Yang Jiechang. On Earth as in Heaven

About

Yang Jiechang was born in 1956 in Foshan in southern China where he lived until 1978. He was deeply affected by the Cultural Revolution proclaimed by Mao Zedong in 1966. After briefly joining the red guards in the 1970s, he quickly distanced himself studying calligraphy and deciding to study Chinese art history theory at the Canton Fine Arts Academy where he was also trained in the traditional art of ink painting. Gaining a considerable mastery of calligraphy and acute knowledge of traditional Chinese thinking, Yang Jiechang decided to be initiated over a period of several years into Taoism and Zen Buddhism which proved vital for the development of his formal language reduced to the essential.

He emerged from this period firmly convinced that “traditional expression” in no way depends on a fixed form but resides in daily actions that evolve ad infinitum. “The real has no form” seems to be a leitmotiv for a body of work that has been developing for more than thirty years, sustained by life and his accumulated experiences, sensations, knowledge and wisdom which are perpetually changing and necessarily moving as time is passing; and whether Yang Jiechang has recourse to calligraphy and traditional silk painting, or video, photography and performance using sound, music and multimedia, all constantly renewed, his corpus of works translates the sensations and events from his life.

The exhibition On Earth as in Heaven groups some twenty works coming from different periods of his creation. The exhibition starts with one of his earliest paintings entitled Massacre dating from 1982 and realized as the artist's graduation piece at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. Yang considers Massacre and the corresponding painting Fire as the work marking the beginning of his artistic career.