The Red Trauma of Violence
Sebastian Preuss

The first encounter remains unforgettable. In the midst of the rush and tumble of the Cologne Art Fair, the noise of the visitors, between countless pointless artworks and all the installations, suddenly these paintings were spellbinding, and all else was forgotten. First, it was a shock to the eyes, but then increasingly an attack on the soul: a kind of painting never before seen. With his red paintings, Yang Shaobin became famous around the world; it is the first highpoint in his work. Basically, at issue is nothing but violence, raw, frightening attacks on the human creature. With a dramatic impact, Yang allows the large, canvas-filling faces almost to explode out of the image. They are not portrait, but rather types,even if also sometimes a certain similarity might surface  with the artist’s own countenance. Some are deformed, injured, penetrated, as if they had suffered horrific tortures.

No less horrifying are Yang’ depictions of whole bodies. But what does whole mean here? They are torsi, mutilated fragments, crippled legs and other body parts, figures in a gruesome uniform or monstrosity. The painter spares us the last details, but there always remains enough to be seen under his expressive strokes to teach the beholder a sense of horror. Man——always men——grab each brutally in the face, bite their ears or even their genitals, fight and throttle each other, with distorted ugly faces. In an interview, Yang said that during his childhood in a mining area, violence and brutality were omnipresent. This experience haunts him to this day. How people fight, destroy, injure, disrespect, and humiliate one another——this runs though his work like the trace of an eternal way of the Cross, to use Christian terms.

In his “red series”, the depiction of violence saturates the work on all levels: in the motifs, in the gestures of the figures, and above all in the painterly aspect. The style is the real sensation of these paintings. It is difficult to believe that Yang came to this style all on his own. In all their nuances and shadings, his paintings are positively saturated with a powerful, brutally glowing red. Everything here is red, the background, the bodies, and faces. Only the hair, if the men have any, is black. Not a contrast, but more a part of the red paint orgy are the white, thin, transparently applied surfaces that lie like poisonous dust on the men and strangely embody their physicality. As if a corrosive acid had rained down on the paintings, the white eats through these faces. The paints are very much thinned, they run and fuse in a highly subtle way. Everything seems somehow liquid; it is as if the concept of Zugmunt Bauman’s notion of “Liquid modernity” had here taken from on the canvas. Of course, for Yang at issue is the blood, and in many places the paint runs down as if the figures had just suffered fresh wounds.`

The trauma of violence that is released in Yang’s paintings in an agitated ecstasy is rooted in the painter’s biography: the painter has never denied that. But he also draws from a European-American tradition of expressive art, the examples of which he presents in a catalogue of 2004 as a reference: a dramatic decapitation scene from the Baroque, the self-destructive Van Gogh, depictions of meat by Chaim Soutine, the deformed bodies of Francis Bacon, tortured figures by Louise Bourgeois, and –what else- a photograph of one of Hermann Nitsch’s bloody performances. All of these are the coordinates with which Yang himself marks his painterly terrain, without giving up his own signature style. His equally subtle and expressive brushstroke is unmistkakable, just as the fluid application of paint or the way in which the figures are branded into the background.

Despite its idiosyncracies, Yang’s painting is an open system and in constant development. In 2003, his paintings became black and grey, and it is astonishing to observe how their dramatics magically froze, the brutality of the event enraptured in a kind of colorist metalevel. It is an almost conceptual transformation of the colors and the iconography, and also a testament to how intensely Yang engages with Western developments. Everything is always in motion, the painterly cosmos in constant expansion. Since 2004-2005, Yang has also painted using photographs as models for his paintings, but not in the style of the exact photorealism that has flooded the art market of late, and is often so boring. Again, it is a form of “fluidization,” the event melts into a coloristic alienation and a seemingly casual, but precisely executed brushstroke.

September 11, 2001 and the Iraq War have led Yang to move from individual violence to violence between states. His painterly paraphrases of photography circle around the Second World War, the bomber attacks of the Japanese on China, the American occupation of Japan, scenes from dictatorships and political conflicts, that need not be precisely localized in order to experience their unsetting effect. His engagement with Gerhard Richter is in this cycle unmistakable. Especially the work Vibrations I, with the American bombs, is a reflex on Richter’s famous depiction of a Mustang fighter squadron in the traumatic attack on his home city, Dresden. The critic UIrike Muenter here correctly recognized a subliminal reference to the Germans coming to terms with the Nazi period, something that many Chinese in vain demand of Japan for their war crimes. Yang’s paintings based on photographs are certainly not politic manifestos, but there are always echoes of concrete political and historical events that are branded onto memory.

       In his most recent series, Yang again approaches the red paintings. Again at issue are destruction and the violent deformation of human bodies. But now they are not just nameless people: there are clear references. So Yang enhances the famous photographs of the dead sons of Saddam Hussein, to a caustic depiction, in which their gruesome death is just as horrific as their bloodthirsty lives. Now there are also references to his illegal visit to a coalmine and its surroundings. Yang met there many deformed children, victims of the catastrophic environmental policies in China. With a frontal view, they indict the hostile world that has produced them. Again, red is the color of trauma.