Deviations of a Lettered Artist
A year ago, Galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger presented an astonishing show of Yang Jiechang, confronting the very different styles in which the artist works: traditional Chinese, calligraphic and gestural. The idea was born from a dialogue between him and Jean-Hubert Martin, who revealed him to the Western audience on the occasion of the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition in 1989. The interview took place in March 2020. When I met you in Guangzhou in 1987, I was struck by the fact that you were interested in history and in particular in the history of Chinese painting and calligraphy. You told me several times that you’d learned three different types of painting. What were these three styles or techniques, and how do they differ from the Western tradition?
When I was three years old, my grandfather taught me how to use a brush. He was a landowner, and the use of the brush was part of his family culture. He held a position of power in the village. Traditionally, someone of his status could choose village children, even poor ones, to pass on his teaching and then, if they were gifted, send them to take the imperial exams. It wasn’t a question of teaching me calligraphy or art. No doubt he didn’t know what art was. He wanted to teach me to write Chinese in the most beautiful way. Every night I would draw Chinese characters. Today in art schools, one learns either art or calligraphy, but we’ve lost this basic teaching of the use of brush and ink, these two fundamental tools of Chinese culture. During the Cultural Revolution my father sent me to learn calligraphy at the Institute of Folk Art in Foshan. But my master didn’t teach me calligraphy. He took me on as an apprentice and taught me about materials, ink and so on. While I prepared the ink and paper for my master, I listened to his conversations with his friends about painting and calligraphy. I can still smell the ink, and this smell is still very important to me today. This fragrance is like a drug for me, and I choose the ink according to its scent.
Like the intoxication of painters with turpentine that Marcel Duchamp denounced to his colleagues!
No teacher talks about it in art schools, but when you learn from a master according to tradition, you acquire more global knowledge. I was 13 or 14 at the time. I came from a military family—my father was an army officer—and my aim was less to become a painter or calligrapher than to become a Red Guard and write dazibao. My master Lin Juanxuan sensed this inclination and the danger. He didn’t let me learn a common style of calligraphy that was suitable for writing political slogans. So I learned calligraphy, but I chose a less practical direction: I chose calligraphy on stone and stele as a model, especially the Diamond Sutra of Mount Tai. As a result my calligraphy became rough and incompatible with the style used on dazibao; but from the beginning, it
found a certain depth, thanks to the model I had chosen. This is what education is all about, and I was allowed to follow this path out of the mainstream. My teacher told me that it was a useless exercise, yet today I consider this teaching to be essential. It has given rise to my heavy, raw, powerful style. When I see the teaching in the art schools of this time, I find it artificial.
At the Folk Art Institute in Foshan I also learned traditional painting by copying Song dynasty painting of flowers and birds. Emperor Huizong of Song, an accomplished painter and calligrapher, was concerned only with art, and not with governing the country. He led the country into political catastrophe. There’s a parallel here with Hitler, who wanted to become an artist, who was rejected by the Kunstakademie in Vienna, and who dragged the world into a catastrophe. At the Institute the work was very classical and meticulous. It took me several months to copy a painting. We made these copies to be sold abroad. Often several people worked together on the same work. It was like a factory. I learned a lot about traditional techniques. Another master, Chen Ningdan, finally taught me ink painting. If I think about it now, I was very happy at the Institute for four and a half years. Later, at the Academy, I didn’t feel comfortable. I had to learn watercolour and portraiture according to Soviet models. I wasted two out of four years of the course, until 1982, drawing the heads of workers, peasants and soldiers, and learning these rigid models.
As a final work, I presented as a reaction a set of two paintings: an ink painting with the title Massacre and another in meticulous technique entitled Fire. These two works on death and fire were unacceptable to the authorities. The two subjects read together meant “to kill and set on fire”: an impossible subject in the artistic world of the early 1980s, still governed by the aesthetic principles of socialist realism. I was highly criticised by all the teachers. Later, however, they appointed me as a teacher. I still don’t understand why, a real paradox.
No doubt they sensed your creative abilities.
I’d also acquired this knowledge of the techniques of calligraphy, meticulous painting and ink painting. In fact, they needed young teachers at that time, just after the Cultural Revolution. I worked there for seven years, and when I met you, I couldn’t take it anymore, I wanted to commit suicide, even though the students liked me a lot. Instead of giving them lessons, I worked with them.
Are you still in contact with them?
Yes, but there were problems. I’d been appointed tutor to the senior class. Two students, members of the communist party, denounced me. I don’t even know what I had said wrong. Maybe that you had to follow your personal feelings and sensibilities. I’d refused to give specific subjects. I was supposed to teach them for eight weeks, but the management of the Academy left me only two. I was no longer allowed to teach the class preparing for the exam. The two students who had denounced me became teachers at the Academy! They imposed weekly meetings. Towards the end of the 1980s many students left the Academy to business and trade.
How did you react when you arrived in Europe and discovered Western art and its completely different parameters? How did you imagine establishing or not establishing a link with it?
I immediately thought of working with brush and ink. I didn’t want to do abstract painting. I knew nothing about modern art. I knew only Picasso. When I was still in China, a German from the Goethe Institute in Guangzhou showed me a video about Joseph Beuys’ performance with the coyote, I Like America and America Likes
Me, as well as about James Lee Byars and Nam June Paik. Hou Hanru (1) borrowed this film, which then enabled him to introduce Beuys to China.
It was therefore very bold of you to do those four large black paintings, Hundred Layers of Ink, for Magiciens de la Terre (2) because they didn’t refer directly to either tradition for you. You didn’t know Malevich’s Black Square at that time.
I studied the history of Chinese art, which contains many anecdotes. There’s that of the artist who undresses to paint in front of the emperor, who agrees and orders that he be allowed to do so. Likewise the artist who started to paint with his hair. All eccentricities were allowed to the artist.
I saw Ben painting with his hair during one of his Fluxus performances.
One classical work, a funerary stele, touched me a lot: the one without inscription on the tomb of Empress Wu Zetian of the Tang dynasty (3). This stele is completely blank. Wu Zetian was a powerful woman who was much criticised because of her despotism: she killed her children and married her husband’s son.
She was an artist?
I admire her a lot culturally, even though she was horrible on a political and human level. She was familiar with Arab culture, which was one of the influences on theTang dynasty, and she absorbed it. This large blank stele impressed me so much that it became my reference for paintings in 1989. Another stele has no inscription. This 4m high stele on top of Mount Tai was made for the gods, the spirits. It has been said that it was waiting for inscriptions yet to be engraved, but this isn’t true: it was destined to remain empty. It strives to connect earth and sky.
Thirty years later I finally have the key to these works. I understand now that it was by accumulating layers of black ink that you tried to find the depth of black stone.
For 3,000 years China has always been an authoritarian, totalitarian regime, but it allows incredible freedom on sheets of paper. This is a paradox that remains as vital as ever.
DEVIATION AND HARMFUL IDEAS You told me that one of the great difficulties upon arriving here was to think in terms of the individual making an independent judgement, no longer in terms of the community and the social group.
Utopias were so different in Europe and China. The communist utopia puts everything at the service of the collective and crushes the individual. Nam June Paik, whom I met during
Magiciens de la Terre, played a great role for me. He was extremely cultured, he knew not only his own history, that of Korea, but also that of China. Imagine: he had worked for nine years on a translation of the Shiji, the historical memoirs of Sima Qian (written from 109 to 91 BC). Paik became my mentor. He had me awarded the Pollock Krasner Foundation scholarship in 1990. He had the humility of a Chinese master, he didn’t care about fame and success. One day he said to me: “Now Chinese are coming”. He wasn’t talking about me, but about the cultural situation. He had an intelligence that understood everything.
He told me several times how much he’d loved Magiciens de la Terre, which was comforting at a time when the exhibition was far from receiving a standing ovation!
I’ve tried to follow his example. He wasn’t a teacher, but I think his oriental spirituality had a great influence on Beuys, and Fluxus more generally.
Beuys wasn’t included in the exhibition, because I followed the rather stupid rule of only bringing together living artists, and he’d died three years earlier. He should have been included for his contribution to the spirit of the exhibition.
Magiciens de laTerre was all the more important for me because I met Nam June Paik, a model who represents for me the Chinese sage, the true contemporary intellectual. Knowing Beuys’ films, I considered Nam June Paik as important as him.The two Fluxus artists were my gateway to contemporary Western art, and completely transformed my conception of art. Paik treated me as an equal, and as a result I was able to enter this world on the same plane, no longer feeling like a Chinese foreigner.
You refer to Paik as a mentor, but you have a mentor you go back to see in China on a regular basis.
There are many different paths in China. In the 1980s, people practised qi
gong, a kind of meditation where you meet in large gatherings to release everyone’s