Companions in color: lifelong alliance forges duo’s vivid styles
With their paint brushes in hand for some 60 years, Zhao Wenliang, 81, and Yang Yushu, 74, have experienced the dramatic changes in social history and artistic discourse since the 1950s.
And with little formal training, the duo remain largely self-taught, which helped them develop their independent styles quite different from the mainstream taste for realism favored in that era.
While they remained marginalized and poor throughout their lives, the duo persisted with painting. And their artworks and life experiences are soon to be shown again at the Inside-Out Art Museum in Beijing, which opens on March 24.
Zhao, who started painting in 1951 by copying Soviet paintings, began to study oil painting at the Xihua Art Preparatory School in 1957, where he met Yang two years later. The private cram school provided them with a free environment to learn the basic skills of painting.
Not interested in sketching, Zhao turned to still life and devoted his time to developing his own style of color use. After studying sketching for three years, Yang started to learn painting under Zhao from 1962.
Mainstream art at the time followed the Soviet style, which focused on realism and the pursuit of the lifelike, with an emphasis on thick textures and dark tones.
However, since the two teachers at the school where the painters studied were trained in Japan, their concept of color was influenced by Impressionism, which focused on the dynamic expression of color and exterior light.
Zhao and Yang were impressed by the teachers’ “six-character” concept which saw them add gray between the blue and the purple as a transition color. This concept can be seen in their paintings and instead of realistic sketching, they intentionally ignore physical details and replace them with rough strokes.
According to Su Wei, one of the curators of the exhibition, the similarity in their techniques is one possible explanation why their paintings are sometimes misunderstood as belonging to the genres of Impressionism or Fauvism.
Yet according to Wang Pengjie, a doctoral candidate of art theory at the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University, both painters lacked any systematic training in Impressionistic techniques, or had any understanding of the Western concept of modernism. Instead, it seems that the two painters had developed an awareness of Impressionism that actively influenced their work.
At the same time, their creations were also filled with the freehand brushwork of traditional Chinese painting, especially their works of the 1980s, after the duo met Liu Haisu. They appreciated Liu’s combination of Western Expressionist techniques and the artistic concept of Chinese literati painting and were greatly influenced by his work.
All through their careers, Zhao and Yang retained their independence when it came to choosing subjects for their paintings, even during the “cultural revolution” (196676), when landscape painting was regarded as bourgeois.
During that period they used small wooden boxes to carry paint sets hidden in their clothes as they wandered around Beijing’s Yuyuantan Park, Beihai Park and any other parks with relatively loose supervision. They started to paint as soon as there was no one else around.
While Zhao and Yang painted together and supported each other for more than half a century, they managed to retain their distinctive personal characteristics. And although their works are mixed together at the exhibition, it is easy to spot who painted them.
Some of their paintings of landscapes and dreams from the 1980s, which are directly related to their personal emotions, appear to convey a sense of contemporary art.
“I think there are strong tendencies of purity, aestheticism and lyricism in their paintings, which tend to blur the tension between art and time,” says curator Su.
Although in poor health, Zhao and Yang are still creating and modifying previous paintings. As Yang once told the media, “Sometimes it takes a lifetime to figure out who you are and what art is. Art is the expression of freedom and everyone is equal before art.”
The exhibition will run through July 1.