Ouyang Jianghe: In the progression of Chinese contemporary art’s development, the emergence of your paintings was a huge surprise. Do you think that some of this was inevitable?

 

Yang Liming: Some people say this. For instance, when Zhou Chunya first saw my paintings in 2003 he wrote an article entitled Surprise. I taught classes for a year after graduating college, then I quit my job. In preparing to fully dedicate myself to being an artist, my primary reference was Western art history, from classical to impressionism to post-impressionism, cubism, expressionism, all the way to American contemporary art. I tested this system step by step for over three years. I like Klee, Pollock, Newman and Rothko. I especially like Rothko’s drip style, which I tried out for a long time. I discovered that my implementation of lines is neither rational like Klee nor sensual like Rothko. More importantly, I began researching Chinese calligraphy and painting through the dynasties, and I rediscovered that feel for writing I had when I was young, which led me to use the traditional Chinese brush in oil painting. At the time, my brush technique was not very complex, so I started practicing calligraphy every day. The composite that I formed later draws from both Eastern and Western coordinates. I’m not very interested in the direct expressions of society and politics that emerged [in China] after the ’85 New Wave. I’d rather go back to an internal personal cultivation.

 

Ouyang: Right now there is a big discrepancy between the definition of “contemporary” art in the Chinese domestic context and in the international context. Your creations seem better fit to the global definition and description of contemporary art. What I’m saying is, art must have orientation and latitude. One side links to your personal experience, including your personal style and language, and the other side is the sensitivity to material. In my view, you haven’t submitted to the demands of art history, social and human history, rather, you have taken your own understanding of art, of abstract art and of technique, and to the highest degree, synthesized it in an open and relaxed way. You’re not chasing the mainstream, but opening a new path to the core of art, a path that leads directly to the most basic, deepest and darkest peak of contemporary art, and you have walked this path.

 

Yang: I can only face myself, and use the methods that I know best and am most comfortable with to show my perception of reality.

 

Ouyang: There is a discrepancy between the concept of Chinese contemporary art and the concept of contemporary art we’re talking about.

 

Yang: Right, that doesn’t matter! What matters is the self-cultivation that takes place once you’ve opened a channel into yourself. When you look inside, I feel that the inside and outside of man are mirror image worlds. That is to say, we have not just a world around us, but inside us there is an internal world. When you show what you see in that world it gets interesting.

 

Ouyang: I’m very interested in your paintings from after 2004 and 2005. The thing about these paintings is that the colors grew fewer, the surface grew simpler and the inside grew more complex. The colors were eventually reduced to three main colors with black setting the tone supported by gray and red. In the process of observing the inside, you have this process of reducing the surface and limitlessly expanding the interior. It has a lot of push. Why are there only these three colors?

 

Yang: Painting is not always proactive; sometimes your heart tells you how to do it. When I fell into one of the deepest ruts of my life in 2004, when survival became very difficult, I turned blue into black. When I came to Beijing in 2005, things got better, and there were changes in my understanding towards black. I think that black is a very pure color; if you want to reach the depths of the subconscious, you need to push past many things, and black can help you get in. So I’m willing to use eighty percent of my energies in it, and this is one of my main directions of attack. Gray is another matter. This tranquil and quietly elegant color has a lot of creativity, and is very close to the things of traditional Chinese culture inside of me. Painting with red is a new idea I’ve had recently. I want to try and use red to inject a sense of warmth into what I’m expressing. These three colors maybe also reflect some of my concepts about nature, society and between people.

 

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Ouyang: The Japanese artist Aki Kuroda once held a momentous exhibition entitled Black, and the French writer Marguerite Duras wrote the foreword. Duras also likes black, and the two of them have shared views on black. Kuroda believes that black is a material that man can never enter. At the time, Duras asked him, do you think there is any difference between the black and the darkness in your works? Kuroda replied, black is a material that cannot be entered, and though darkness is also difficult to enter, people can enter into it, even fuse into it. I think that black can be diffused, for example, it disappears when you turn on a light. But black is different, black is a pure material. Kuroda’s definition of black subtly echoes that of your own.

 

Yang: I agree with what he says. Blue, red and other colors all have sentiments, but black doesn’t. You can only go deep and far when you have no distractions whatsoever.

 

Ouyang: Your black conceals a bit of gray. The traditional Chinese definition of black has seven levels. Gray is on a middle level in the transition from black to white. Does the entry of gray into the black surface show that your paintings contain an “anti-black” sentiment? In other words, the dilution of the black is the potential to move towards “anti-black”.

 

Yang: The gray is there in the black because there is light coming out from inside and interacting with the black.

 

Ouyang: In your large paintings, light seeps out from inside. When it comes in contact with natural light it reflects it. This combination creates a very magical effect, very serendipitous, where you see a different reality from each different perspective. This undefined aspect makes your paintings contain many things, including your decoding of colors, metaphors about the spirit, poetic and non-poetic things, the infinite knobs of internal space, the murky state of mutual denial, verification and attraction between the material and non-material worlds. So there is a vast amount of information contained in your works.

 

Yang: For example, the Bodhidharma faced a wall in the Shaolin Temple for nine years. He wasn’t just facing a wall, he was facing a vast spiritual world with many problems. I’m not simply painting black, I’m painting a space, a completely spiritual virtual space. This space has developed from a creative space of traditional Chinese painting in 2005, to a Western space structure delineated by straight lines and angles in 2006, to a combination of all kinds of circles and squares in 2007, getting more complex with each step. It is like a chamber with many passages throughout.

 

Ouyang: It is like Glenn Gould, the thinker among pianists. He viewed Bach’s most abstruse fugue pieces as an internalized process of removing the interference of all external sounds.

 

Yang: The process of musical composition is also an entry into a virtual world, a process of hearing inside. All of the notes are in his head. When a performer plays, he enters into that state. Hearing is not important, just as looking is not important when looking at paintings – you want to enter into that painting.

 

Ouyang: The largest painting in Black 2007 is 3x5 meters. How long did it take you to paint?

 

Yang: I painted on and off, finishing in august. I only paint one large painting a year.

 

Ouyang: In my view, when determining whether or not a certain painting is a masterpiece, the key is to see whether or not there is a huge scene behind it. It is like writing. If it is just a superficial rhetorical effect, then it is just the operation of words. To see if it is a great piece of music, you have to see whether or not it has a big scene behind it. This scene I’m talking about is a spiritual scene, maybe the scene of social history, cultural history or conceptual history, or maybe a massive spiritual space of the entirety of human history. Black 2007 contains a vast scene, though it may not be visible at first glance. In the image, aside from the light of space in action, time also comes into play. What you see in an instant is very different from what you see after a long time of viewing it.

 

Yang: Right! What needs to be perfected is that scene. I like listening to music. Part of it is rooted in the rhythm, but what’s more important is to perceive the musician’s internal driving force that shakes the chords. Relatively speaking, music is not important, what’s important is what kind of thing is driving the master musician? It is the primal form of that scene. Of course, the perfection of technique is also very important.

 

Ouyang: Is this technical problem a two pronged one, one of material and another of thought?

 

Yang: Actually, the image and the inner mind also have a mirror image relationship. This issue of technique includes the reception and insertion of all kinds of information into the body, which must then be selected, arranged and presented, finally being sent out onto the picture. Sometimes there is a distance between what is imagined and what gets painted. One must always revise. On the materials side, black is very special; when it is wet, it is very black, but when it dries it turns gray, and if you do it wrong it gets murky. You must repeatedly layer to reach the effect. This is a very slow process.

 

Ouyang: This painting has small and thin pieces of black as well as big chunks of black. Because of exquisite overlapping, it produces a delicate light inside, through which one can see a nebulously changing world. What is your understanding of this?

 

Yang: It is very tiring to present what is inside as if it has been directly transferred onto the image, a process somewhat akin to a worm spinning silk. When I finish one painting, what I think about is the next painting; I only look back here and there. The best feeling is when the light is just right in the night, and it feels like I can touch another space.

 

Ouyang: This painting gives me a faint impression of a Buddhist pagoda. How do you explain that?

 

Yang: I painted this under normal light, and I was painting abstract things, but when it is hit by direct light, reflections in the center form an image resembling a Buddhist pagoda. I didn't notice this at all when I was painting it. This thing keeps appearing in all my recent works, and I find it a bit strange myself. I'm not a Buddhist, though I sometimes like to walk around in temples. I never burn incense or bow to the Buddha. Maybe it's just a coincidence.

 

Ouyang: Looking at your sketches, the intersecting ellipses make me think of the ancient Chinese diagrams of concentric circles. This is a cultural concept. Your paintings have this intentional and accidental link with Chinese traditional culture. I wonder if the more abstract and Western something is, the more it will be marked by ancient Chinese culture. Lao Tzu says that one produced two, two produced three, and three produced the myriad things. There's some kind of link between your paintings and Lao Tzu's “the great form has no shape”.

 

Yang: In terms of form, my paintings appear Western, but the content is actually purely Eastern. Those intersecting circles in Black 2007 are the natural result of my spatial constructs. You talked of ancient Chinese philosophy; that stuff is deeply embedded in our minds.

 

Ouyang: Concentric circles in the end all have a point of convergence, or a point of disappearance. I saw this point in your draft sketches, but it isn't there in the final product. Did you wipe it out on purpose? The Western concept of perspective relationships is not present in your paintings, nor is the Eastern concept of the cavalier perspective.

 

Yang: I depict this point int the first go a the painting, and then I continuously move in from that point.

 

Ouyang: Is the point present in Black 2007?

 

Yang: Yes, but it disappears behind the white light in the center.

 

Ouyang: That point is not present in terms of perspective?

 

Yang: Right, that's not important! What's important is that the point is always pulling me. I might follow that point for five years, ten years, twenty years even fifty years and finally open it. So it is said that art is a game played by artists, but once the artwork leaves the artist, it becomes a wholly different game.

 

Ouyang: Your use of perspectives rails against Western perspective studies, and is also wholly unrelated to the Chinese cavalier perspective.

 

Yang: I don't think about the perspective at all. It is just a virtual construct of unreality.

 

Ouyang: The big scene behind your work might be your presentation of the virtual construct of unreality. Once anything is presented, it becomes a physical reality. With so-called black for instance, this is a physical reality, but behind that physical reality is a giant scene of unreality.

 

Yang: Right. I am steeping in this scene of unreality.

 

Ouyang: Your creations are very important in Chinese contemporary art, and unique. They could be described as an unprecedented undertaking.

 

Yang: Virtual unreality has only just begun, and it remains very distant.

 

Ouyang: Your work is highly regarded among your peers. I've always wanted to figure out why everyone likes your paintings so much. I have the utmost respect for your work, and it deeply interests me, to the point that I see it as a part of my life, just as I can't do without listening to Bach and Schubert, that's the level your work is on in my life. By viewing, pondering and exploring your paintings, I might be able to raise up a part of my life. Right now I'm very interested in culture and the painting form itself. What is it that makes the Western collectors so interested in your paintings? You told me last time that there was a British woman who saw your works and said they resembled the issues that a man in his sixties or seventies would be pondering, but you painted them when you were only thirty. She was amazed, and wondered what you would be painting when you grew old. This was an understanding of your paintings based on the most extreme of life experiences and insights. She saw the wisdom of an old man. From what angle did she approach and understand your paintings?

 

Yang: Artistic education for Westerners is very systematic, spanning from figurative to abstract step by step. She has no problems with abstract. But the West differs in that Westerners like to separate all of the natural, social and human issues to research them while Easterners prefer to bring everything together and understand them. She was an artistic consultant for a very famous gallery in England. I replied to her, can you ensure that I'll live to be sixty or seventy? I can only see and perceive today, then paint it.

 

Ouyang: You emphasize that the content of your paintings is Eastern, but you still use Western methods to present it. When you emphasize the Chineseness and Orientalness of your paintings, do Westerners ever project their imaginings about Chinese contemporary art into their understanding of your paintings?

 

Yang: I don't think about this problem; it's not important. Art has no borders, and this is an era of melding. China didn't have abstract painting before, but this doesn't mean the Chinese lack the capability for abstract thought. They put abstract things into calligraphy, painting, opera and many other fields.

 

Ouyang: Has anyone painted totally black paintings before you?

 

Yang: Rothko did in his later years.

 

Ouyang: I've never seen his completely black paintings.

 

Yang: I've never seen them with my own eyes. Zhou Chunya described seeing three of them in a church while he was studying in Germany. They're very powerful, utterly spiritual.

 

Ouyang: I've been to nearly one hundred cities in over twenty countries, and whenever I arrive somewhere I always go to the museums, but I've never seen a pure black painting. The giant Pollock paintings you mentioned really shocked me, but in a different way than your paintings do. His paintings emit from the inner world, while yours are introspective. I've never seen this direction before, and I've never seen any of the the physical space, conceptual space, logical space, musical space, observational space, mathematic space, poetic space, and the tangling of space, time and anti-space that appear inside.

 

Yang: The French 蘇拉熱 painted some black paintings in his late period, in a purely Western expressive method, a feeling of sublimation. Also, there are some very sensitive contemporary artists abroad who are also inside virtual unreality. Maybe in another fifty years, today's unreality will become the reality, and a new realm of unreality will emerge.

 

Ouyang: I've always seen this art as cutting edge, and of course it's also avant-garde, but avant-garde is not as good as the concept of cutting edge. Because cutting edge is a process of moving upwards, while avant-garde is just a term of temporal direction; in ten years, today's avant-garde might be well behind the times. You're vision art looks from the height of fifty, even one hundred years in the future. Your vision already has a bit of the vision of the dead, like something from a departed soul. It's just like poetry, which in certain respects is the language of the dead, imbued with conjuring properties. I think that your works are imbued with the vision of the departed. The best artists are those who have won the right to die, and then evade death. Your vision today already has some of the vision with which you will view problems fifty years from now.

 

Yang: I worry that in fifty years people will say I'm just a monkey (laughs).

 

Ouyang: The greatest poets all have an internal aspiration to writing, like they want to compete with the dead. In my writing process, I often set a hypothetical reader, and sometimes it's a great poet from the realm of ancient Chinese poetry, sometimes a poet like Paul Celan, Friedrich Holderlan, Ezra Pound or Wallace Stevens. I think that this poem is written for him, and competes with him, even though he died a long time ago.

 

Yang: I used to compare myself with Pollock, Rothko and Cy Twombly, but not anymore, because I'm different.

 

Ouyang: When you're painting, do you have an aspiration or dream to become the best artist in art history?

 

Yang: This is very unclear. There's no reason to think about this problem.

 

Ouyang: Next year the whole world will focus on China's Olympics; China's economic and political rise and their global effect have already become a reality, but what of contemporary China's cultural influence? I think there is a lot that's positive, but there is also some negative. The positive is mostly traditional culture, and there's not a lot of contemporary stuff in the positive. Chinese contemporary art already has status and position in the world, and against this backdrop, a lot of Chinese painters always strive towards the big stuff, including Xu Bing, Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun, who all believe that it's China's turn to provide the world with more art products and cultural output, but your aspirations are more personal as an artist. Painters like He Duoling are pretty much the same in their aspirations.

 

Yang: I'm not so optimistic. I think that recent Chinese culture has reached a low point through thousands of years of development. Total contact with Western culture has only been going on for a short time. This kind of thing needs time, and what comes after will be some new product of this contact. It's a good thing that Chinese contemporary art is very hot on the international market today, but that's a different issue. I think that the work of most Chinese artists today is very insubstantial and imitative. The height of art is to innovate and reach true freedom.