Ye Yongqing, who also goes by the name of Ye Shuai (Commander Ye), was the leading figure of the “Southwest Art Group” during the 85 New Wave. Aside from his identity as an artist, he is also a famous curator, art event organizer and teacher at the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts.This exhibition is entitled Paint a “Bird”! Aside from the majority of the artworks, which are scribbled birds, there are also many painted in a method of scratching out the details of certain portions which can deconstruct a lot of meaning. “Bird” is also slang, and Paint a Bird can mean to paint something that’s not really anything at all, which is a satire of painting. The artist agreed with Duchamp’s conception of art, that a person’s “life” is “art” in a way, and neither is more important than the other.Scholarly Attributes in the Contemporary SettingThe attributes of the scholar slowly formed through five thousand years of Chinese painting and calligraphy. Unlike the emotional expressiveness of western artists, these patient and understated people liked to find sustenance in landscapes, turning their career frustrations or life ideals into the painted landscapes, flowers and birds or the crazy yet humble calligraphic forms. This quality seems to be innate in Ye Yongqing. Li Xianting thinks that Ye Yongqing is a “poet or literary talent in his bones”. In the eighties, Ye Yongqing liked a painting style that was full of lines while painting very thin and transparently, the proverbial prose poem of oil painting, full of an air of understated exquisiteness and graceful sentiment. The works of this time include Two People Leaving and Staying on the Last Pasture, She who is Being Watched by the Horse Outside and we who are Being Peeped at by Her, Lookout and Runaway.Beginning with “Post 89”, Ye Yongqing began to look at things from the level of “contemporary consciousness”. He directed his efforts towards the “socialization” of social reality, and thought of how to subvert and deconstruct the collective ideology of the social reality. In 1991 Ye Yongqing made a foray into pop, and in his hands pop had no relation to politics or consumer culture, but became a sort of diary for snippets of all manner of life experiences. He describes it: “Man is an incomplete existence, bias itself. Meaning is a structure we build using fragments, beliefs, childhood trauma, newspaper articles, chance precautions, old movies, feelings of defeat and achievement and the people we love and hate. Looking at one such everyday situation and history, I know that I have discovered a rich vein, but I don’t have a talent for remembering everything that happened; it is the parts I remember that allow my thoughts to take flight. The traces give the scattered fragments of my memory a more important position and a larger space for resonance. My job is to pickup those sliced clippings of memory, turning seemingly unimportant things into symbols, and bestow ordinary things with transcendent qualities.” In those “controlled” images, there are all kinds of flutterings and puerile images scribbled in, such as birds, birdcages, tobacco pipes, cartoon faces, antique display cases, postcards, old photos, leopards, opened envelopes, old trees, cars, etc. The artist has breezily and happily completed an “experiential fill-in-the-blanks game”. Since a lot of his works at that time were made on silk, he could just roll them up and they could follow him on his wanderings. Here it wasn’t just the artist that was romantic, but the life that followed him around as well.After coming across some cultural clashes living away from home, especially while living and creating in England, Ye Yongqing came to doubt the changes that art brings upon life. He felt “I haven’t sold myself out to art, so why do I paint twenty-four hours a day?” He wanted to do other things instead of being just a “professional artist”. Starting in 1996, Ye Yongqing’s activity space and work content became full of variables. He had many hard to define identities. Aside from being the founder of art spaces like the Upriver Gallery and the Self-Run Space in Chengdu as well as the Loft in Kunming, he was also an exhibition organizer, part-time artist representative, a participant in urban planning and so forth.The Personal Image Style of Rational ScribblingStarting in late 1999, Ye Yongqing started to reduce the content in his works, extracting portions and symbols from his scribbled works. Ye Yongqng’s scribblings are the synthesis of control and crudeness, an emotional catharsis under rationality, bringing together the easygoing aesthetic of ancient scholars with contemporary concepts. “The scribbled arrangement of these symbols is at once my personal inclination and a reversal of rational styles… this process is the opposite of the standard habitual production method. The only reason I move against the current is that I don’t want to follow the flow. This process can be viewed as my effort to return to the visual surface from the depths of awareness and memory”.And the trend towards symbolizing is the artist’s process of conceptualizing his personal language. Ye Yongqing likes to make a plan at each stage, bringing his ideas and the concepts together in an environment to interact and clash and gradually form into a project plan or system. “It’s like adjusting the focus; it starts out blurry and slowly becomes sharper. In the end the field of vision is probably much smaller and you have to put a lot of stuff in, but it is much clearer.”