前波画廊荣幸地宣布将于2018年9月15日至11月10日举办展览《尚扬:新作》。此次展览将由前波画廊学术顾问唐冠科博士(Dr.John Tancock)担任策展人。2015年11月,唐冠科博士在北京的一个群展中首次看到尚扬的作品,那时他们并不相识,但那些巨作给他留下了非常深刻的印象。他想要进一步了解,碰巧同时北京前波画廊在举办由朱青生策划的艺术家群展《第三抽象》,尚扬正好是其中参展艺术家之一。此后经过多次的走访和交流,最终促成并迎来了尚扬在他职业生涯中第四次个展。值得一提的是,这次展览将在位于曼哈顿切尔西的画廊空间和位于纽约上州的展览空间“艺田”同时举行。
尚扬1942年出生于湖北,1981年因其《黄河船夫》的创作而赢得了广泛赞誉。80年代末90年代初,尚扬开始进入一个系统性的实验创作阶段,着迷于非传统的材料所带来的各种可能性。他开始运用工作室里的人工材料和现成品创作,包括1988年到1989年创作的《状态》系列作品。他于1991年创作了《大风景》,这是对中国自然环境受迅猛的城市化发展与肆无忌惮的商业发展影响的综合批判。1993年至1997年间尚扬在广州居住了四年,体会到了非常明显的社会变化,当时他面临着严重的健康问题,并联系到了社会和人的关系,开始关注社会和自然环境的问题。也因此尚扬的风景主题变得更加不安和忧虑,作品中无处不在的火山外形代表着看似表面稳定,内部却极具破坏性的力量。2003年,尚扬创作了一件表现环境恶化的大尺寸三联幅作品《董其昌计划No.2》,这是其艺术生涯上的一个重要发展,并在之后接下来的八年间反复深入这一题材的创作。而《剩水图》和《剩山图》在过去五年里成为了尚扬的主要创作题材,并逐渐演变为对坏和压抑的呈现。
尚扬的作品涵盖了各种媒材,若是不熟悉他多年来卓越艺术生涯的观众,很难看懂其与众不同的作品。其作品无疑得益于采用了奠定二十世纪艺术特点的非传统材料及创作方法,同时又以最为精湛的技艺展现出来。在形式语言上它们以抽象为主,同时也援引了几千年来中国古美术中最重要的主题或是不容忽视的当代问题。这些作品通常规模都很大,虽然这反映出了他对创作的严肃态度,但他的意图并非只是让观众感受到尺幅上的冲击力,而是为了更好地传达当代社会的严峻事实。虽已近八旬,但尚扬创作时的活力丝毫不减当年,在本次纽约两个空间的展览《尚扬:新作》中,他为大家呈现的也是其最新的系列创作。
虽然尚扬在纽约切尔西和纽约上州“艺田”两个空间的首次展览在主题上是统一的,但它们的风格和视觉手段却大相径庭。在纽约切尔西的空间共展出了八件近作,其中包括一件布面立轴;五件暗示着当下文明正不断衰落的坏书,即《坏书-文学》、《坏书-历史》、《坏书-哲学》、《坏书-逻辑》、《坏书-政治》;以及两件对日益严峻的环境问题进行深刻反思的《坏山水No.2》和《坏山水No.3》,这两件作品中精湛的绘画技艺与精心计划的拼贴元素特征鲜明,所传达的主题也十分明确——数千年来,山水及其所代表的一切一直是最重要的绘画主题,然而现今它已被人类的贪婪和傲慢所破坏。
在艺田空间,尚扬不仅抛开了山和书的基本形态,也放弃了架上绘画以及在平面上运用颜料或其它材料。这个空间的展览存在一个统一的概念“白内障”,这是一种随着年龄的增长而导致许多人视力模糊的疾病,尚扬以此暗喻了被塑料化现状包裹着而永远都无法接触事实的当下生活。在竖幅的《白内障》中,由多种不同人工材料合成的膜从画布上被揭下来,它们看上去像斑驳而千疮百孔的大地,但又如同纪念品一样被安置于精美的树脂玻璃盒中;《白内障–大切片》中挂在墙上的白内障横截面由不可识别的合成和有机材料混合而成,它们似乎是大地被切开所看到的截面,看上去斑斑点点有些脏乱不堪,但有时候又会捕捉到一种特殊的美感;用树脂和手机制作的《白内障—未知物》以不可预测的节奏在地上散发着微弱的光芒,并时而会传来如同外太空的警示音。当下越来越多的生态和环境问题与危机普遍存在,然而却并不被大家所意识到,这种现状就像白内障覆盖眼球一般。
尚扬在中国广为人知,并备受同龄人和年轻一代艺术家的尊重,但目前在国际上尚远未达到其应有的知名度。此次尚扬的绘画和装置展览将附有一套完整的图录,其中包括唐冠科和汪民安的文章以及唐冠科和茅为清对尚扬的采访,以便为人们深入理解这些作品提供必要的背景信息。
Chambers Fine Art is pleased to announce the opening on September 15, 2018 of Shang Yang: New Works (September 15- November 10, 2018). The exhibition will be held in two locations, in Chelsea and at ArtFarm, Salt Point, NY.
Although individual works by Shang Yang (b.1942) have been exhibited in the United States, his work has never been shown in depth. The current exhibition, only the fourth in his lengthy career, will concentrate on work produced in 2017-2018 and will be accompanied by a substantial catalog in which essays by John Tancock and Wang Min'an provide essential background for an understanding of these ground-breaking works.
Although born in 1942 in Hubei province, China, Shang Yang was nearly forty years old when he first won wide acclaim with the painting Boatmen of the Yellow River in which he abandoned the Socialist Realist style that prevailed in China at the time and embarked on a career of restless experimentation that continues until the present day.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, '85 New Wave appeared, the wide-spread proliferation of artist associations that occurred in China in response to the influx of information regarding contemporary art, literature and philosophy in the West during the 1980s. Although Shang Yang was less affected than artists of a younger generation by the stylistic experimentation, he entered a brief period of stylistic polymorphism. The most important of these phases occurred in 1988-1989 when he executed a group of abstract paintings titled States in which the focus was on the nature of the materials.
In 1992 he painted Great Landscape, a stylistically hybrid commentary on the way in which the environment in China was being affected by rapid urbanization and the unbridled development of capitalism. Shang Yang's landscapes became increasingly tormented, the omnipresence of volcanoes representing the powerful, destructive forces welling up inside seemingly stable outer forms.
An important development occurred in 2002 when Shang Yang painted Dong Qichang Project - 2, a large horizontal triptych that reflects on the degradation of the environment. This was to be the first of a series of thirty-eight remarkably diverse large-scale paintings in which, using Dong Qichang as a reference point, Shang continued his exploration of painterly effects and found materials.
Another turning point that is the immediate precursor of the works in the current exhibition occurred in 2012 when Shang Yang decided that Dong Qichang Project –33 was lacking in the tension that was a crucial aspect of his sprawling compositions. Over a period of two years, he partially dismantled it, retaining some elements in different locations in the composition and adding others, resulting in the ten-panel work Remaining Mountain. This led to further variations on the Dong Qichang Project, andwas the precursor to the related series Remaining Water. Remaining Water No. 1, 2015, was created in response to the Three Gorges Project that Shang has referred to as "a huge sociological and environmental disaster."
Shang Yang's deep concern with the deterioration of the physical environment has only deepened since then. "Yes," he has remarked, "I am absolutely pessimistic. There is a wide-spread recognition that global warming is undeniable." The alarming proliferation of extreme weather conditions in recent years has only deepened his despair.
The works that have resulted from this attitude – Decayed Landscape, Cataract, and Cataract Sections – will reveal to Shang Yang's admirers that far from resting on his laurels, he has entered a new level of daring in the restless experimentation that has characterized his entire career. Although not included in the present exhibition, Decayed Landscape - 1 (2017) reveals a new urgency in Shang's response to the global situation, the aggressively scrawled word "decaying" virtually obliterating what remains of Dong Qichang's world. In Chelsea, two new additions to this series – DecayedLandscape -2 and Decayed Landscape -3, developments of the pictorial language first established in the Dong Qichang Projectwill be accompanied by four works titled Decayed Book, each one representative of a major component of civilized discourse, Literature, History, Philosophy, and Logic. As Wang Min'an asks in his introductory essay, "What is the cause of all these decayed landscapes and bad earth? Shang Yang exposes the background: the decaying of the landscape results from the decaying of humanistic knowledge and the decaying of ideas."
At ArtFarm the Cataracts and Cataract Sections will surprise even those most familiar with the arc of Shang Yang's career. What exactly are these mysterious abstract works, the Cataracts mostly presented like unidentifiable relics in Plexiglas boxes and the unframed Cataract Sections that hang in front of the wall rather than being attached to it like a painting? The Cataracts derived ultimately from the first Painting Albums of 2008 in which the partial removal of a layer of synthetic material from the surface of the works was a revelatory moment for Shang. "There was pleasure in tearing," he commented recently.
The Cataract Sections lack the visual evidence of destructive actions that characterize the Cataracts and are much more impassive. From a distance they resemble geological specimens but closer inspection reveals that all kinds of extraneous matter are included in the mix. Are they beautiful or are they repulsive, or are they both at the same time. As described by Wang Min'an, "Shang Yang uses chemical substances directly as ready-made materials…..Why does he use such materials? There is no doubt that these chemicals are the most serious causes of the destruction of the earth. In other words, on one hand Shang Yang displays the reality and the results of the destruction of the Earth, on the other he displays the materials which are destroying the earth." Cataract –Mysterious Object represents a new departure for Shang Yang, a three-dimensional object fabricated from resin and cellphone placed on the floor that emits a feeble light at irregular intervals.
Shang Yang believes that the role of the artist is to reveal profound truths about society, not in a didactic manner but through creating works of art that stimulate viewers of his works to ask questions, not only how they are made but what they mean. Decayed Landscape, Cataracts, and Cataract Sections are exemplary in both respects.