Yang Fan’s <Spring>
until April 6 @ Star Gallery

In a drastic departure from her works on canvas, Yang Fan has produced a carpet of colorful poof-balls that she culled from the storerooms of clothing and toy factories in her native Guangdong. Yang Fan is formerly known for her series of paintings of young women in fashion plate style, the series, ever popular with Asian collectors, did not resonate with Western audiences.

When she began working on the project last year, she mentioned that the idea came to her while visiting clothing factories in China’s south. In what might have evolved from more “crafty” origins, this work culminates in her scouring of southern factories for unwanted bits and bobs, a new representation of the stories behind the cast-offs, and timely with the massive layoffs in the south.

An essay accompanying the catalogue is presented below. I translated it, but also enjoyed it for some valuable insights on her early works.

SPRING / AN INITIAL READING OF YANG FAN
text / Zheng Naiming

Yang Fan’s art, behind its loud colors, always faintly hints at her loneliness.

Her paintings intuitively remind me of the American artist Edward Hopper (1882-1967). For so many artists of this new era, I’m afraid that Hopper’s works are only known by a limited few; after all, he is already one of those “fossilized” artists. Born in the small town of Nyack, New York, Hopper was fond of recording metropolitan life. Strictly speaking, his strong point was describing the psychological distance between urban people and space, he used the wavering penetration of light to pierce the lonely ambience of his canvases. Hopper used rather sparing brushstrokes to construct his themes on canvas, he had a flat style, and to a certain degree he condensed the emotions of the artist and the viewers. We could say that he was not at all willing to use his works to project an overtly consumerist visual mood, and adopted condensed methods to shape a distance between the people and spaces in his canvases, the immeasurable psychological ditches. I always feel that we can actually reverse simple or common metropolitan scenes to read into the mental state of its author, and this artist has surely undergone some psychological tempering, to be able to make his language so understated, yet at the same time so effusive. In 1942 Hopper began calling attention to himself with the oil painting titled “Nighthawks.” This work is grounded by the image of a twenty-four hour diner in a nightscape, there are a few customers in the diner, but Hopper daftly uses a the reflective surface of the glass to lay bare the hollowness of the atmosphere. He makes the light in the diner extremely bright, luminescent like a pearl, while the New York street scene on the other side of the window is solemnly silent and obscured. The atmosphere in this scene is filled with a tension that seems could be ruptured at any moment by an unnamable sound, and the people seem desolate because their loneliness has been magnified! Hopper was always able use wholesome contexts and somber colors to make the people in his paintings, at the vending shops, gas stations, hotel rooms, garages, and the scenarios of our minds into tangible and extremely conventional pictures. His works are truly among the most moving art to represent the culture and landscape of metropolitan life.

Of course from the two-sides of formalism or spiritual subjects, neither Edward Hopper or Yang Fan can be dogmatically compared, as both of their artistic languages are personal; Hopper using space and light to adjust the shallow musing of person’s inner minds. Yang Fan, on the other hand, in what seems to be colors that could overflow from the canvas, is motivated by the desires of her youth, and portrays the life that she encounters on the surface of the city. Although their psychological intentions are different, both reflect honesty garnered though the artist’s age and environment. Therefore, I choose to elicit Yang Fan’s oeuvre through an examination of Hopper’s paintings, not only because their artworks display a personal language, but because behind all of these works lies witness to an era and is an expression of personal emotions in reaction to surroundings.

The New York that Hopper grew up in was the era when the White-collar class was most prominent, the America of that time could build dreams, but could break them at any moment. In the year that Hopper was 24 years old, he went to Paris and became deeply captivated by the poems of the French impressionist poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867). Baudelaire has a poem that reads: Carriage, carry me away! Boat, spirit me away! Take me away, to a far off place. For here, all of the land is tears.” Hopper unexpectedly discovered that he and Baudelaire were quite similar: both liked to be alone, enjoyed urban life, nightscapes and public transport stations. Perhaps he was inspired by Baudelaire, when in 1925 Hopper bought his first second-hand car, and drove from New York to Mexico. Since then, the vagabond in his blood took over his heart, often many months out of the year he spent on the road, sketching and painting. Solitude naturally became the chains of predestination, the people that appeared in his paintings were always alone, always look lost in thought, as if they just left someone, or someone just left them. The expressions of his figures and his command of the space, invariably show a weak inner self, a susceptibility and the appearance of being difficult to approach, as if to touch them and would set loose a mind full of worries. Hopper took the pervasive search for happiness of the American 50s and 60s, and used light brushstrokes and sallow hues to allow the tension on the canvas to press inwards, but clearly allows the viewers feel a rich emotional rupture––at any moment it could come bursting through the picture. I think that Hopper clearly transformed the contents of his environment into something that he could personally handle, that he could controlled grammars to show that in addition to appreciating his works, we can also identify the weak points of the situation at the time and the artist’s personality.

As for Yang Fan, who was born in 1972 in Jieyang, Guangdong province, throughout her progression of her studies at the Guangzhou Academy of Art, to teaching at the Guangdong Educational academy, her performance has always been bright eyed. But, even as her outer personality is not fond of words and is docile, I actually think that Yang Fan has a rebellious disposition. Essentially, this so-called anti-social behavior isn’t the bad sort; to the contrary, compared to her contemporaries, Yang Fan keeps a wise and farsighted distance from many social problems. She moves close, but is able to congeal the contemplative logic that belongs to her alone, and she is able to transform this into her own creative energy. Therefore, when we are appreciating her works, we should actually recognize the environment that Yang Fan grew up in, which will shed some light on the artist’s fondness.

Perhaps we already know a certain amount; China is currently the largest manufacturing nation in the world. With nearly one hundred and four million laborers, it is double the combined total of all of the labor in America, Japan, France, Canada, Germany, England, and Italy. Of this work force population of more than a hundred million people, Guangdong province is home to an estimated 17,000,000 to 40,000,000 migrant laborers. Can you believe it? According to statistical data, from 1994 to 2004, 60% of China’s economic growth was in the so-called manufacturing sector. Of the cities that border China’s coast, the city of Wenzhou manufactures metal-casing lighters for the entire world, Guangdong’s Shunde is famous for its household electrical appliances, Zhejiang’s Zhili village has 5,000 factories manufacturing children’s clothes, Datang village produces 6,000,000 pairs of socks every year, the city of Shengzhou produces 40% of the world’s neckties in its more than 1,000 factories. The Canton Fair can be called China’s oldest trade fair in history, which in 1957 it became the most important and sole window with which China came in contact with the entire world (because China’s international business activities came to a halt between 1960-70, the Canton Fair naturally evolved into the main portal for trade with the outside world).

Try to imagine: ever since she was small, the world that Yang Fan encountered was the city that is China’s economic pulse. Yang Fan’s mother is a painter, aesthetic fundamentals were a natural-born, familial cultivation; Yang Fan’s surroundings while growing up were brimming with cultural personality from the “outside”, Teresa Teng’s Mandarin pop hits, pretty clothes smuggled in from Hong Kong. Even when she was small Yang Fan had already begun wearing evening dresses as casual street wear, the streets were covered in fashion labels, and constantly attacking Yang Fan’s line of sight was Chaozhou’s flourishing culture of smuggled goods; but even more serious, they clashed with people’s traditional values. Yang Fan told me, her favorite things to read at that time were showy fashion magazines, in page after page of luxurious and flawless advertising copy, she seemed to be watching on as her little hometown morph from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. Owing to her own experience working in the clothing industry, it made her even more capable of experiencing and observing the depths of an appearance-oriented fashion industry. Actually, it conceals various unknown undercurrents of society, and those anti-social observations that she garnered from various social phenomena have naturally influenced Yang Fan’s painting. But, Yang Fan is clear that she isn’t a knife-packing, gun-slinging, agitated sort of creator, she cannot let her works so frankly depict this blood and tears part of her life. She is also a fan of the pop art style of Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol, works using very formalist aesthetics to reveal a pinnacle of deeper layers of inner social-rebellion and irony. Judging from Yang Fan’s early paintings, she was retrieving the language of fashion advertising and bringing it into her own context, the young women that appeared in her paintings were sweet-faced, young, slim and fashionably dressed, but the way they are displayed is stagnant and stiff, as if it were some sort of display rather than a burst of life. Especially in the expressive looks on their faces, it appears as if they were smiling but also smiling right at the viewers. Yang Fan uses her own linear self-control and bright colors to give her paintings a superficial and commercialized feeling of happiness, this kind of visual image, built on a process of formalization, just like the pop art that she personally loves, actually seems like her gentle side using calm emotions to gradually reveal her increasing suspicions towards an exterior world. Admittedly, in the works from this period Yang Fan wishes to use her canvases to point socialism confronting the powerful winds of capitalist materialism. Because people lack the cultural inertia that builds over a long time, will unavoidably react to sudden openness and tons of glamour, with a shocked and happy, but with a little bit of unbelievable ecstasy. Such a state of joy will naturally influence a pantomime language and facial expressions and poses that “copy” those of the models in popular advertisements. This kind of action explains the adjustment phenomenon of China in the face of an open society. Personally, I think that Yang Fan has appositely captured this rhythm of society, but of her strains and her colors, her personal sentiment is still too heavy, and prevents the canvases from reflecting the icy indifference of an observer, austere social calibration, and to some degree weakening the strength of the blow.

In my opinion, Yang Fan’s artistic breakthrough has two major factors, the first: after her body gave her warning, it give her an opportunity to have a fresh look. Also, after Yang Fan moved to Beijing from Guangdong, it was as if she moved from the environment in which she lived, to one where she merely existed, displaying the inherent variability in the environment and inner struggles of even greater forces attacking her, giving her the perturbed feeling of tightrope walking on. Yang Fan said: “When I arrived in Beijing, I realized even more how small I was, my heart was in agony.” To Yang Fan, Beijing was a dream factory producing people and things, perhaps it allowed people to free themselves, but could also teach them how to suffocate themselves. Although Yang Fan knew that Beijing would give her a greater platform for competition, and more opportunities in the spotlight, she would demand even more of herself to conceive new perspectives and significance. The stimulation of the environment and the pain of existence caused her to think more deeply on life and its essential meaning; it was under the amalgamation of these two conditions that allowed Yang Fan to stumble upon a new spring for her creative powers within various fabric processing plants.

In her youth, Yang Fan was often in contact with the fabric processing plants in Guangdong; many of which made children’s toys or stuffed dolls. Perhaps the market price of a Barbie doll in an overseas shopping mall is 20 USD, but the actual cost of production and labor is only 35 cents. Another similar product is the Blythe doll, whose market price is 15.89 USD, but whose production and labor costs in China are only 17 cents; the significance of an inexpensive China is not only what we call the problem of low wages, it involves environmental pollution, wretched work conditions, and the exploitation of labor, to the point that many of these laborers cannot afford to go home even for the holidays, they would just rather save the money, or actually hitch rides on trucks meant for shipping pigs. No one knows that the dream of beauty or of marketing afforded us by Western capitalism is actually built upon an all-too-real compromise of low-cost Chinese laborers. And when the market is excellent, and the factory is in a rush to ship goods, producers will send them to the surrounding homes for proxy labor, Yang Fan is all too familiar with such scenarios. But her early inertia we see again today, and can actually experience a bit of the bitterness of society, impacting her thoughts, she has seen someone else’s Spring, which may not necessarily be the hopes of these Chinese laborers. Therefore Yang Fan went to every factory to collect these already discarded leftover scraps of fabric, in bag upon bag of excess fabric, she did not fail to see a beauty that had not yet faded. . . it is precisely this kind of beauty that carries with it a warm, suffocating breeze.

Strictly speaking, Yang Fan’s 2008 installation piece “Spring” contains two deep layers of significance that must be put forward. The first, the mirror image of Spring’s persistence and an emergence. These leftover cloth pieces come from the springtime of these factories’ laborers when they were in their flourishing youth; they weave their most beautiful Spring, and when it is finished it is sent it off to a capitalist society, and those excess pieces of cloth are squalidly cast into a factory corner. Yang Fan collected all these ruined pieces of springtime and brought them home; washed them one bag at a time, and gave them new life. In the process, Yang Fan prolongs the unshakable destiny of these low-priced Chinese objects, surplus fabric implies the materials leftover from a false springtime, and they imply so many broken dreams of youth of the Chinese laborers that have left the legacy within. Yang Fan’s action of cleaning ever represents the new youth of China as its raises its head, a new era of intellectuals that understands better than the older generation how to create their own dreams and personal ideals, how to purge. It is also symbolically a kind of emergence.

The second is the recreation of spring and it’s propagandizing. In this installation, Yang Fan’s presentation rather moves me.  That is to say, Yang Fan did not cast away these fabric remains in favor of new ones, they all originate from the spirit of technical production that is the finished products of manual labor. She once again allows herself and her family of women and friends to return to the movements of hand sewing, mending, and weaving, transforming this fabric into a pile of brilliantly smiling flowers. This complicated procedure is similar to a ritual, a rite of respect towards China’s laboring class, and the chance to let her experience the bitter pains of this kind of manual labor. It’s like going back to medieval Europe, when women used weaving to pass the time and awaited the realization of their dreams. Manual labor allows Yang Fan to have a more sincere understanding of Chinese laborers reverence for the hand, the helplessness and sigh over the different lives and status that life have doled out to each of us. Manual labor allows her to understand more about the recreation of Spring, and thus endow this work with multiple layers of meaning. Yang Fan allows the work to spread out, covering heaven and earth, like Spring. Its beauty must shock us and allows us to fly, but beauty also allows people to see clearly the grief and sorrow behind the form. As observers, as soon as we know the history behind where these fabric remnants come from, Spring is no longer a springtime in appearance alone: Spring also has tears, Spring has social significance. It’s only, these tears have been wiped away to show tenacious essence of life, Yang Fan has given them a new beginning.

From her early paintings to her new work “Spring”, Yang Fan’s passion for life has never wavered, what has changed is her outlook. Such an outlook, from her early formalist works, but the present ramifications grasp tightly at life’s little details, and interweave the piercing pain together. Yang Fan has very subtly experienced that pain, leaping away from the indulgent style seen in “Cruelty of Youth” works, in this restless “Spring”, all along life has been endless hurt but can endlessly heal itself, and the rose garden in all our hearts will not be ruined completely.

:)

[…] were some rather established artists present, such as Yang Fan, who sent a portion of the massive carpet she installed last spring, and even some artists under pseudonyms (one included in the photos below).  In its first year, […]