I have always felt that in order to study an artist, one must begin with his life. Because life is a unique and undeniable "truth", regardless of the work, there is always a direct correlation between the two. The same "whimsy", the same "evanescence". The artist, like everything else, carries with him individuality and existence, in this way similar to criminals and "good Samaritans", scientists, workers, peasants and soldiers, chiefs of state and terrorists. Like everybody else, he can escape neither the heights nor the depths of his generation and, limited by his intelligence and his view of things, is unable to remove himself from his personal circumstances. In order to speak about Yang Shaobin, I will therefore base my comments on what I have personally heard or seen of him. It will, inevitably, be biased, but it is impossible to proceed otherwise and it would be the same way with anyone. No one is able to capture the "truth" of an existence, but evaluating a piece of art is even more tenuous: At the very best we can give our opinion and attempt to justify it. In the process of writing this text, I was forced to rectify my point of view. Certain aspects of Yang Shaobin did not correspond to the image that I had created for myself. In some cases it was diametrically opposed: It is a capricious world, art is capricious and humans change. Yang Shaobin is honest and direct. In other words: he has preserved the simplicity of the traditional peasant: maintains a certain "natural" element. The works of his first period, filled with "cynical realism", are "excellent imitations", "copies of genius" in which reflection is substituted by associations with thoughts and experiences. His technique was still immature - almost maive - but by following the trend he was unintentionally caught up among the "rising stars" and marked with the kind of temporary reputation that constantly threatens, at the very next moment, to have one disappear in a puff of smoke. For this there is a single reason: he was not applying his personal experience and personal judgment to his work. Of course, the works of this period are not entirely without merit. Their primary theme is that of un-heroic heroism. The artist caricatures individuals that we would consider to be positive, and goes so far as to couple "reactionary" methods with a crude technique that reinforces the feeling of alienation: A number of "abnormal" phenomenon and their repercussion on our existence are thus illustrated. The canvas is often chaotic and fragmented, but the color is applied in a sophisticated way - what is the ugliest thing I could use in order to ridicule this or that thing and through that manifest my resistance to "conventions" that regulate our lives and our ideologies. Since 1991, when he arrived in Beijing, Yang Shaobin, in the village of Yuanmingyuan, found himself thrown into a universe of painters. It was a place of disparate population where the inhabitants obeyed a "collective unconsciousness". A minority of "enlightened individuals" dictated the law and, win or lose, everything was of their doing. "It was a wilderness at the time." He explains, "We were all so poor that the arrival of a buyer would have us all on the edge of our seats. It was rare for us to have time to think quietly." As a general rule, when artists get along they become mutually influential and come to form a rather uniform group. Every trend produces one or two leaders behind which the rest fall in line. Yang Shaobin admits that, at the time, he was a follower: "Fang Lijun’s aura was too strong, it was his thing, "cynical realism", it had nothing to do with me". A candid and sincere individual, he does not worry about saving face. It’s an endearing quality of his and one of his strengths. Nor, on any given day, will you hear him boasting, It is his nature. In the spring of 1995 he moved in order to set up residence in the village of Xiaobao, but he still remains nostalgic about Yuanmingyuan. On a brilliant fall morning in 2003 I made my way there in order to accompany him while he took photos for a magazine. He was awash with emotion. Recalling those memorable years, days of happy poverty that he had spent in this place, he felt like a former student returning to the country covered in glory. Fall in Beijing is well deserving of the qualifications "clear" and "cold", its truth rebuffs the birds. At the bottom of dried out lakes, the golden reeds shimmer with more ferocity than the setting sun, and the waves on the surface of the neighboring lakes stretch out to devour you like so many tongues. Freezing cold or blistering hot, the rocks stand unperturbed. Indeed they are oblivious to all stares. That day, one of numbing cold, they endured the bite of the northern winds. Stones as obstinate as jade, a jade forest in the gale. At midday the light, one must say, was radiant. Bundled in our padded jackets, we, with gleeful hearts, set ourselves up to enjoy the sun on reclining chairs of a green reminiscent of the bars of prison cells. I forget how we got there, but we called up the past. We spoke from the fifties through the seventies, of its art, that at the time, was in its spring in china (perhaps I am the only one to see things this way). I said to myself that in contrast to the other eminent artists of our time, the work of Yang Shaobin is not fed by our own traditions and certainly not by that of the New China, what we define as "the socialist visual experience". For example, in the way that he creates, we would assume that, seen at an integral level, he was influenced by the west. His themes, the cultural interests that he spreads, are of a western order, as old as time and still current. The problem that occupies him knows no borders - the realm of conflict. I believe that, apart from him, there is not a single artist on the contemporary Chinese art scene that is not in some way tainted by "nationalistic sentiment". And yet, much that his feel and form are western, I find it enormously difficult to establish the slightest kinship between his work and western art. That is why he is in fact an "atypical Chinese artist". The sun bent towards the west. The motorboat that we had rented, hobbled by aquatic weeds, remained stuck in an off-shoot of a canal surrounded by an armor of vegetation. We thought we might be in a Romanian film shot in the delta of the Danube! It was cold, dark, the air thick and viscous, everything blending, the atmosphere recalled that of his paintings. Always careful about his appearance, that day he was wearing a very elegant black leather jacket and a hat, also black leather. He must always be smartly turned out, that’s his sensitive side. It was a winter night, cold but bright, in 1997. The moon was like the round face of a movie star, with her white rays splashing over us carelessly. After having spent the night drinking, a little shakily we got back into his old Cherokee and went back to his old abode, the village of Xiaobao in Songzhuang, Tong district. Before opening the door he warned me: his dog, "Soviet Red", was ferocious. In fact, we had hardly opened the door before he began his assault. Even his master was unable to make him heel… Thank god for the house maid: the beast lay down quietly as soon as she appeared, the collar of her shirt flapping against her white chest like half uncovered snow. A spring rain had come to silently slacken nature’s thirst. It took only a moment for impending carnage to be transformed into this tender scene. I am not sure if this illuminates Yang Shaobin, but afterwards, in his "Red Creations", within the perfume of blood a bit of calm and serenity managed to filter through. It was in fact during that winter of 97’ that he suddenly began his shift. One afternoon of sunrays so soft that we thought it might be spring, Yang Shaobin and I took our tea in his studio, discussing and listening to music. That is what brought us together and we often met in the afternoons on Sanlintun to buy CDs. Like me he likes metal, inspirational music, but he also listens to bizarre stuff, incidental music - he pretends that it is good for inspiration - or gothic. Marylin Manson for example. All that is related to his character and his mode of creation. Let us accept that he has an eccentric and twisted side. Impressionable and easily enthused, he can be extremely stubborn and, as if exasperated, become unreasonably obstinate. We find in his work boundless violence, violence that he reveres and by which he is inspired, that he celebrates and applauds. The kind of behavior reserved for the abhorrent and the insane. His favorite film, La Haine, is extremely violent. He was adamant about lending me “C’est arriv pr s de chez vous”, an equally brutal Belgian film. Eighty percent of the DVDs or VCDs he buys are war, horror or gangster films. I remember that day in the studio he had five or six canvases each eighty centimeters square: The hand-to-hand conflict with its incisive images, hard and crude lines that confirmed his change of style. He confided in me that it had been four years since he had last painted. Throughout that period he asked himself ceaselessly where his path lay and how to find a style that suited him. Had it not been for the theme of violence, he might have dropped everything. The images that haunted him were those of violence. Of course, he understood that the theme was difficult to sell: What collector or buyer would think of "sullying" his walls with a bloodied canvas? "I can no longer make boring art" he said "I will have to move into the grandiose." Such rare pride! Such ambition and such power with words!. Violence was spread throughout cynicism; Yang Shaobin concentrated it. His fist - a fist of steel - shut tight and bit-by-bit he was able to develop a specialized style that would allow him to crystallize the instantaneous and the partial. His paintings are like an ultimate challenge, challenging the body to repulse to its farthest limits the lesions and shocks that it cannot withstand. At the same time, it is a challenge to the optic nerve of the viewer. "Will of steel", "Man is evil" and "Flesh is weak", such are the themes that make up his oeuvre. Here is how, in a letter written in 2002, he defined his work: "As art is the spiritual product of accumulated experience, I do nothing more than expose facts or stories that took place in reality, memories from which I draw my production, marked by a specialized esthetic that finds its foundation in life and art history. They are images of violence, but there is a great distance between art and reality: the state of mind of my paintings is one of moral disorder, they suggest implications and have a sense of confusion. The figures and forms are treated in such a way as to give a strangely unreal feeling and from this feeling is born a sense of alarm, a fright that goes straight to the soul. We could talk of psychological reality. Art is tiresome, life is a bore, and yet day after day we continue to live. I say that to comfort myself, it is perhaps merely the reaction of a weak heart but in that way I establish a distance in order to be able to scrutinize the universe. I like that feeling of distancing: it gives me room to express my sensibility. At the core of my work, there is the destructive element in that moment when feelings become actions." Yang Shaobin has expressed to me his disgust and boredom with existence more than once, but even in those moments I have always felt his passion and fascination for life. Especially after he remarried and his second child was born. He is very traditional, in fact, it could be said that he is proletariat (he did in fact work for several years as a fitter). We have always felt that his daughter did not exist in his eyes, except for a very few occasions, he never spoke of her and we felt him to be indifferent (for this there are no doubt reasons of which we are unaware). But once his son was born, New Years Eve of 2000, he was "insanely happy". There are no other words to describe it. In order to pick a name he asked the advice of all his friends and even consulted a mystic to have the characters interpreted. As a result: after hesitating and deliberating, his son celebrated his first birthday having not yet been given a first name. "The best must be found for him, so that he might never suffer!" he reasoned. One summer afternoon in 2002 - an afternoon that would be qualified as luminous - we were sitting down to tea at a teahouse in Kunming when the phone rang: From Beijing he was informed that his son was feeling slightly unwell. Suddenly finding himself standing on hot coals, he decided to abandon the trip that we had just begun and returned home. "I have to take care of my son." In moments like these there are two lines by Lu Xun that often come to mind: "Did you know, the tiger, while howling and roaring / will turn his head to watch over his young." The paternal bond runs deeper than the taste for adventure. Lets return to that "distancing". I agree with the opinion that Yang Shaobin has of himself. As it happens, I do not consider him as someone that is well integrated into society. A sense of responsibility and an inferiority complex co-exist tenaciously within him. Although a good person at heart, likeable and endearing, he has few real friends and even I sometimes feel him withdrawing to his interior fortress. He, who would never harm a fly, often needs to make efforts to avoid vulnerability. He remains eternally a child, hardly hatched from the egg and oblivious to the world. He has to be drinking in order to relax to throw off what has been weighing on his heart. He even tends toward violence when drunk and carries on in a bizarre manner. He spills his drink over his pants, sends his money flying through the air to come down like snowflakes, kicks the table over, etc… "Seeing the world at a distance" is not one of his affectations, not the result of introspection. It is the result of an inane esthetic position. Something inane, without any schooling, like his paintings of violence. While admiring his new paintings, at the time I had the impression that he was moving into the springtime of his life. His figures were still a little crude compared to his present work, and throughout the canvas, the lines provided the most life. They bit, they scratched, they trampled. His paintings effected you deeply, ripped out your guts. Yang Shaobin himself, sitting there in front of me, looked so gentle! He was filled with the air of a refined gentleman sitting before a background of willows swaying in the breeze. He showed me photographs of violence taken from imported magazines. One of them, to my great surprise, was of a sumo-wrestling bout and one of the athletes was the recently affianced Takanohana. Before his paintings I felt like crying, and here these photos made me want to laugh out loud - I was not far from the asylum. I suggested we have a drink, which we did while looking at other photographs, these of himself, that he used as source material for his paintings. Completely naked, plucked like a chicken, he forced himself to adopt the poses and expressions of a person that has been "hurt and humiliated". It was very funny. At the height of our excitement he confessed to me: "I love (his favorite expression!) psychological stimulus. It excites you and it’s difficult to forget, you are too moved, you integrate it into you understanding as if it were an experience. Some people say that the feelings that I express have been marinated in sulfuric acid, others say that when they look at my work they have the feeling that something soft is jumping at their face. I respect their opinions enormously, it is more concrete than the way I had seen it. At the beginning I had taken the relationships between human beings, and as such the background of contemporary society, as a starting point. But I too am a creature of instinctive reactions, I have often been made doubtful in life and I have a ton of ideas about what other people are thinking." Afterwards he recalled certain images that he had already consigned: "In the air the scent of blood", "Man with an ear in his mouth", "A ferocious hand pulverizes a male member", etc… I had goose pimples, the hair on my head was standing on end and I nearly mistook him for a nazi. In everyday life, Yang Shaobin is essentially a gentle being, likeable and cordial. But dynamite runs through his veins. I find him charming when he describes his work as a "specialized esthetic"! We did not go out that night. I was still stricken by his work; it had stunned me. In spring, 1998, Yang Shaobin, Fang Lijun, Yue Minjun and myself went on an excursion to Hangzhou. He had seemed absent minded throughout the journey, but where his work was concerned he was a veritable fountain of conversation, an ocean spilled forth. He had something to be proud of; the transformation had been executed incontrovertibly. From Hangzhou we departed for Shenyang where, the night we arrived, the two of us went to see a rock band play at a local bar. North-Eastern rock is not as violent as one would imagine, it’s more sad than anything else. To him, though bitterness was very present, it did not reach the core of the music, which meant that something was missing. I agreed. Sadness is in itself a form of violence and its affliction can destroy one’s will. Violence and its equivalent is everywhere in life, all hostility and prejudice (including those in language and the unconscious) are on one level or another, a form of disaster. That’s why the theme has such vast social repercussions. It’s even "fashionable". Through violence, Yang Shaobin accuses, through sadness he soothes. At home I have two little paintings by Yang Shaobin (40×50cm) that form a group called: "Cutting Van Gogh’s Weeds - Living Like a Shaw". None of the artists and critics that have been through the house have ever identified the artist. I bought them at an auction - it was for that express reason that I attended - because they are "completely different in appearance" from the rest of his work. I have never seen him paint other landscapes. "Cutting Van Gogh’s Weeds" is the depiction a worker mowing a field much as it is so often represented in the work of the master. The painting, in its colors, atmosphere and the strokes used, is "a-la Van Gogh". In " - Living Like a Shaw" a clutch of people play golf in the distance, the lawn stretches out like a carpet, a few clouds float through the serene sky. These two canvases are of a "conceptual" genre so rarely seen in the work of Yang Shaobin. They are also the ones that would be considered off-topic today. One recalls the "light works" of the literati of the past, of the "superfluous subjects" of certain translators: "Little works", but the essentials are there, in lieu of their conciseness, added attention was required, so much do they overflow with flavor and verve. It is without a doubt unintentional, but unconsciously, through the image of cutting grass, Yang Shaobin once again delivers an image of violence. To cut the field is to war against nature, to assassinate it. In the beginning he must have painted these canvases because he was in a serene mood. He had a new house, a new studio, his financial situation was improving and doors were opening in his professional life. But as soon as he slackened his attention, "dropped his guard", waves escaped from the end of his brush and very quietly poured their torment into the world. The "inadvertent" works of an artist have always acted as shortcuts for those who are looking. When I interviewed him later, Yang Shaobin said that he would not paint that kind of painting again, they were not the product of his "free will". Unwittingly we plant willows, but this inadvertency results in a kind of wisdom; we intentionally plant flowers, but the initial intention was not well considered: the universe is made up of a million things and it has always been thus. In the spring of 2003, during the time of SARS, Yang Shaobin often called me to catch up. It warmed the heart. He is like that: when it comes to his friends he has a great big heart. In 2000, upon returning from the United States, I had no more than 500 yuan to my name. One night he came and had a drink at my house. He got drunk and then left stumbling through the door. On his chair I found a little package in a plastic bag. The next day I called him to notify him of the oversight, but no: the package contained thirty thousand yuan for me to use. I didn’t need the money, but the thought was touching. How can the work of such a good person make apologies for violence? As for those of his first period, it might be related to the fact that he was a police officer. He has a nose for blood that would put a hound to shame. But as for those that followed and assured his success, after he had changed styles he continued along the same trend, it would go so far as "violence or nothing". It resides within the extension of an idea that has always been essential for him: "tenderness for those who need it, solicitousness for those for whom it is a weakness". That is why I would say that he is "taking care of the universe through violence". Perhaps he lacked love in his existence. Regardless, he is never avaricious when it comes to art, his friends, the whole world. Yang Shaobin’s work is dense, it has the esthetics of porridge and the philosophy of jam, it has the morphology of the "falcon" but carries with it the message of the "dove". Its scratches, its tears, its distortions, its deformities, its struggles, its fights, its blisters, its tumescence resembles closely the world after the cold war. Yang Shaobin possesses a "cold exterior but is warm hearted", his expression can be glacial, like clear water, but his heart is no less sincere and enthusiastic. One day, also during SARS, he called me: we had not seen each other, he missed me, and he invited me to lunch. "Good idea." I said "It has been a long time since I have been to your place." No, no! not to his house: "Coming over is impossible. I would be too scared that you might carry bacteria in with you and pass them on to my son. We will go to restaurant." Ever watchful over his pride. Once the epidemic was over, when I was for the first time able to go and visit him in his studio and saw his new work, I was completely flabbergasted - bowled over, shaken! Trains, planes, the canvases were gigantic, all in a fuzzy bohemian green like a washed out memory… the studio looked like a war zone, the planes were capsized, the trains derailed. Political figures, in the guise of virtue, sensitivity and justice, were hacking up curses, roaring obscenities across the international scene… Unable to contain my excitement, I called all of our friends to tell them that Yang Shaobin had gone off the deep end. It was, nonetheless, the work of genius. In his most recent work he has broadened his artistic and ideological field to infinity. He is no longer an artist taking refuge in his ivory tower, but a gigantic monster wielding an over-sized paintbrush to color a land of splendor. Yang Shaobin is a rare bird, floating at the center of contemporary art and fleeing a sea of pain in search of some small prosperity. His work is no less excellent for it, it even leans heavily towards pure estheticism - his colors interwoven like heavy clouds or spreading out like a thick fog; his strokes surging and then stopping short like a car that breaks suddenly; his strokes and his approach, correct on the first glance, are then discovered to be imperceptibly false (or vise-versa); his faces with eyes too distinct for their unreachable souls… All this floats on a breeze, carries with it a general beauty as well as an intimate beauty, a ravishing spectacle of glacial exquisiteness. The work of Yang Shaobin attracts controversy, it meets with opposition, but this controversy and these oppositions seem to be nothing but an attempt to preserve the status quo. Mild and peaceful, like grass quietly growing and multiplying on the embankment, they cannot dilute his "red humor". Rather, they get along gleefully with the idea of "a typical person in a typical environment". As if we don’t know enough about that kind of "fire cracker"! Personally, I could take it or leave it, they grow in abundance, such is the harvest on fertile land! Yang Shaobin is today considered the most eminent technical artist on the contemporary Chinese art scene. The way I understand it, that means that his work is the most eminent in so far as the unification of figure and background. Yang Shaobin’s technical approach does include a certain amount of scientific research, but his interest in that domain would never have him betray his original creative intention. In the age where the notion of creativity outweighs the "fine arts", the quality of the "scientific and technical elements" inherent in Yang Shaobin’s work, and the pains he puts himself through to attain them, are all the more admirable. The manner in which he applies color, with halos reminiscent of traditional ink work, makes one dream of a time when subject and setting were in necessary unison. In the same breath we sigh for the day when the past will be revisited. The formalist revolution was, is and always will be, yesterday, today and tomorrow, but its spring will not arrive independent of science. Ten years of Yang Shaobin, one hundred years of monsters in the spotlight.

作者：Huang,Liaoyuan