(YYQ: Ye Yongqing LXT:Li Xianting)

　　YYQ: I don’t like to organize documents. My past documents and objects are just piled up in boxes in my Chongqing and Kunming homes. When I was still a student, maybe in 1979 or 1980, the first time you, He Rong and Xia Hang came to the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts, published some current things in Art, and later with the edited chronicle of Luo Zhongli’s Father, these were all linked to my works at the time.

　　I stayed on as faculty in 1982, and later in 1985 with the New Image movement, everyone had to find their previous works, annotate them with poems and make slides for catalogues and presentations, because the conditions weren’t there for exhibiting the originals.

　　LXT:This period you have the same intention,as Zhang xiaogang and Mao xuhui.

　　YYQ: Right. We were all painting Mt Guishan, a red soil village not far from Kunming.

　　LXT: You all came from the rural painting, but had already started to stray from the rural painting style of Luo Zhongli. You all shared these differences, though you all differed from each other as well.

　　YYQ: Our biggest sources of reference were the works that criticized realism and rural painting.

　　LXT: I remember feeling that though you were all classmates, and all painted rural style, the works all had a lukewarm feel to them.

　　YYQ: Sichuan rural painting was critical on the one hand, and also had an aspect of suffering, which never really got us worked up.

　　LXT: Or you could say that the theme was the same, but the starting point was different. As for the countryside experience and the vast difference between the Cultural Revolution and the reform period, you guys didn’t experience it as strongly as people like Luo Zhongli and myself, who are ten years your senior. You guys didn’t have that strong feeling of intervening in society.

　　YYQ: Right, there wasn’t the social aspect. Even early on, the stuff we wanted to do and the influences we received were different. This may have had something to do with the books we were reading or the artists we liked. I liked post-Gauguin modernist artists. So we had to leave this rural, ethnically Chinese Sichuan, and find a place that was different, go off to the minority regions, like Yunnan, this Sani village. I had two places I liked to go. One was Xishuangbanna, and the other was Mt. Guishan.

　　LXT: Did this have anything to do with age? You’ve had a different experience and understanding.

　　YYQ: We were roughly ten years younger than our oldest classmate.

　　LXT: A decade. For you guys, the stark contrasts between the Cultural Revolution and afterwards weren’t such a heavy blow to the consciousness. When you started art it was with rural painting, but in your heart it didn’t get you going. I want to know about this difference, including the artists you liked and your influences, because we old ones, like Luo Zhongli, He Duoling and Cheng Zonglin, were all influenced by Russian art and literature.

　　YYQ: At the time what we really wanted was to escape from the mainstream themes and forms of expression. I was surrounded by the hottest people, and it was just these works, concepts and styles that gave us the most pressure, and it made me feel that I’d never catch up. So I enjoyed going to Xishuangbanna in Yunnan. I remember there was one year when I went eight times. I had some unrealistic ideas at the time. I wanted to be an artist along the lines of Gauguin, ha ha. My graduate work was along those lines. Those works are now being bought and sold back and forth at auction, and it’s like a joke that history and time played on the ideas of the time.

　　LXT: Even Zhang Xiaogang’s graduate work was in this state.

　　YYQ: The Mt Guishan paintings were basically under the influence of Duchamp and the late impressionist stuff. It’s also like you were just saying. We’d all go to the same place, but have a different reaction. I always liked light, almost transparent strokes. By my third year in school I didn’t even buy colors. I’d show up to class every day with a bottle of turpentine, dipping my brush here and there in my classmates’ paint. It didn’t matter how large the painting was, I could always finish it with a minimal amount of color. I just liked it and made a habit out of it. It was like a skill, painting like it was a watercolor.

　　Xiaogang and Big Mao would go paint at Mt Guishan, as would Yang Qian. I was perplexed, because my stuff came out light and expressive, but theirs would always be different: Zhang Xiaogang’s paintings were spastic and sensitive, Big Mao’s were clumsy and inhibited, and when Zhou Chunya painted the Tibetan areas, his expression was deep and bright. This had to do with each person’s personality, and each person’s interests. It served as a sort of mirror.

　　LXT: This was very important. When the mainstream art and thinking were still in this sort of “collective aesthetic return”, you guys started paying attention to the relationship between painting and the individual experience. Not to say that the collective aesthetic return painters – like rural and scar painters – didn’t lacked individuality. What I mean to say is that during the rural period, the expressive methods of art, or the link between what was being expressed and the actual state of painting had a lot more elements, like political feelings, the subject of the painting, details and the completeness of the narrative. The endless rearrangement of the literate and social elements in art is a mark of modern art. The literate aspect of Chinese traditional painting is something that western modern art has always sought after. I think that your thin painting technique suits your character, including the easygoing feel. These are all personal traits of yours. I once used a term, “talented literary painter”, expressive and cathartic.

　　YYQ: Right. That was a painting of a mountain village from 1983 that looked like a hill. That village was a base for the previous generation of Yunnan artists, people like Yao Zhonghua, Jiang Tiefeng and Sun Jingbo, to paint life studies. Later we turned it into an experimental field for barbizon and other stuff we had read about.

　　LXT: The feel and the method were all different. That generation was still painting landscapes. Their differences were stylistic. Your differences with them were not stylistic, but conceptual. The paintings you guys were making then were the first paintings in China to have a conceptual feel to them.

　　YYQ: These pretty much appear to be under the influence of the early new expressionists like Kandinsky.

　　LXT: These portraits are what follow from post-rural conceptualization?

　　YYQ: Right. These series follow a chronology. This early self portrait was like Lu Ao’s stuff, and the other one was Fu Liya’s. I had a completely different personality back then, I was shy, and I didn’t get along with the people around me. When I was painting in Xishuangbanna, I painted right onto my certificate. She was in the front and I was in the back. We just painted freely. Walking Poet was actually a self portrait. That was in 1983, which was when rural painting was at its height. There wasn’t much to use as a reference in the Chinese art world back then: Courbet, Millet and Wise. But I was different. If you look you can see some of Hegel’s influence. I painted this one in Chongqing, a lamenting and dejected feeling. I could almost count as a literary youth at the time.

　　This Man Under the Trees, painted in Xishuangbanna, was a play on Gauguin, but with a totally different style. Doesn’t Gauguin have a painting called Good Morning Mr. Gauguin!? It sketches a picture of himself knocking on a wooden door on a crisp morning. I felt that I had just come to stand at the door of modern art. This was a self portrait; I stood under the shade of a tree. It was an allegory about civilization and nature, about reality and escape. I did a lot of sketches for this one. I also had a lot of influence from Picasso, Australian aboriginal art and whatnot. I loved the expressive power of lines. I ended up influencing a lot of people in Sichuan. Then I went to Beijing, where I painted urban jungles and factories in acrylic, paintings among the plants animals. That was 1984, and I was reading some western books at the time. All of my friends were going wild, but those people were far removed from me. All of my classmates from the institute had left Chongqing; Xiaogang had gone to Kunming, Cheng Zonglin, Qin Ming and Gao Xiaohua had gone to Beijing while Yang Qian and Luo Zhongli left the country. I had virtually no one around me. I was just drinking all alone at the school.

　　LXT: The feel of those 85 New Wave works started to appear in 83 and 84. What I knew of it definitely wasn’t from official exhibitions like the Youth Fine Arts Exhibition, but from a gradual wellspring among the people, like with your self portraits and Zhang Xiaogang’s early sketches for his ghost series. Word of your “New Image” exhibition was sent to me by Huang Yongping’s classmate, Hou Wenyi. I was at home with nothing to do, and I had been receiving lots of artists who sought me out. The surrealism and metaphysics of 85 appeared in artists’ works much earlier, even in Feng Guodong’s works. Chen Yufei over in Anhui sent me some works at the time, some as early as 1983, and they had a similar feel to what you guys were doing. They really had something to them, unlike the overly stylized works in the official exhibitions. Your works at the time had a green mood to them, and the people were as if in a trance.

　　YYQ: Right, pretty grevious. I had started moving from Xishuangbanna and Guishan to the things around me. I painted those in Beijing. I remember looking you up, and I remember you saying that it was strange that the Sichuan Institute had such a person, as you hadn’t seen this kind of stuff. At the time I started wanting to paint the reality around me but when I did, it was influenced by my past work. I painted the pipes like plants, like the trees of Xishuangbanna. It was like a hybrid of Xishuangbanna and the industrial environment. When I first painted the smokestacks of the Hengjiaoping power plant, painted the factories and the city, it was all a bit surreal. The long title Two People Leaving and Staying on the Last Pasture represented my thinking at the time. I really liked the work of 契里柯 and Picasso; they liked spatial relationships. I really wanted to use a horse to represent the west I a way. I was reading a lot of books, foreign magazines every day. Thoughts and conflicts in books trapped me into a lot of shady pondering.

　　LXT: A lot of painting titles at the time seemed like philosophical essay titles, like Self Portrait with a Window (Gu Wenda), Mankind and Their Clock (Zhang Jianjun), Mysticism on the Staircase (Chai Xiaogang)… It was from all those books. Art was to a certain extent following a spirit found in western modern philosophy. I remember you had a painting called…

　　YYQ: The Horse Outside is Peeping at Her and We Who are Being Peeped at by Her. There was a smokestack in the background. The horse was looking at the girl and the girl was looking at us. It was like there was a titmouse in the back. This spatial-temporal relationship was a kind of metaphor for external culture and the self’s situation at the time. It was the contradiction of viewing and being viewed, and some observations of the current culture, though we couldn’t imagine cultural issues in the same way as Shu Qun and Wang Guangyi in the north. But I still felt that there were external things bursting in, so I wanted to use imitation and metaphor to sketch my internal understanding and situation. I imitated Picasso’s horse, used it to make a sort of symbol, along with the cistern from the power plant next to the institute. It was all an autobiographical sketch. At the Sichuan Institute I was the loneliest holdout for modern art. It was just starlight; no one else was doing modern stuff. It wasn’t until Xiaogang was reassigned there in 1986 that our circle slowly started to form. This was also a painting of the love-hate relationship of two places, like a lonely, helpless and grieved poem, expressing love. It was all painted in Beijing.

　　LXT: I’ve seen all those paintings.

　　YYQ: These were all of the times. This was coming back to a previous theme all over again. It was the late eighties by then. I was adding a lot of borders around the edges, which was linked to changes going on in my life; I was endlessly moving back and forth between Yunnan and Chongqing, sometimes coming to Beijing. It was then that I started rushing about, so the image has some montage qualities to it.

　　LXT: Paintings with borders, I think that was during your third transition, Guishan – lonely and inhibited self-portraits – to Scenery with Grey Border, but ever since the borders appeared in the paintings, Ye Shuai [YYQ] took on distinctive language traits. On one hand you were handling all kinds of conceptual imagery in a formic and painted manner, and on another you were using a lot of scattered compositions disruptive of time and space, with an air of philosophical prose poetry. This had a lot to do with your situation – flitting back and forth between Chongqing, Kunming and Beijing at the time, and of course it had a lot to do with your personality and character – you were at once inhibited, poetically or literarily, and you liked pondering, pondering about art history, figuring out a lot about international postmodern art trends… You wanted to bring your different qualities and contradictions together as one. It’s very contemporary, very conceptualized, but it preserved a decidedly painted vein. After that it was the big character poster series, right?

　　YYQ: That was in 1989 after June 4. I was depressed and full of dread. I used paper and oil. I was living at your house at the time and we were always together, the two of us, you sitting there in the daytime smoking cigarettes, waiting in the evening for Fang Lijun and Liu Wei to come over for a drink. That was at 28 North Palace Alley, with me sleeping on one couch and old Fang [Lijun] on another. No one knew what to do back then. Later on I went back to Chongqing and started painting with brush and ink. In 1991, I remember I was painting on a calendar, and I started playing with water-ink and calligraphy stuff, which grew into the Big Poster project.?? LXT: That was when pop started to appear. I remember it was 1991, you painted Big Poster, bringing al kinds of current and popular Chinese symbols together in the same space through big character posters and announcement board methods, but all of the symbols still retained your normal painted style.

　　YYQ: Then I started making installations, which were actually a continuation of the water-ink and mixed media. I did the installations for a few years, later taking it into silk, hanging it up, later on making some installations in the style of the Ma Wang Dui artifacts at the China Experience Exhibition. Those works had just come back from France, and when they were shown some culture officials were mad because the Ma Wang Dui and big poster stuff touched on some writings and Mao stuff. They requested that the works be covered up during the exhibition so that no one would see. The installation was made of plexiglass, silk and lights, expressing two sides of interests, one of which was western stuff along the lines of Boyce. At the same time I also did some stuff along ancient scholar lines like Jin Nong. I think that these things started to gain subconscious links which have continued to this day. A lot of the things I do have this kind of idea. Five thousand years in China have nurtured and formed a tradition which is “calligraphy and painting”, maybe including poetry and literature, and this tradition is unparalleled in its refinement, but it’s not totally an artistic tradition, and calligraphy and painting are impossible to bring out for a dialogue with the world, so it’s just a misunderstanding. But I’m the type who’s always doing futile things, straddling borders and putting myself in one tight spot after another.

　　LXT: You’ve always wanted to find a link between them. I remember writing about you, “Ye Yongqing’s works on silk are in his typical philosophical-poetic style; he has put fragments of his different spatio-temporal life experiences together on a single surface, evoking that state between dreaming and waking. The symbols are like forms that come together in a dream; the strokes are emotive, and even the aging methods of the silk evoke sadness. It is like his life.” You wrote a letter to me then, saying, “My life is often rendered fractured and aimless by my migratory flights from city to city. My paintings and writings also move around with each shot. My painting style, working habits and even my painting tools and materials are quite “amateur”, and in this profession as a “painter”, my choices are growing increasingly marginalized. In the past few years my interests have become increasingly fragmented. Sometimes I have this vision that I am gathering and piling up all these fragments of images upon silk, and when I raise my hand, it all flies up like so many chicken feathers, like none of it ever existed. Such things, Chinese or not, foreign or not, current or not, ancient or not, are the unbearable and helpless aspects of life.” You’ve always been trying to bring together the ancient and modern, like the literary aspects of Chinese scholarly painting, the feel of oil paint strokes, the printed feel of woodblocks and the serendipity of scribbling together on one path. With this, you want to transcend the limitations of cultural ethnicity, identity and regionalism in your choice of symbols, techniques and materials, trying to find a world of harmonious coexistence within the various historical, spatial and temporal elements.

　　YYQ: I always wanted to find a link, I was always looking for something like that, maybe because of my character. I felt that using the images of Boyce and Jin Nong was like erecting a memorial, a new Ma Wang Dui. I did installations for a while, including nine bird cages at the Shanghai Biennial. Everything was on silk. My paintings changed in the nineties, more of a graffiti style, a jotting-down of my feelings, kind of like blogs these days. I had wanted to distance myself from the current Chinese ideological styles and trends, and search for a free form of expression that was transcendent of regionalism. I was spending most of my time drifting around places like Germany and New York at the time.

　　LXT: Your feeling is a bit like that black guy, what was his name?

　　YYQ: Basquiat. I was working in Dali in the late nineties. In 1999 I started some works that I’ve been continuing with to this day. This is the first one, which I painted in Dali. Before that I was living in England, and I was still painting the graffiti stuff, but the longer I was in that environment, the more I felt that my earlier stuff lacked power. I felt that it was too close, too close to what that black guy was doing or what other people were doing. I started calling that kind of painting monkey painting, because I only had that creative motivation when I was hurting or happy. But that stuff is everywhere, and it’s all the same. Like I just said, I’ve always had a scheming heart: because I really love stuff from the Song Dynasty, but that stuff can’t touch contemporary culture and life, so I tried to find a way to bring them together, but I didn’t know how to do it at the time. In London, my landlord was a woman artist, a vegetarian, and I was surrounded by vegetarians and homosexuals. I hadn’t had this experience before, living with a woman for whom I had no affections for such a long time. We lived together for half a year, one of us eating vegetarian and the other eating meat every day. There were conflicts on a daily basis. Not just that kind of cultural conflict people write about. My piss stank more than here. These people were all designers and furniture artists. I started to understand a bit about British art. I feel that British art is an obsession with cleanliness, an art of vegetarians and homosexuals, at once the most conservative and the craziest, the most elegant and the coolest all in one. As for difficulty, this simultaneous drive for extremism and bias, this stuff hits me the hardest. What comes out in the end is bipolar, one side is minimalist, exquisite and clean, and the other is dirty and violent, like someone who is both obsessed with sensory cleanliness and has an anal fetish. I went to see a Klaus exhibition, that American realist master, an exhibit of the contrast between his early and late periods. His early periods were meticulous photo-like reproductions. In the late period, maybe his eyes and hands were giving out, and he started making each part of the magnification abstract, but the whole would still look like a photograph. This gave me a lot of inspiration. I figured that the logic of the artist is truly different from that of a mathematician or philosopher. An artist can start from his point and go on to the flipside of logic. He uses his hands, not his mind, to guide his thinking. I think that I could use a pole to poke it upside down.

　　LXT: Your “birds”, which you have continued to today, look like graffiti, but are actually a model of countless details from graffiti, and are also a search for a link between painting and concepts. I saw Glenn Blown’s paintings in England in 1998. They had very expressive strokes, and were modeled objectively in a similar fashion, using painting strokes to model an objective thing. Where do the two of you differ?

　　YYQ: There are lots of people like this in England, using handiwork to stand up to computers, using their hands to make very difficult, even impossible things that are a breeze to do with computers. This hand-crafted aspect, in its contrast to new technology and media, has created a feeling for the absurdity of the day. At the time I felt that this unreasonableness was interesting, though I had my doubts, namely that monkey-painting style. I was surrounded by just such artists, and the southwest has grown accustomed to appreciate this and accept this kind of art, emotional and literary. I got tired of it, and grew opposed to it. Maybe this had something to do with my time making installations, but it was mostly linked to my personality; whenever something becomes big in someone else’s eyes, I drop it right away. I usually walk away when everyone else starts doing it. This is an old habit of mine, and it’s been like this with every phase, especially with art. I’d rather do something challenging. At the time I was following my own disposition to paint something clean.

　　LXT: What’s the specific method?

　　YYQ: First I put a picture together in pencil, and scan it into my computer. Then I project it onto a canvas and copy it. That’s a very subjective method that I’ve worked out over time. Of course anyone can trace, even an old lady with her embroidery, but she’ll trace it out round and I’ll purposefully exaggerate it, all chopped up. This is actually totally different from what other people trace. It’s also very complex. I want this effect, where normal people see a child’s drawing, but the more they look at it the more it seems wrong. Then they realize that it is they who were wrong in the first place, like a joke.

　　LXT: What looks to be hobbled together is actually meticulously crafted.

　　YYQ: I feel that this contains that poetic element that I like, like the elegance of ancient painting. Elegance has been discarded by contemporary culture. But I want to make use of this absurdity. People are always asking me, why do you paint so many birds? What is that all about? There’s really nothing to the idea of painting birds. Bird is difficult to translate in Chinese. It has two meanings: to paint a bird is a very elegant statement, but on the other hand it’s also a bit filthy, because to paint a bird you paint an “ass” and then a “head”. In Chinese, to say “paint a bird” is cursing or mocking someone. You can say that in Chinese, but I don’t know if it translates into English. The relationship comes out here. In this lax yet rational method, it’s destructive and subversive. I’m not really painting anything at all. I think that this working method suits my life. My life is the same, all fragmented in different cities and getting into all sorts of odd situations. I’m like an amateur painter, with an amateur identity and broken-up time. With the painting method I use now, I can start and stop whenever I want. I can paint when I only have twenty minutes. I have an easel set up in Beijing, one in Chongqing, one in Kunming and one in Dali. I don’t need to have any drive to paint. My art has reached a state of consistency and lack of enthusiasm.

　　In a way, this method has dispelled ideas and concepts. I don’t have any ideas behind painting birds, I’m just scribbling them out. But a lot of people have a lot of ideas when they look at this, and that’s their business. As for me, it’s just the same as painting anything else. Liu Zuhui can say, “The Bodhi tree is not a tree, a mirror is not a platform.” Things appear real and are not at the same time. For me, working is a bit like reading sutras and meditation. It is a basic thing, and I can basically paint. This is linked to a very long experience. After I had done a lot of things I started to feel that I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a painter.

　　LXT: I’ve been meaning to ask you about this. Your later role is a lot like my own now. I do almost no critiquing anymore. I’m developing this art area, and I’m a lot like the country gentleman of yore, meeting with local officials and architects to develop this liberal experimental field, a cultural, artistic, architectural and way of life thing. Traditional Chinese scholarly types didn’t paint as professionals. They were officials and soldiers. Chinese scholars chased after success all their lives. In failures, in the shady depths of officialdom and the travails of the heart, they used their free time to find rectitude through music, chess, calligraphy and painting. What they expressed was the emotion of life.

　　YYQ: This kind of identity allows you the time or the distance to provide some ideas or other possibilities for this reality. It was just this kind of experimentation, multi-disciplined experience and wandering around the world that allowed me to relax. Time is broad and the world is vast. No one is mandating that we only be artists, but what does art imply? Right now, art is like a bottom line. If I have twenty minutes or a few hours in a day to think about something and do it, I’ll do it, whether or not it will be a success. It becomes meditative, and you attain peace and calm right away, though it becomes less and less connected to what others are doing. If one day even art doesn’t bring you this, then you might as well go and play chess or do something else like Duchamp.

　　LXT: I’m not a craftsman or an artist. I am a person first, and art is but a route for expression. I once said that it wasn’t the art that’s important. Many years later I suddenly realized it’s just like the ancients saying the power is outside the poem. Art cannot express the feeling of life. You don’t have to do this, you can do something else.

　　YYQ: I thought of leaving Chongqing in 1997. I had undergone surgery, and you came to see me. Sitting on that sickbed, I felt so weak. It took me two months to heal from a one hour operation. I had lived in Chongqing for twenty years, and still I had no connection to it whatsoever. I felt so defeated. So I went back to Yunnan. Yunnan is heaven for the defeated. All kinds of failures come here to find a new way of life.

　　LXT: Just like the plants that thrive in that moist, sunny environment.

　　YYQ: I returned to Yunnan, my old home. But my life had changed, and I was frightened by the tranquility of Yunnan. I started doing all kinds of random things and accumulating multiple identities. In the early days I was just an expresser, and my works seemed autobiographical. You asked about how I differ from Xiaogang and Big Mao. I think that we’re alike in that to some degree, we’re all autobiographical artists. But I have a sort of bystander mentality towards things. I don’t get involved, though I’m curious about everything. Xiaogang is full of vigor. He starts out lukewarm, but he goes deeper and deeper in search of the essence. Big Mao is a natural revolutionary, very sensitive to the times and rights. He’s great at expressing his enthusiasm in words, and painting is just another outlet. I’ve become a hawker. I’ve gone from being an expresser to a hawker. What am I selling? A way of life. I’ve been very enthusiastic in opening the club, the Loft, eating with people and talking. I’m trying to influence reality and change life, so I play the roles of hawker and promoter. I’ve done quite well in this. I’ve been elected spokesman of Yunnan by the masses – not by the government or the art crowd, but by the old folks in the street!

　　LXT: How big is this painting?

　　YYQ: They’re all pretty big, three meters, the largest one is six. Sometimes it takes over a month to paint one. I paint slowly.

　　LXT: It’s just a bunch of dots.

　　YYQ: This is called Joy. It’s just five or six meters of random scribbles. This work isn’t taxing on the brain, but it’s a lot of work. It’s a peaceful painting process. You can do it in any state of mind.

　　LXT: And you can stop any time.

　　YYQ: I can stop any time. I wrote to you before, saying that I was becoming more and more amateur, even my tools are those of a child. I have a tube of ink and a small brush. I use this little brush for even the biggest paintings. I dip it in water and I can carry it on the plane. I think that it suits me.

　　LXT: Acrylic?

　　YYQ: Acrylic and water.

　　YYQ: This is a little bird with a rock. After over thirty years, I am a survivor and witness of the changes of the art waves. I’ve traveled so many roads and seen so many sights. As students early on we accepted and studied foreign cultural influences, and later we came to recognize our own traditions. Accepting and recognizing weren’t our goals. What was important was a return to life. Today, I no longer want to go and be a mood-swinging modernist expressive monkey, nor will I ever go back to being a kaleidoscope chasing after trends and conceptual changes. Art is just an attitude, and a person’s character and personality are revealed within it. I envy artists like Huang Binhong and Lin Fengmin, to whom forty years is as a day. Through a long and repetitive social and artistic history, I’ve come to understand that I can only strive to be a single point in time. My highest motivation is the Buddhist ‘permanence, personality, pleasure and purity’. We’re talking about self-cultivation, but that doesn’t have to be any different from artistic attitude.

　　2007.5.18