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In the "long and variable" creation career, Ye Yongqing made a clear breakthrough in the late 1990s with the "bird" series. How comes such a shift even with some self-reversal flavor? When I first saw these works a few years ago, I was deeply surprised to feel the expression of lightness aesthetic qualities. Now, the answer has been unveiled by his own review and the overall reflection of contemporary art.

Questioning social problems via art form becomes a double-edged sword of Chinese modernism. Despite of producing a discourse confrontation point and a sense of history, it resulted in the shackling of thinking, in other words, a narrow and pan-ideological binary mode. As one who participating in the making of the sword, Ye Yongqing realized that art had brought “a little some foundation” before 1989 but the environment no longer allowed artists to "indulge in the deep form of the humane spirit in the past" along with transform of the entire social formation. More importantly, he gradually realized that "Whether one artist has world and nation conscience depends on how much he have experienced and memorized from the past. It’s hiding in the bottom of one’s heart, like a metaphor image instead of playing with words on paper superficially.” The artist should remove the ethical burden and use their joyful and intimate feelings to “respond to the call of the martyr". This perception came out of “his home seen elsewhere ":

The changing of idea started from the working period in London. Living overseas far away from native language made one feel the loss of experience and the feeling of physical disruption. Settling in somewhere else brought about a strong sense of loss.

Perhaps, the word "weightlessness" is more accurate than "loss". As Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996, American Russian poet) said, living overseas is "like being put into sealed cabin in outer space". Leaving one’s native and local environment, the feeling of loneliness and emptiness would test each of the drifters. But it also makes one reflect their own cultural memory. For Ye Yongqing, he found the British art kind of "cleanliness", a pursuit of difficulty, extreme and bigotry; he also realized that artists like Bacon, Keith Harlem, Twombly are like some "strange people hit by good luck". They succeeded in attracting public attention by demanding "secret emotions and a rare form of art" via "those private lands". By contrast, China's contemporary art has been subjected to its ideological burden and imitating the language of Western art many years ago. Its prospect could be foreseen from the fate of the former Soviet avant-garde art: the former Soviet avant-garde art works had been a smash hit in the 1980s, but now they are sealed in the Ludwigshafen Modern Art Museum, hardly noticed again.

The experience made he long for "fighting against the role framed by the West in every possible way", because "Westerners are interested in Chinese contemporary art primarily due to political or ideological curiosity and the mentality to seek novelty". In the mean time, he realized the necessity of self-transcendence, as art in his home has been lagged far behind and sometimes only made to meet the Western need. Some other Chinese art are self-locked in a narrow circle like "as a voluntary internal exile such as the black isolation circle under the South Africa apartheid policy". Therefore, he emphasized to the selection of cultural affinity, rather than rushing to find an art difference coming into effect immediately - "beyond the contemporary state of mind, one will be relaxed and gain more valuable results. I’m proud of measuring myself in the multilingual family tree and I’m proud of being part of it."

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Flying bird is traditionally an expression of the wandering, unconventional and transcendent image. Ye Yongqing's painting is an sad and sportive echo to the poem by Du Fu, a prominent Chinese poet of the Tang Dynasty: "Wind-tossed, fluttering—what is my likeness? In Heaven and Earth, a single gull of the sands", corresponding to his own image in the time of "the obsessional lightness of being". When the old value system fall apart, the individual becomes a flat sketch, who could only mirror "the shattered memories" and "the transcendental character" through lonely wandering. Taking another point of view, "this process could be deemed as my effort backing to the visual surface from the depth of consciousness and memory". Surface substitutes depth, and lightness edges out heaviness.

Regarding techniques, Ye Yongqing's series of Bird was inspired by Chuck Close, the American photorealist created grid work copies in his old ages with bad sight. Each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions of color which give the cell a perceived 'average' hue which makes sense from a distance. Learning from the concept of "challenging the computer by handwork", Ye Yongqing firstly blocks out the sketches by pencil, scans them and then project the scanned ones on the canvas, finally he copies the projecting images. Ye Yongqing calls this kind of method the "rational antistrophe of graffiti", since when he face to the canvas, the structural whole has been rationally fixed while each part of thoroughly drawing brings the spontaneous, surprising effects and the painting excitement of "hands leading head".

Tension formed here under the lyric and self-mockery. The implications of the bird are the elegance, vagrancy and pursuing; However, there is another meaning of bird beside the lyrical appreciation: "bird" is also a dirty word in Chinese. As he said, " 'Drawing a bird' is a cursing or a joke." Through such joke, Ye Yongqing ridicule himself and the group of artists, who become more and more material and vulgar in the commercialized art world.

In the still of night, I pick up the pencil and feel the joy from a plum blossom, a stone, a bird or even a single line. Here I know I'm good at expressing... Maybe tomorrow, these expressions will be sold again logically. ... Consciously or unconsciously, the generation completes the historical transformation, and I've transformed from an expresser into a cheap-jack. (from The Confession of an Epoch's Deserter)

In a manner of speaking, it’s kind of entangled sorrow and humor with an existential absurdity and the sense of distance of self-contemplation, as Jaques’s confession in 0Shakespeare's play " As You Like It":"... ... This is the sadness of my own, made from different simple elements and extracted from many objects. In fact it’s the reflection of my previous travels. The more repeatedly I think about it, the more I am involved in the most humorous sorrow." In Italian writerItalo Calvino’s commentary, it’s is an example of transferring the heavy existence into the light aesthetic: "It is not a dense, vague sadness, but a veil made of a variety of tiny humor and emotional particles." In other words, the frustration in reality and the tragic fate would turn into "zero-gravity” joy and detachment via the refinement through imagination and language.

In contrast, the "Injury • Heart" series further weakened figures. These works, extension of the "Bird" series, also face the last generation’s humane subject and come out with lightness aesthetic qualities and drifting experiences with elegant sadness and humorous self-mockery. Detailed image of bird disappeared and feather-like strokes were put to the portrait, imaginary, insolent and indulgent of pain.

The trend of simplizing and softening language highlights Ye Yongqing’s pursuit of his favorite "extreme and pure" art purport. It is also a symbol of a number of Chinese artists deeply influenced by conflict of thoughts researching for their original dream - in fact, both his works of today and the heavy and bulky "big bills" series of the past enjoy the same cultural seed which had been sown in the early 1980s. “When I first learned to follow other people to write in the diary: 'painting is the painting itself, Boyce planted thousands of trees in Kassel, and once again stressed that' people are the sculpture of the society'." Some believe that period was a beginning of a dilemma and a nest of energy and faith. But Ye Yongqing used his personal changes to confirm the vitality of his own. Like a migratory bird, he journey to and fro between current world and the past. His going back, rather than a pure nostalgia, is to "understand and repair his own narrowness and bias."