Exhibitions

Ye Yongqing - people call him “Chief Ye”, a strategic giant in the Chinese art field. He is an art director in Contemporary Art Academy of China, and also has an equal fame with Zhang Xiao Gang and Wang Guangyi. He well elaborates the spirit of “playing art”, journeys to the world with a pipe of ink and a tiny “eyebrow pen”. Walking freely across scholar’s sentiment and humorous life, he takes “bird” as the unique mark, overthrew the traditional art thinking, reverses classic Chinese logic and humorizes “bird” into the element of joke and scoff. He gains a title which might be weird, but certainly suitable for him “Birdman”.

Ye Yongqing uses who-knows-what-kind of method to draw his birds, he got this idea from 2000. He chooses “slow scribble” as a reverse way of thinking; he draws magnified and distorted bird in detailed however abstract lines. “Scribble usually gives an impression of fast and simple. But if I sketch something childish in a mature way and with slow process, people might miss-recognize it as a child’s drawing at first, then suddenly discovering the meaning in it. This is an interesting process that I am like a trap setter, making a joke to visitors just for a harmless fun.” Ye Yongqing loves this contrast of tradition and ridiculousness. In recent years, his subjects extend from birds to humanity and living environment. “Sometimes I wonder, am I the one playing on birds? Or it is birds playing on me?” says Ye.

In 1986, Ye Yongqing and a group of friends founded the "Southwest Arts Group," bringing about his direct participation in the "New Wave Arts" movement. To this day, he still fondly remembers that surging period. At the time, they were full of sincere ardor for humanist ideals. Yongqing avoided the scar art and the indigenous social realism of the previous generation, and he even seemed to have bypassed the path of "political pop" that was then gaining such attention worldwide with the flag of "to be integrated is to be creative" raised high. Instead, through his semasiology of pictorial idioms, he has ingeniously stridden into a new age of creativity, causing him to embrace conceptual art much earlier than other artists of his generation. The post-1997 Ye Yongqing has been ceaselessly expanding his spheres of activity, and at the same time taking up many different roles that have him flying all over the world, “I often see my life as like that of a migratory bird moving among several different cities, fragmented and with no fixed abode. I have this fantasy: I wave my hand and all these fragmentary images and ordinary objects that I have woven into and piled onto silk fill the ground with feathers that float away, like they had never even existed. he defined himself as a cultural rebel, but after walking out he discovered how small he is, and started to think about “who I am”. “The national character has giving us too much boundaries. I was deeply touched by artists without boundaries. They directly express the thoughts with great explosive force to fill the artworks with energy and life.” After wandering far and seeing much, Ye Yongqing’s art thinking becomes mature. The early metaphor-like style turned into visual art of symbols.His creation is as an extension of his thinking and as the evidence of the tumult of his thoughts and emotions. It seems to be memories of the past but even more resembles to the future that draws from reality. However, a wanderer’s mind is always flying and would never settle down. Time and location cannot admit him to put his eagerness in art into action from time to time. Yet, Ye transfers his pain into painting with a tiny eyebrow pen. It is a transcendent status after obstacles and struggles that break through the boundary, which enables him to enter the status of painting wherever he is. Returning to art, without any hinders, to the simplest but absolute ego and space.

Dali Script is Ye’s artistic creation in Yunnan this summer, the extraordinary scenery of Xishuangbanna is his spiritual home town. Just as a migratory bird, he set his foot between farmland and forest and discovered the traditional paper made in Lijiang which Naxi tribe uses to copy the “Dongba script”. Attracted by its texture of simplicity and elegance, his inspiration seems exceptionally tender and sentimental, fragile but full of complexity. Through his artistic creation, memories surge back to existence and to the reality. In his scribble journal, one can see an intellectual’s poetic and lyrical romance. It is an attitude of altitude that Ye Yongqing holds to the world.

The reason Commander Ye is Commander Ye is because he will never become a follower of the current prevailing trend, much less an obedient idolizer of Western art. The inheritor of the "spirit" of the accumulation of 5000 years of Chinese history, he has in his bones a natural ability to absorb the ectoplasm of earth and sky. Bird becomes "spirit," and turns into "bird man" – that’s Mr. Ye’s humorous pun. Even if it is the rude mocking "Showing your bird, bird man," even that also symbolizes the highest realms of the unity of heavenly god and earth-man. His "great big bird" revived the soul of literati art, perpetuating the spirit of Chinese brush and ink. However, no matter a bird or a birdman, art or life, humanity or symbolization, rebellion or innovation, humor or joke, what the laity care is free only, nothing to do with the bird.