Using digitally manipulated photography, Yang Yongliang creates dystopian fantasy worlds that mesh the misty-mountain landscapes of Chinese traditional painting with images of contemporary urban blight. Your initial impression is that you’re looking at landscape paintings – nature undefiled. At second glance, you quickly realise that what you’re seeing is photography, not painting; that his mountains are made of skyscrapers; that his trees are made of construction cranes; that it’s not pure nature we’re looking at but a faux nature, a landscape made of concrete and steel – nature as a construction site.
It’s hard work to pull off and have people like you at the end of the party. As with so much digitally manipulated photography, Yang’s previous works have occasionally felt cluttered, as if Photoshop were an addictive fetish that you can fling at people like a used card trick. Fetishes are like anything else. You have to know when to stop. Yang hasn’t always known that, and while the effect has been dazzling, it has also sometimes been dizzying, graceless and emetic.
What’s good about his new photographs here at Galerie Paris-Beijing is a refreshing sense of balance, tendresse and moments of compositional austerity, even as, at over several metres long, they unfurl and surround you with the grandness of an actual landscape. Entitled The Peach Colony, the series references a prose poem by Tao Yuanming that was popular during the Song Dynasty, and this adds a narrative richness to what could have otherwise been a litany of unrelated images.
If in works such as ‘Horse Herder’ the artist risks over-cramming the frame with too many figures, he hits close to the mark with his lacustrine piece, ‘The Lonely Angler’. True to the conventions of traditional Chinese shanshui, Yang’s landscape envelopes its human subject with a majestic lake, an ephemeral fog and endless mountains. The figure is at once diminutive and meditative, balancing on that thin line that every fisherman totters upon, between solitary bliss and unadorned loneliness.
In
The Peach Colony, Yang has stepped up his game, creating a world that feels achingly familiar and eerily distant. The result is not perfect, not yet, but Yang is a meticulous craftsman with a rich imagination.
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