Yang Liming and analogous images Contemplate, Let yourself be invaded by energies, take a deep breath and vibrate. An artist creates by his hand but also by his heart. Reducing the works of the Chinese artist Yang Liming to pure abstractions would be a misreading caused by our shackles of Western perception. Yang Liming was born in 1975 and graduated from the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts but quickly broke away from what is commonly referred to as the "Sichuan mei yuan Situation", a phenomenon which leads most artists to this situation. generation, originally from this province, to produce similar and not very innovative works.In the early 2000s he decided to study Western art, from Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism via Cubism, and to explore these different modes of painting in his own works. He also devoted a time to dripping, fascinated by the scope of dynamic lines in the construction of Pollock's works. However, he quickly returned to a working technique of painted line. oil brush. But the "touch" does not satisfy him either. The oil brushes do not stretch enough, he prefers the use of the Chinese brush, in a style close to calligraphy. he practiced as a child. of Western classical music, he discovers the enormous potential of “musicality” of the fingerboard. The painter's gesture, like that of the calligrapher, expresses “qi”, both vital energy and tone, to reflect his own sensations. The result is an image which translates in a “concrete” way the vision of this feeling. This concept, impossible to translate into French but which could be defined as an “analogy” or an “analogous image”, is therefore imbued with both precepts of Taoist Chinese philosophy, movements of musical composition and the calligraphic gesture. . Yang Liming's work is therefore situated in the interrelation of the senses (sight, hearing), of the heart as a central element of the body and motor of emotions and of the hand, extended by the tool of the brush. . In 2006, the artist's first series devoted to the expression of the “analog image” through the line essentially explored the structuring of linear segments. A few years later, the artist's perception gradually changes. Straight lines and right angles give way to curved and cyclic lines, to form spatial sets made up of rotating circles. These compositions are in reality the pictorial translation of the peaceful spirit of the artist. As he put it in a 2015 interview with Liao Wen, “When I am calm and meditate on my inner mind, I can feel a rotating space that slowly lights up and produces many more rays of light. What I paint is not just abstract painting, it is literally a "concrete" projection of what I feel. For me, absolutely all of these elements are tangible, including color, structure, circles or the direction of the light. The use of colors also reinforces this desire to paint the "tangible reality" of sensations. For Yang Liming, red symbolizes the passion for life and warmth. It expresses something that would resemble blood, carrying life, but also sometimes a hint of pain. As for the black, it represents the family. The infinite black is not something dark that would come to destroy us, in reality it carries a heat and a light which emerges from the inside to come to help us. The different types of black tones, cold or warm, find their balance in the luminosity created by the color contrasts. From the meeting and the mixture of these two colors are born vibrations, real undulations caressing the surface of the canvas like the concentric circles formed by a stone fallen in the heart of a lake. Ricochets of the heart, energetic echoes of the hand on the surface to be painted, testimonies of the past meeting the present to bring out the future. Analogies without referents and doors open to the soul of the artist. Poetic as well as prosaic works. Living spaces.
Read more
