Beijing’s Ink Studio presents Earth Roots, a survey of Yang Jiechang’s One Hundred Layers of Ink series.

Born in Guangdong Province in 1956 and a 1982 graduate of the Chinese Painting Department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, calligrapher Yang Jiechang (楊詰蒼) was selected to participate in the 1989 group exhibition Les  Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Yang Jiechang arrived in Paris in April 1989 without works to show, however, as they had been detained at the Chinese border. So he responded extemporaneously.

Retaining his native medium, he distilled all that he knew and experienced into a simple procedure: the repeated application of ink with a brush on paper, day after day and layer upon layer, until the fibrous surface hardened into a thick, densely textured relief with a metallic sheen. As blackness turned paradoxically luminescent, it gained the dimensions of space and time, becoming a record of his actions and being. 

The resultant One Hundred Layers of Ink series departed strikingly from traditional ink paintings and resembled rather color fields and other modernist idioms,

but for Yang it was calligraphic practice in its bare essence, and was grounded moreover in the multilayered polychrome court painting of the Song Dynasty (960-1279).

Four large rectangular works were exhibited at Les  Magiciens de la Terre at the Centre Georges Pompidou.

Artsy describes Yang Jiechang’s multimedia works as combining  traditional Eastern and Western modes of representation, a confluence he calls “Eurasian.” Based in Paris and Heidelberg, Mr. Yang states, “Eurasia is the land I experience everyday in my life: I am from Canton, China, my wife is from Germany, our children are Eurasian. We feel this land; this disposition and lifestyle bear a lot of possibilities and power.”

Works from the One Hundred Layers of Ink series are in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum; Cantor Center for the Arts, Stanford University; Deutsche Bank; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi; Hong Kong Museum of Art; M+, Hong Kong; and University Museum and Art Gallery, University of Hong Kong.

Other of his works are in the collections of Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley; François Pinault Foundation, France; Fukuoka Art Museum; Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou; Ministry of Culture, France; Rockefeller Foundation, New York; and World Bank, Washington, D.C.

See:

“Earth Roots” | Yang Jiechang Paintings, 1985-1999, 10 June – 12  August 2017, Ink Studio, Beijing

Yang Jiechang | Artsy

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