This retrospective is a bit different from those Yin Zhaoyang has held in the past. The exhibition stresses neither his reactions to society in painting nor the depiction of the labor inherent in the medium. Instead, based on this painter’s explorations of artistic themes over 20 years, the show aims to interrogate an even older subject: a painter’s ideals.

 

The exhibition is divided into seven sections. Beginning with his early work from the 1990s, the show describes Yin Zhaoyang’s art historical influences. His painting Flowers, in the style of Munch or van Gogh, represents the embryonic form of his spirit as a painter. In the late 1990s, straitened circumstances, as well as the application of photography, video, and computer technologies, shifted Yin’s attention from art history to personal experience. This painter became a real worker, and Yin became one of the key artists in the Cruelty of Youth movement. After 2000, with his Myth series, he shifted from depicting reality to visions of the past and present, and his identity as a painter became linked to considerations of politics, philosophy, and literature.

 

With Landscape series, his identity as a painter was reawakened. Following Paul Cézanne in his path to Mont Sainte-Victoire, the 40-year-old Yin Zhaoyang returned to his home near Mount Song (Songshan) and his painterly style. He blended Eastern and Western characteristics into all-new “contemporary landscapes.” Next, focusing on the lightness and heaviness in painting, we chose drawings that Yin made over the course of two decades. Behind legendary, heroic stories of artistic talent, these drawings offer a subtler kind of observation. “The Production of a Landscape Painting” offers a brief history of landscape painting and compares it to Yin’s own path. To end the show, “Vincent van Gogh and the Square” revisits the symbol of the painter and returns to motifs that have appeared in Yin Zhaoyang’s work over a 20-year period: the personal ideals represented by self-portraits and the collective ideals represented by the public square.

 

In the course of this exhibition, the viewer sees societal changes and an awareness of painting, as well as shifts in the identity of the painter in different circumstances. In the end “Rebuilding Ideals” does not present painting; it discusses a subject, a painter’s soul and character. In a time of stereotypes, how can a painter find a distinctive mode of existence and state of mind, akin to Bada Shanren’s eccentricity, van Gogh’s madness, Bacon’s violence, Rothko’s sorrow, or Freud’s gravity? They may not have certain beliefs about society or be perfect symbols, but they can never lose their ideals as painters. They live based on stubbornness and freedom. In their radicalism, intractability, and arrogance, they found the weight that allowed them to settle into their lives as painters.

 

Particularly right now, Vincent van Gogh and Mark Rothko have universal meaning as ideals or spiritual guides. This could lead to fabrications, but fabrications and arrogance are much more powerful today than change and mediocrity. In other words, “Rebuilding Ideals” reaffirms the individual, rather than the collective; it casts off the influence that our times have on us in favor of reshaping the individual and rebuilding ideals. Because of the classicism and modernity that these ideals declare, the sublime and the desire to build mark a return to an old tradition that has remained uninterrupted since the rise of classicism and modernism.

 

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