Yang Guangli【Featured Artists Recommended by Chinese Galleries】

Author: Jia Dejiang, Editor-in-Chief
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: Yang Guangli is one of the few painters in contemporary China's figure painting scene who lacks a tendency toward aestheticism. He has also broken the long-standing dominant tendency of self-expressive inclination in literati painting, which has been one of Yang Guangli's persistent efforts over the years. He is a narrative painter, thereby broadening the context. Among the mature painters in Shaanxi, he is one of the few who transition from a small self to a larger self, carrying the weight of the world and the people. His artistic realm far surpasses that of ordinary painters who possess mature brushwork and talent. He is also a true creative painter. These are the foundations upon which we recognize and enter these grand and majestic works. He is a painter who has given realism the ability to reproduce, as he has returned to the raw source of life and, after undergoing various embellishments and manipulations of historical language, has reverted to the simple earth. His creation is also an explosion from within realism. If placed within the specific field of modern Chinese ink-wash figure painting and observed from a historical perspective, he is an extreme painter who has gone too far and cannot return to his early pioneering period. This extremism is not in terms of words or actions, nor in terms of ways of thinking or artistic concepts, but in the nature of his work. This is the historical paradox of aesthetics.