PARIS-B is pleased to present Imagined Landscape, an exhibition which unveils a new suite of photographs and video installations by Yang Yongliang.
Yang Yongliang’s work questions our contemporary vision of nature, profoundly altered by unbridled urbanization and industrialization, while also building on the artist’s traditional Chinese pictorial heritage.
Inspired by shanshui, classical paintings of mountains and waters, Yang Yongliang’s artistic practice reminds us of that of landscape painters. However, a careful examination reveals complex superpositions of towers, skyscrapers in ruins, electricity pylons and other man-made forms.
While the ancients sought to convey the feeling of the immutability of nature through the stroke of the brush, Yang Yongliang endeavors to express in his digital landscapes this cycle of demolition and construction that is perpetuated before our eyes. The result is a work in which the appeal of urban modernity is simultaneously accompanied by an awareness of its fragility and impact.
With his new series Imagined Landscape, Yang Yongliang continues to develop a critical approach to reality parallel to a kind of personal utopia that evokes the multi-millennial history of his country. The eight photographs that make up this series mark a break in the artist’s practice, distinguishing themselves from his iconic black and white landscapes by the use of a new color palette, voluntarily more seductive and delicate.
Each work in this new series presents a solitary human or animal in a state of distress: a monkey clings desperately to a rock, three rabbits stand on the edge of a creek, a herd of geese flies away… While human figures such as wandering scholars or hermits were often included in the classical paintings of the Song dynasty, symbolizing the harmonious relationship between humanity and nature in Taoist cosmology, Yang’s figures stand out as the only survivors of an environmental disaster.
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Yang Yongliang – Imagined Landscape – Exhibition views
" This series is dedicated to a shifting world, and especially for the ones who remain hopeful moving forward. "
The exhibition will also feature new video installations, including Glows in the Arctic, 2022, a 2-Channels 4K video. Here, Yang assembles and brings together in one animation the urban landscapes of New York, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris, London and Tokyo. Conceived at a time when travel is made difficult or even impossible, the artwork takes us on a journey, canceling the physical and psychological distance that separates us from each other.
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Shanghai in 1980, he studied traditional Chinese painting with the calligraphy master Yang Yang for ten years. Photographer, painter, videographer and visual artist, he graduated from the Shanghai Institute of Design and the China Academy of Arts in the fields of visual communication and design. He is now a professor at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art.
Catalogue of Works
Imagined Landscape Series
Videos
