Yin Zhaoyang (b.1970)
Glory Mountain(Painted in 2015)
Oil on canvas
140 × 210 cm. 55 1/8 × 82 5/8 in.
Signed in Chinese and dated on the reverse
Hills All in Red, Cliffs in the Dawn
Yin Zhaoyang's Spiritual Crystalisation
“Seeing yourself through your own eyes. Such landscape is the so-called Shan Shui. Shan Shui is yourself. It is like the externalisation of your spirit. ”
——Yin Zhaoyang
Born in the 1970s, Yin Zhaoyang is an important representative of China's “New Painting”. In the course of expressing the anxiety and hesitation of the generation in Cruelty of Youth series and exploring the zeitgeist in “red politics” and “myth metaphors” in the 1990s, Yin has established his signature style of “psychological field” through his strong realist emotions and intense romantic visual expressions. Since 2007, Yin has turned to depict the “spiritual landscape” and presented his distinctive valley pines and rocks in solo exhibitions such as Cold Mountain at Long Museum in Shanghai, Distant Song Mountain at Henan Museum, and Yin Zhaoyang at Song Shan at Suzhou Museum. Glory Mountain, painted in 2015, is a large-sized masterpiece of the series showing his skilful depiction of dawn light spreading in the ancient pines of Song Mountain.
Red Glow, the Majesty of Life Burning in Blood
The landscape has always been the spiritual residence of traditional literati. In Glory Mountain, Yin Zhaoyang continues the naming tradition of Chinese landscape painting, emphasizing poetic associations with the intention of creating a spiritual realm. The iconic red colour in his past works, such as Cruelty of Youth, Tiananmen Square, and Myth, is reflected in these overlapping rolling mountains. Chinese red has long been the spiritual crystallization of Yin Zhaoyang, possessing strong Chinese cultural symbolic connotations like red Chinese knots, red walls in traditional Chinese architecture and red spring scrolls. Yin perfuses this colour into the transcendent, surreal, and imaginary red ravines as well as green pines.
There is no red sun in the sky, but everywhere is covered with the dawn, as if the fervent blood of life is welling up together. The piled-up mountain ranges, with two peaks sandwiching the valley. The green pines stand along the mountain, disappearing into the colour of the sky, and a road stretches out from the earth to the sky of infinity. Dotted white colour crosses the tips of the branches, interweaving in a strong contrast of red and green, just like the red walls and green tiles in the winter of the Imperial Palace, creating an image of blending warmth and coldness. Between the cliffs and ravines, chrome yellow, orange-red, vermilion, rouge, and ochre jump and undulate like the astonishing magical creativity of nature.
In this fiery brushstroke, Yin's artistic passion is more straightforward and blazing than ever before, exploring a more realistic psychological reality that is different from the traditional literati and detached from the revolutionary narrative discourse. This kind of reality is a romantic sentiment, an expressionistic ego, a generous spirit, and an independent soul.
Standing, Vivid Landscape Order
Glory Mountain is a testament to Yin's profound reflection on the language of painting that spans the past and the present. The composition of the giant cliffs and the way they are stacked and scraped layer by layer portray vivid rocks and hills horizontally, presenting the spatial sense of distance and height, yin and yang, reality and emptiness. He is rooted in the outline and texture stroke of classic Chinese rocks and hills, creating the jaggedness of the rocks and the gloom of the pines with intense vertical reds and lush horizontal greens. The thick quality of the oil paint, like inscriptions and rubbings, records the texture of the rocks and hills, establishing a pure space of “quality”. The figurative and the abstract, the macro and the micro, coexist in his painting, creating a contemporary visual taste of landscape order. Yin's work returns to the ancient spirit of the landscape from the outside in, drawing on imagery with meaning and evolving a contemporary landscape that connects nature and imagination, history and reality, blending subjective markings and mental imagery.
