White Light/白光 Painting

The art created by Yu Ying explores this theme, through juxtapositions of everyday life and spectacular objects, and produces a powerful tension: whether his paintings, videos or his on-going social project “Change the Future of Tengzhou City” (his hometown in Shandong Province), indicated a tension towards real life and social issues. Under the social conditions of post-totalitarianism, he selects an intelligent approach to protest it. It is distinctive among the post-80s artists featuring cultural coquetry that he resists stark knowledge system, intervenes deeply into real problems, and he understands his local culture profoundly with a research on history alternatively. After experiencing the practice of abstract painting, Yu Ying uses his excellent figurative skills again. He considered the figurative skills a sort of knowledge system to comprehend. White Light (2009) was once prohibited on view at Tsinghua University Academy of Art. This has become a part of his important experiences in life. He asserted that he had predicted the result before finishing that piece. In other words, it helped him to complete this work in a conceptual way. For artist himself, White Light probed the boundary of system, demonstrated his judgment of the social authority and concealed an ambiguous “monumentality”. The White Light also suggested, through the messed images and props, the sensitive time of the year 1989. And the musical bed in this work would be a kind of allegory, rather than sarcasm: here, the private and national secrets composed the deep structure in the narrative tune of the work. His works after that till now, concentrated on the subject of human bodies in space. He deprived the mundane and identity qualities of body further and minimized the narrative of body in various “scene” in Untitled Tactical Exercise Series, Puckish Academy or Body Gospel Hall. Contrasting to the musulman in Auschwitz Concentration Camp (deprived of the identity as a human being) Georgio Agamben has talked about, the object that Yu Ying called as sample body is a rotten knowledge system. In the statement for The Key (2010), Yu Ying has said that “the way to realize a sample body in a picture maybe refers medicine or ritualization. For this piece, I show the subtle changes of a human body in an open space and the changes of body convey that of relationship. It is not important if the images are special, I just chose to use this kind of stereotyped ones: a couple look at water facing a pool in a garden, which is the specific amatory scene in a stark knowledge system. There always existed specific and typed scenes in amatory narrative. The subtle sense of alienation expressed in my works is based on the combination of everyday bodies and performing bodies. In a sense, the sweet feeling from the relationship between two individuals roots in collective unconscious under the stark knowledge system. Time drives the individual physical space to transform where the formulation of meaning happens, and in case that it is thought I adjacent two pictures in different time, I choose to mix two situations after they are suspended. At least, it is archived on image showing the delicate parallel of synchronic and nonlinear relationship in a given time-space.” Excerpt from Cultivating a Landscape —Thoughts on Art of Yu Ying by Mary Meng

Painting:Oil on Other

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:149.6 W x 78.7 H x 1 D in

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