Yang Yongliang: Vanishing Landscape

By Clara Che Wei Peh

Yang Yongliang modelled his videos and lightboxes closely after the traditional shanshui paintings through a monochromatic lens in his earlier practice. In his more recent works, Yang expands the universes he creates to encapsulate colour, while also shifting the focus on artificial landscapes onto urban lives and individual narratives. Vanishing Landscape, the solo presentation of his work held by Sullivan+Strumpf during Singapore Art Week 2023, is an illustration of these new directions.

Trained in ink-wash painting and calligraphy himself, he takes photographs and videos captured across different cities he resides in and travels to, and seamlessly layers them into virtual environments that take after the painting tradition. Throughout ancient China, the cultural significance of landscape paintings has evolved through time, with the genre embodying man’s desire to withdraw into the natural world at the end of the Tang dynasty, becoming a virtue signaling exercise for scholars in Song dynasty, and further (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2004). Despite its various transformations, it is noted that the Chinese landscape depictions of nature are ‘seldom mere representations of the external world’ but are ‘expressions of the mind and heart of the individual artists’ (Metropolitan Museum of Art 2004).

Born in 1980 in Old Town Jiading, Shanghai, Yang witnessed the rapid and ever-expanding growth of China’s mega-cities and the endless cycle of demolition and reconstruction that follows, lending towards his surreal and almost dystopic blending of the natural landscape with manmade constructions. Shanshui paintings generally bear little resemblance to the ‘real’ visible nature but are more of abstractions and imaginations. Yang’s landscapes are simultaneously more ‘real’—in that he takes from photographs and footages captured from lived cities and environments, and less likely, as he pushes the limits on how urbanisation can take over nature.

In his recent work, Yang breaks away from a monochromatic palette to imbue his animations with colour, introducing new mysticism and vibrancies to each landscape. The textures of buildings and towers stacked on top of each other become more apparent in colour, although the palette remains delicate and subdued as it would be in traditional paintings. The scenes of urban life and urbanity hidden amongst mountains and streams have become more identifiable and present. In The Clouds (2022), for example, we see people circling around a town square where neon lights occasionally light up in different colours and a billboard flashing commercials on a mall hidden behind a stream cascading downwards. These motions introduce a sense of time that contrasts with the ever-flowing waterfalls and drifting clouds. The use of colours in crane and construction filled backdrop juxtaposed against clear, aquamarine waters in The Lakes (2022) also emphasizes the implausibility and unreliability of Yang’s digitally sculptured landscapes.

In a departure from the traditional shanshui genre, Glows in the Arctic (2022) brings us into an imagined city filled with bright lights and skyscrapers. Yang merges footage he had captured across cities such as New York, Shanghai, Paris, London, and more, into one unified cityscape, illuminating how urban cities have tended to converge towards similar environments and bringing nuanced experiences across continents into one. The city is shrouded in dark mist, surrounded by tall mountains and, gradually, further lit up by the Northern lights spreading across the sky. Northern lights are commonly seen in the Arctic but are rarely found in populous urban centres, as light pollution diminishes one’s ability to observe this phenomena. In bringing the natural wonder of auroras together with the harsh lights of the city, Yang puts forth the contradiction that is human’s desire to overrule nature and build towards an artificial measure of progress, against the wish to retain and even mimic the natural environment and its wonder.

Looking towards Vanishing Shore (2023), Yang continues human’s tumultuous relationship to nature in the story of two runaway children. They escape from their home in the forest and spend days wandering through vast lands, with the brother hoping to see the ocean and the sister afraid of water and longing to return home. Moving away from the collaged faraway landscapes of Yang’s other work, where ‘human interference is at once omnipresent and invisible’, Vanishing Shore takes on a new thread in his practice where the person and the individual comes first, and nature becomes the silent narrative tool within which the story unfolds

YANG YONGLIANG, VANISHING LANDSCAPE, 7 – 15 JAN 2023, BLOCK 43, GILLMAN BARRACKS 43 MALAN ROAD 01-17, S+S SINGAPORE