Yang Jiechang is probably the most unpredictable and chaotic artists in his generation. For the last thirty years, he has constructed an immense body of work. It covers a large span of media and languages from ink-wash painting, Chinese calligraphy, drawing, photography, installation, performance, sound, music, multimedia to simply everyday actions while the formats vary from huge and oversized to tiny and quasi immaterial. However, he has never tightened himself to any fixed and established style, norm and issue. Instead, he always reacts to the given context and momentum of each events in which he participates and produces new concepts and forms to put forward his systematically critical, provocative and even subversive thoughts and expressions. He simply comes up with a new surprise every time.
1.
　　As we all know, the question of tradition and modernity has been the central debate for more than a century in China's modernisation process. Indeed, it's also a central issue, or a battlefield in the modern history of the world driven by the clash the Western and the Non-Western worlds. Traditional forms of artistic expression have been regularly put in question. In the last century, “reforming” Chinese traditional painting (ink painting) has been an unsolved and somehow unsolvable obsession for the Chinese art world. It has been widely considered as a part of the national mission of cultural modernisation. This issue became even more crucial and urgent in the Chinese avant-garde movement of the 1980s. Trained as an ink painter and calligrapher, Yang Jiechang started his artistic career in involving himself with the debate. After gaining perfect skills of traditional painting and calligraphy and a deep knowledge of Chinese art history and theory, he sought to escape from the double confinement of the academic rules and the norms of the dominant Socialist Realism still prevailing in the art world, in order to obtain the real freedom and joy that art can offer. He spent a considerable amount of time in a Taoist temple in Luofu Mountain in Guangdong province and learned Taoism with a master. Instead of any fixed form of “traditional expression”, he has learned that the real spirit of the tradition is to be found in the actions of the everyday which is in infinite change. One needs to face it in the normal state of mind (平常心) and transmit the feeling in the immediate available language instead of any dogmatic formula. Tradition is actually a living process of accumulation of feeling, sensibility, knowledge and expressions that should be in constant evolution with time, rather than any kind of dogmas and fixed rules. It's a Tao (道), an endless route, instead of Tong (统), established rule and order. To reform the tradition does not mean an end of it. Instead, it's about injecting new and fresh energy and forms to continuously reactivate it. In the process, one should not simply destroy the existing and dominate norms but deconstruct it from within in the most active and reconstructing manner. Unlike many of his contemporary avant-gardists who claimed the death of the Chinese ink painting, Yang Jiechang simply continues to merge himself in the field and explores exhaustively all possibilities that the tradition can offer and invent totally new ways to utilise it. Ink painting and calligraphy have hence remained the red string that conducts all his artistic adventures for the last three decades. And, it will continue to be so. In his numerous work, he incorporates all genres that ink painting contains and push them to the most radical degree of their possibilities. He has developed a system that combines huge scale “abstract” black-on-black works under the series names “thousands layers of ink” (千层墨), meticulous brushwork paintings (工笔画), gold-and-green landscape (金碧山水), splash-ink wash (泼墨), and so on. What is really unique and stunning is he has decided to write calligraphy only in an upside-down way in order to obtain the exceptionally powerful but somehow eccentric effect that is impossible to achieve when written in normal direction. In addition, all these explorations of the expressions with ink are often expanded to take over the entire space of the exhibition as if their expansions could be totally beyond any boundary. Frequently, he incorporates any imaginable kind of media to bring this effort of expansion infinitely further: performance, installation, photography, video and even rock and roll! Together they create a wonderful world of a unique cacophonic concert of image, action, light and sound! It's in such a concert that Yang Jiechang navigates through the very tension of extreme control and radical abandonment of the control. In this way, Yang Jiechang opens up his own Tao, his own tradition, that determines the very unique route that his art will take. If one can refer to the very spiritual state that Zen (whose Chinese version has been deeply influenced by the Taoist tradition) reveals, as Yang Jiechang himself often evokes, this is a powerful and effective mélange of the two opposite ways of the Northern school that emphasizes on hard working style meditation and the Southern school that argues for sudden enlightenment… It's by nature a world of hybridity situated in the constant evolving realm of the in-between. And this is also highly relevant in the contemporary world in which globalisation is driving us towards an increasingly hybrid and mélange reality. If Tao and Zen encourage the understanding of the inevitability of the communication and merge of Man and Nature, Yang Jiechang's engagement with the “tradition” actually provokes the necessity for everyone living in the contemporary world to embrace and merge with the other, with everyone and everything from different cultures while any “traditional form” of expression can be an effective medium to express the state of the world today…Yang Jiechang's art is somehow idealist and even utopian. It rejects any kind of dominant and normalised rules – political recuperation of norms of expressions. But it's by no means nihilist. Instead, it's always rooted on the ground in order to constantly revitalise the route of life itself. Taking real life as it is and absorbing it as a natural part of his work, it's a cocktail of idealism and realism, a pragmatic utopia…
2.
　　Fundamentally, Yang Jiechang's work is seeking for a complete merge of art and life. It takes place, at first, in the real in a literal sense of the term: art is a process of living experience that can only be sensed through the body itself. Understanding the circle between life and death as inevitable destiny of Man and the world, he lays bare his own body and its destiny in front of the public gaze: early in 1991, he announced his “Testament” in the form of a conceptual installation. A pottery pot is set in front of a white wall with a sentence written: “One day I die an unnatural death. Then one should feed me to a tiger and keep its excrements.” Since then, he keeps resorting to his own body and turning it into a test ground for all kinds of exceptional states of being. In a series of performance and installation works dated back to the 1990s, he cut his own hairs and glued them to needles and nails with his own blood to form up “paintings”. In another project, he installed a corridor in which the audience was forced to receive (low-voltage) electric shocks in order to be “enlightened”. In many of his recent works, he introduces human skulls and body parts. Rather than showing the terror of death, he manages to turn them into suspiciously playful and ironic forms that provoke astonishment and laughter. For him, putting the body in an “abnormal” state and catch the extraordinary experience is certainly the best way to understand the very reality of his existence. This can be understood in a particular perspective related to his own life experience, which is, to different extends, shared by a great number of his contemporaries. As one of the first generation of Chinese contemporary artist settled abroad since the late 1980s, the question of cultural identity has been a central concern in his life and work. Like many of his colleagues, Yang Jiechang has never been entirely relying on his Chinese background. Instead, he adopts a completely open attitude towards all kinds of cultural influences that he encounters in his new living conditions consisting of a multi-national family, global city life and transcontinental travels. It's in the very process of confronting, embracing and exchanging with other cultures and different living realities that he has been constantly trying to reinvent his own identity. This is also a process that involves continuous reactivation of his own cultural background, memory and fantasy. For many immigrants, the first difficulty to adapt to the new life is often the language along with the difference of bodily habitudes such as instinct, taste, gesture and facial expression, etc. This is also the case for Yang Jiechang. However, instead of feeling inferior in the society, he manages to turn his somewhat “foreign” habitudes and uneven linguistic skill that mixes Cantonese, Mandarin, English, German and French into his advantage as an inventive way of communication that is increasingly gaining respects and understandings of his entourage and public. He incorporates such a linguistic mix bag in many of his art works. This shows the fact that, in the age of globalisation and trans-cultural communication, hybrid and alternative forms of linguistic and corporal, as well as artistic, expressions are indeed becoming more and more necessary and efficient. In a way, they are even more and more relevant in terms of the evolution of contemporary culture. It's in such an extraordinary state of being that one can actually rediscover one's true identity. This reveals a strong desire to subvert the socially received “common” values, criteria and even taboos. It's no surprise that sexuality has been brought to the centre of his work since his self-portrait of 40 years anniversary in 1996. Drawn with rough and strong black ink strokes, it's a full body nude of the artist with his penis erecting. Then, another series of ink paintings, multimedia installations and sound pieces, with or without images of love making, have been developed simply based on the joyful screaming of sexual ecstasy: Oh My God! On the other hand, in a number of his works depicting some extreme situations such as plane crashing, he uses Cantonese dirty words such as “Diu”(屌)and “Lokchat” (碌柒) as their titles and sound tracks. In fact, there is no better way for him, a “hybrid Cantonese”, to express such an exceptional state of existence, the very existence between life and death!
3.
　　Obviously, Yang Jiechang's subversive usage of language in his work is a challenge to the established order of social codes and values. This mélange of the real and the surreal, the high and the low, the “clean” and “dirty”, etc. destroys the usual moral hierarchy of language. It is a perfect way for him to continuously re-anchor his shifting identity and its relationship with the changing world in order to understand and manifest creativity in alternative forms. This anarchism is an act of liberation of the self. It also offers him a unique perspective to confront, observe and intervene in social reality itself. Living in a time of global conflicts, it's impossible for an artist like Yang Jiechang, who is extremely sensitive to changes in reality, not to express his reactions. Deeply concerned and even fascinated by spectacular events such as 9/11, he has come up with his own visual interpretations of them, pretty much based on rumours circulating among people of popular classes as alternatives truths countering the biased assumptions promoted by mainstream media and political systems. In his installations “To Emily” and “Crying Landscape”, he proposes the public to scrutinize the hyper realistic picture of the plane crashing into the Pentagon building in the morning of 9/11, 2001. The meticulous style that is capable to exhaust the potentiality of ink painting to reproduce the “real image” exposes all the details with articulations on some quasi-invisible elements to the pubic gaze. Eventually, it renders the image suspicious: the traces of the attack now look too real, too carefully organised, to be true… This in fact echoes the very popular “theory of conspiracy” claiming the image as a forgery, resulted from political manipulations. Indeed, the question here is not whether the image is real or not. What is important is that by messing his work up with such a polemic, Yang Jiechang has succeeded in making his art into a channel to make counter-reality visible and audible in a context where one can hardly hear any other voices but the propaganda of the mainstream media. This turns his art into a site of experiencing with alternative views, visions and voices in terms of definition of reality and truth. It certainly implies desires and strategies of resistance, allowing the oppressed, or the silent majority, to express themselves vis-à-vis some crucial and grand issues of society and the world. It's no surprise that, a couple years later, in the 2nd Guangzhou Triennial, 2005, that Yang Jiechang came up with an audacious but intelligent provocation, the performance-installation named “The Pearl River”. The Triennial with the title “Beyond – an extraordinary space of experimentation for modernization”, referring to the particular historic and cultural context of the Pearl River Delta, focused its concern on the dynamic and conflictive relationship between global and local, between national and regional, between art and reality in order to claim for the opening of an in-between space for alternative models of thinking and actions. Grasping this opportunity, Yang Jiechang created an installation with a huge flag in the form of a national emblem along with a huge neon sign stating the voice of the P.R.D. (Pearl River Delta): “We are good at everything, except for speaking Mandarin”. On the opening, a rock and roll band played a song that resembled an anthem… In 2007, exactly ten years after Hong Kong's hand-over to China, he showed another even more provocative series in the city under the title “The Most Beautiful Country of China”. Again, it's a series of hyper realistic paintings with meticulous brushwork franked by neon signs. Next to the phrase, one can respectively observe the post-card style views of Victoria Harbour, Mong Kok shopping streets and Lingnan School ink wash paintings. These are clichés that can be seen as emblems of this international metropolis that has lived through a complex colonial and postcolonial history and still remained in a certain complicated relationship with the “motherland”. However, if it's certainly justified to consider Yang Jiechang's work, with all its purported contradictions, suggest a claim for a form of autonomy or even independence of the region, what is much more important is to understand such a claim is indeed pointing to a much more universal dimension. In the age of conflict between homogenisation prompted rapidly by globalisation and “differentiation” as resistance of the establishment of the nation-state, one should look for a third road that leads to a real liberation of independent spirits and encourages a destruction of the tyranny of the dominant logic of confrontation and struggle between the dominant and dominated.
　　In an interview, Yang Jiechang explained his motivation to emphasize the linguistic and cultural autonomy of the Cantonese:
　　“To simplify traditions has become a serious problem. It belittles traditions and creates confusion…
　　“Culture appears, disappears, and relives in a natural environment. If we don't remind people how beautiful Cantonese is, it will soon be gone. Mandarin will soon become the mandatory official language in Hong Kong, and people in Macau already speak Mandarin. This is no good! I think such a trend is horrible. If things continues to go this way, it'll be very dangerous. China will become one big empty shell. It's impossible for China to have a great literary writer today. The language is empty; the newspapers are empty. There are no poets anymore.” [1]
　　It's time to imagine a world that language can become rich and complex again. That will be a world of poets instead of the one of advertisers. This can only be constructed with multidimensional paradigms in terms of conceptualising and structuring territory, population, culture, politics and economy. An open society governed by hybridity instead of purity, in ethnic, cultural, economic and political terms is the answer. And tolerating and encouraging alternatives, minor but vital forms of expressions are no doubt the first step towards such a new world.

5 August 2008, San Francisco