Home / News / Master Piece 2015 London:Enchanted - Yao Jui-chung solo exhibition

Master Piece 2015 London:Enchanted - Yao Jui-chung solo exhibition


DURATION: 2015-06-25 ~ 2015-07-01
OPENING: 2015-06-24
VENUE: South Grounds The Royal Hospital Chelsea
ADDRESS: South Grounds The Royal Hospital Chelsea Chelsea Embankment Near Sloane Square London SW3 4LW

Born in 1969 in Taiwan, Yao Jui-chung is now internationally recognised as one of the most innovative Chinese artists of his generation. However his work runs against the current of much of the mainstream avant-garde, in its unabashed delight in producing a visual experience for the viewer that is beautiful as well as intellectually provocative. Artist, curator, critic, author – Yao challenges expectations and cultural norms in diverse ways. He is equally comfortable with photography, sculpture, performance and installation art as well as theatre and film. Yao has attracted international recognition for all of these various ways in which he aims to render the zeitgeist of the last years, years that have been so fertile for the emergence of Chinese artists. Yao graduated from the National University of the Arts in 1994 and currently teaches at the National Taiwan University of Fine Arts. Like many artists and writers of his generation, much of his work has been rooted in issues surrounding Taiwan’s national and cultural identity and his country’s complex relationship with the Mainland. His world, however, stretches far beyond Asian boundaries. He has participated in numerous international exhibitions both in North America and Europe as well as in Asia, and his work is now represented in many museums throughout the world. He secured early critical acclaim as the representative of Taiwan at the 1997 Venice Biennale, with an irreverent photographic series on Taiwan’s post-colonial identity. An artistic residency in Scotland in 2007 provoked a change in Yao’s pictorial interests, particularly in his attitude towards landscape and traditional Chinese landscape paint- ing. The natural undiluted beauty of the countryside was such a contrast to the intense urban environment in Taipei that Yao was inspired to look at landscape afresh, and also to respond to Chinese classical landscape painting with its very cerebral aesthetic, in a new way. He now began to produce paintings that celebrated the beauty of the natural world. He began to feel free to both cut loose from the technical norms of the Chinese canon on the one hand and, on the other, to reinterpret the great masters of the Ming dynasty with his own very original, and often idiosyncratic vision, as seen in Good Times: Paint from Life (page 8). The essence of his work from now on lies in the quixotic fusion of the classical landscape tradition with his own personal, often humdrum, daily experiences. Thus it was from this period that Yao began to create a famous series of works in which he appropriated masterpieces from Chinese art history and transformed them into his own personal ‘history’ in order to reduce the grandeur of these works down to the narrative of his own ‘commonplace’ life, with its pleasures and pains and romantic intimacies. The scepticism he had always felt about the myths propagated by national politics and the vanities of the world around him grows more dominant as he extols the 5 virtues of the simple life and its expression in luminous landscape paintings enriched with the glow of gold such as in Good Times: Golden Cloud (page 24). Yao speaks movingly of sitting on his father’s lap as a child, watching him conjure up magical images of dragons hidden in the clouds and roaring tigers and beautiful peonies ... all with his traditional scholars brushes. These now stand today in Yao’s own studio but he says he doesn’t so far ‘have the courage to pick up and paint. It’s not because the brushes are too old to use but because the tradition hidden in the depth of the tip of the brush is still too huge for me to carry on.’ His profound respect for the past has not deterred him, as we have seen, from expanding the repertoire of ink art into photography and performance. And while in Scotland, with his father’s brushes far back home ... ‘I picked up randomly a technical pen within my reach and painted in an original manner to smooth out the strong urge inside me. Once I was given the chance to abandon all the traditional constraints of traditional brush, ink and paper, I could, to my surprise, convert ancient painting into innovation, winding into a new direction.’ In addition to jettisoning the brush, Yao also began to work with a thick handmade paper from India rather than the traditional Chinese xuan paper. This paper is not only heavy and coarse but is also very springy with an irregular edge, which appeals to Yao because its very irregularity, especially when enriched with gold leaf gives it an intimate, informal quality – ‘like the charm of the Buddha niches (in temples), or cave frescoes’. His work from now on is another striking example of ink art’s expansion into a variety of different channels and media by many of the more audacious talents of Yao’s genera- tion. In other words, he is grappling with the challenge faced by all his contemporaries of how to express the transformation of Chinese society into works that are meaningful, precisely because they take account of the past in order to make sense of the present. His marriage in 2008 and the birth of his daughter in the following year introduced a further shift in his pictorial aims. His work had always expressed an ironic yet generous humanism but now it went a step further. As he has written, ‘after I publicised the “Romance” series in 2009, I said goodbye to my wild days. With the birth of my daughter, my family and I live a simple and warm life, a kind of sweetness I never experienced before. The “Honeymoon” series depicts my yearning for the mountains and waters away from the city, where I feel relieved and inspired in the embrace of the mountains and that of my two loves’, as seen in Honeymoon: Pregnancy (page 33). Most of his works in these last years consequently embody touching references to the ‘sweetness’ of his domestic life. This is evident in Good Times: Forest Path (page 34), with a tender depiction of him and his wife in minute scale, located within monumental landscapes. Yao’s aesthetic trajectory is profoundly original in its choice of technique and subject matter, and deals in the ever-present tension in contemporary Chinese art between past and present. In the works in this exhibition, he submits Chinese tradition and classical styles to the same scrutiny and sardonic wit he has deployed in the past, with an elegance and simplicity that significantly enrich the contemporary repertoire.