The title ‘Mountain, Unseen’ itself carries a profound sense of Zen resonance. Previously, a friend of mine, Wang Lifeng, held an exhibition at Vermilion Art titled Dian Jiang Chun (点绛唇, ‘Archives of Longing’). The title stands out. It was an exceptionally fine title, drawn from the names of classical Chinese ‘ci’ poetic forms (词牌名), belonging to the same lineage as Qing Ping Yue (清平乐), Nian Nu Jiao (念奴娇), Man Jiang Hong (满江红), and Sheng Sheng Man (声声慢). Literally meaning “to lightly paint crimson upon the lips”, Dian Jiang Chun evokes a quality that is gentle, refined, and quietly elegant. It was later revealed to me that this exhibition title was likewise conceived by Yang Jianyong.
From the two titles, Mountain, Unseen and Dian Jiang Chun, one can clearly sense Yang Jianyong’s aesthetic orientation and cultural sensibility: movement and stillness, strength and softness, grandeur balanced with lightness; his work carries both heroic spirit and ethereal grace, valuing moral and spiritual bearing while remaining attentive to the beauty of artistic conception and poetic atmosphere. His preference for traditional aesthetics, particularly the literati painting spirit that has prevailed since the Song dynasty, is evident here. This pursuit of the unity of form and spirit, and this emphasis on cultural depth and aesthetic refinement, permeate the current exhibition.
Yang Jianyong works primarily with watercolour. Through the natural diffusion of water and pigment and the patient accumulation of layers, he constructs images on paper with deliberation and restraint. Watercolour allows almost no room for concealment; once a misstep occurs, revision is difficult, often requiring the artist to begin again entirely. This medium, therefore, demands exceptional control and patience. Yet it is precisely for this reason that watercolour is able to yield colour transitions that are fresh, lucid, and organic, creating visual effects that are moist, hazy, and rich in poetic suggestion. Skies, water surfaces, clouds and mist, and layered mountain ranges appear in his paintings as light and gentle, finely articulated and vividly alive, imbued with boundless imagination and a quiet, stabilising force.
When treating traditional art, the attitudes can broadly be divided into three categories: total rejection, total acceptance, or inheritance combined with development. Yang Jianyong’s practice clearly belongs to the third. In terms of content, he employs watercolour, a Western medium, to present landscapes containing Eastern poetic sensibility, while incorporating contemporary reflections on nature, ecology, and relationships of coexistence. In doing so, his work embodies both the classical concept of the “unity of heaven and humanity” (天人合一) and modern notions of sustainability.
In his visual language, Yang breaks away from the single-point perspective of traditional landscape painting, instead adopting aerial views, upward-looking perspectives, and multi-perspectival compositions to create a contemporary viewing experience in which time and space intersect. Meanwhile, drawing upon modern design aesthetics, he geometrically refines and abstracts the forms of mountains, rendering their contours and structures as concise yet powerful visual symbols. The proportions of mountains within the compositions are deliberately exaggerated or even distorted, conveying intense subjective emotion and a distinctly contemporary avant-garde consciousness.
In his use of colour, Yang alternates between works of high saturation and strong chromatic contrast, where clashes of colour endow the image with symbolic meaning and the emotions of the times, and works of low saturation and restrained monochromatic palettes, which evoke a cool, detached, yet tension- filled contemporary atmosphere.
Overall, Yang Jianyong’s exhibition Mountain, Unseen resembles a pure land in the bustling city – within its classical resonance lies a reverence for sky, earth, and the natural world, while its contemporary perspective reveals a profound contemplation of the symbiotic relationship between humanity and nature. This dual core makes the exhibition with both a cooling, calming quality and a warmth that invites sustained reflection.
Wishing the exhibition every success.
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