged version of the real international metropolis. A kind of “pirated” global city. And it's conceived to become a model for the future of Chinese urban society. And this ambition is being realised smoothly, with duplications of its image in the new urban expansions all around the country.
Shenzhen's urban-scape is extremely exciting, with thousands of high rise building, highway network, busy traffic, bright neon signs, endless noises and smells… blending socialist style of urban planning and chaotic collage of semi-rural zones, or villages in the city. In the meantime, one can never escape from a certain sentiment of void: all these have been built up from a no-man's land overnight, and are expanding infinitely without allowing us the time to understand what, why and how. There is not any natural connection with the geographic and historic conditions. Everything has been made up artificially. And there is always a lack of certainty to live here. This is probably what makes it fundamentally different from Hong Kong, its postcolonial neighbour. And this is also what makes Chinese cities so different from truly international, or global, cities.
Accordingly, the production of such an artificial city has also produced an equally artificial urban population. Many of them, coming from other parts of the country, often agrarian regions, are now turned into “white collars”, dressed in the most beautiful, fresh and trendy fashion and enjoying a comfortable lifestyle that incarnates the dream of the nouveaux riches. However, inevitably, there is a kind of melancholic feeling of being lost behind their young faces. Their souls are essentially empty. The reason for them to settle in this immense and anonymous city is simply because of the need of business, namely to enrich themselves. And the only “cultural life” available for most of them is simply entertainments such as Kara OK and Hong Kong television program with Pop songs, and occasionally pirated DVDs of Hollywood films. Knowing they will never take root here, this population can only try to enjoy as much as possible the present conditions. And the only present possibility is to consume, to shop everything they can shop and amuse with it as quickly as possible… However, all this fast-food style of comfortable life can by no means relieve them from the profound sentiment of lose, the missing of a real soul, hence real life. To hide away such an anxiety, they constantly disguise themselves in another, borrowed, identity – cool and distant, making fun but never take it seriously, a kind of volunteered mimics of the fictive figures from Hollywood or Hong Kong films … In the fashionable jargon, they are called “Cruel Youth”. In Yang Yong’s words, life for them is escape, from fleeing to committing suicide. Or life is only a game. You can play the happy one, or you can act as the loser. But they can never run away from the question: “Am I myself?”. But they never seek any serious answer… [1] There is no distinctions between real and unreal, between I and the other. This is simply a virtual world. It’s cruel, but also cool.
And they represent the very image of the future generation who is reshaping China's urban society and contributing to the transformation of the global world.
This is exactly what Yang Yong has grasped and manifested in his work. He says: “it's the reality consummated by virtuality that excites me”. This ambiguous zone becomes a particular playground for Yang Yong to express his artistic talent. And quite naturally photography becomes the most relevant medium for him – photography is the best way to erase the distinction between the real and fictional, between facts and imaginaries… disguised by the presumption of photography's “realness”.
Under generic titles like “The Cruel Dairy of Youth” (qing chun can ku ri ji 青春残酷日记), Yang Yong's photo-romans unfold along the urban trajectories of these young people, especially trendy girls. The protagonists are always beautifully dressed and made-up, sexy, slightly exhibitionist, ready to go for luxurious parties. They try their best to play all kinds of drama, assimilating the pop stars that they have seen in films, television and magazines. There is a lot of fun. But the fun is uncanny. They are together, but everyone appears to be so lonely. They are always standing against a sort of surreal background, spaces that are isolated from the busy life of the city – semi-private, artificially mysterious spaces such as hotels, bars, etc… If sometimes they find themselves in public spaces such as streets and markets, their images are still cut off from the surroundings… their presences and behaviours are totally irrelevant and hence alienated from the context. They are the most lonely beings in the city, trying to weave their own networks of friends and ways of living… their own world. And in turn, this phantom-like images make up the face of the city itself.
All these have been carefully conceived, directed and photographed by Yang Yong. He manages to capture and demonstrate the real psychological reality of this generation of urban dwellers who live in a kind of surreal-ness. Pursuing fashionable looks reveals the desire to cover the emptiness of meaning of life in this context with excessive make-ups. It's a kind of cosmetic mask to cover the uncertainty of their lives, their anxiety and lack of reliable values. They perfectly reflect the social and physical conditions of the city where they live, and further reflect the real nature of China's urbanisation and modernisation – they are contradictory results of a kind of state planned great leap-forward towards a consumerist society without developing necessary cultural conditions, namely a value system of a citizen society. It’s a world full of contradictions and conflicts, sometimes explosive and uncontrollable. This is why all efforts that the society can make, over a collective compromises, is to create more and more splendid facades (in architecture, urbanscape, advertisements, etc.) to temporarily mask the precarious reality.
Indeed, Yang Yong is recounting the stories of his own generation, born in the 1970s and grown up in the process of China's opening and modernisation. The way of living of this young people is largely shared by the artist himself. Different from the previous generation of artists who have lived through the transition between Cultural Revolution and opening and engaged in the collective struggle for freedom of expression, hence direct political confrontation, they are much more interested in seeking to open space for individual ways of living and self-realisation. Looking for new identities, more diverse and complex, and more adapting to the new cultures influenced by globalisation, they claim for new forms of existence. They call themselves “New New Human Beings” (xin xin ren lei 新新人类)
At the turn of the millennium, Yang Yong's work evolves towards a wider space of interests and artistic experiments. He focuses more and more on the spatial relationship between the urban background and the figures, increasingly articulating the physical forms of the city. Inspired by the visual efficiency and impact of commercial advertisement in the age of new technology and image communication, he introduces new media such as light box and video into his photographic work. This provides him new possibilities to engage in more public and open spaces. Yang Yong also resorts to computer programs to envision new forms of connecting photographic images and architecture in order to achieve more impressive expressions and further transgress the boundary of photography itself. What is even more interesting is to see this tendency can actually bring Yang Yong's work to direct involvement with the social reality, beyond the self-enclosure of the “Cruel Youth”. For the last couple of years, he has been trying to evade to public space with site-specific projects. The most successful one is certainly the project he realised for the event “The Fifth System, public art in the age of post-planning” (the 5th Shenzhen International Public Art Biennial, 2003) in the Porto Fino area of the Overseas Chinese Town of Shenzhen. In this project, he constructed a bridge on the lake situated in the middle between the most wealthy and the poorest zones of the city. However, the two ends of the bridge remained unfinished. They can never arrive at the banks. The rich and the poor are bounded to be separated forever…
And this is our reality.
[1] Yang Yong's statement on his work "About 'Youth Diary'", 1999
