Yang Shaobin grey paintings
Stephanie Tasch

When around two years ago a large of works by the Beijing painter Yang Shaobin was shown in Germany, we could only speculate what course this artist’s further development might take, what the next step in his work might be. Yang’s Red Paintings, in which male figures,closely and bitterly intertwined with one another, battle out merciless struggles, could scarcely be topped in their dramatic power. It could neither be said what the motives of these struggles might be, nor how they might end. The figures acted in an indefinite and unending image space of oxblood red; seen close up, they sometimes seemed directly to attack the beholder. By lessening the distance to the image, one was submerged in a colorfulness of great painterly delicacy, apparently entirely divorced from the bloody content of the image.
By this point, Yang Shaobin had already gone through an artistic development that can illustrate the questionable applicability of realism in painting: born 1963 in Tangshan in the northern Chinese province of Hebei, Yang was a policeman for a few years before studying at Hebei Polytechnic College. His works from the early 1990s sometimes depict policemen; in a work from 1993, a whole group of them leans out from the image, their hands on their thighs, a wild grin on each of their faces. The margin of the painting cuts through some of the figures, behind them one can barely glimpse a tiny spot of deep blue sky, and in the middle of the group butterflies inexplicably flutter about. The image does not tell a story, but confronts the beholder with a scene, only to leave that beholder to his or her own interpretation-is their grin malicious? Are the policemen in a good mood or are they feeling aggressive? Are they chasing the butterflies, or are they chasing us?
The Beijing art critic Li Xianting coined the concept of “cynical realism” to describe the art of Yang Shaobin and a number of his colleagues, like Fang Lijun. This term was not only intended to describe the work of these young painters (all of whom are male and born in the early 1960s) in terms of style, but also sought to encapsulate an artistic position as well as a perspective on life shared by the representatives of a generation old enough to still experience the “Great Proletarian Counterrevolution” from 1966 to 1976 as children or teenagers. Their worldview was marked by their experience of the enormous social, economic, and political transformations in the People’s Republic of China inaugurated by the opening policies at the end of the 1970s. At issue here is not how far the attempt to generalize from individual biographies can contribute to the interpretation of this decidedly anti-academic and anti-traditional painting, nor the extent to which this painting might also have represented a pose of the youth culture at the time. But “realism” was surely already a flexible category in these early works of Yang Shaobin, merely indicating that he worked figuratively and with a certain amount of verisimilitude.
The Grey Paintings from last year represent in a surprisingly simple and at the same time utterly convincing way the direction in which Yang Shaobin’s work has continued to develop. The sky to the Red Paintings lay precisely in their overpowering colorfulness; for the beholder, the subjects of these works were thus clearly delimited to aggression and violence. In the new Grey Paintings, Yang allows more space for the ambivalence that is also clearly present in his figure dramas. As always, the male bodies wrestle with one another, grapple with one another; bodies lying on the ground are attacked. But the different shades of grey, the deep black background of many of these paintings, produce distance. If we subtract the excessive symbolism of this color, a perspective is opened up on new constellations. In addition, it is clear that in the past few years Yang has worked a great deal on the placement of figures in space; he now answers the density of the bodies with a new element in his images, the infinitude of starry night skies in which the figures seem weightlessly to float.
Yang Shaobin has retained a style of painting that shifts between the precise depiction of anatomic detail and pure abstraction; certain zones on these bodies, especially the hands and feet of the figures, are painted quite realistically, orchestrating the entire action of the painting with their gestural language. They reach into amorphous masses of flesh; heads seem softened, dissolved, up until the shape-edged rows of teech in their wide-open mouths. Yang’ technique of placing the not really graspable, but certainly violent interaction of bodies in an indeterminate space and representing dramatic movement with the blurring of color is sometimes reminiscent of the painting techniques of Francis Bacon. Here I can only brieflyb touch on this artistic elective affinity: further study is necessary to establish how far it actually goes. However, a great increase in the complexity of image construction and image effect in Yang Shaobin’s scenes from the past year is striking.
Zones of shadow are now placed before the monochromatic grey of the backgrounds in these paintings, be they the hash shadows thrown by a falling figure or the threatening shadow of a figure standing outside of the image field, invisible for the observer, about to throw himself or fall onto another figure. In contrast, the ambivalence of the gestures becomes especially clear in one of the main images of the new series: the large work in an upright format shows a tower of two figures before a starry sky that stretches to infinity. These figures, which literally have their sleeves rolled up, fill almost the entire image field, one standing on the shoulders of the other, the upper one choking, or at least tearing the head of the lower figure with both hands, while the lower figure clutches the legs of the upper figure with both hands. It is unclear whether they are pulling each other, rescuing one another, mutually blocking each other’s ascendance (but where to), or simply tumbling through outer space. In a work in landscape format, which seems almost like a counterpart to the previous image, the protagonist sits on a chair before the backdrop of outer space, while the other embraces him from behind. In the third painting of the same series, an isolated, male half-figure stands at the left hand margin of the image, his arms helplessly thrashing about or raised in self-defense; two much smaller figures duck in the right hand corner of the image, behind them the starry sky arches horizontally. In some of the works the figures are even covered with the lights of individual stars, making their spatial position even more unclear.