Kailiang Yang
1974 born in Jinan/Shandong, China
lives and works in Hamburg, Germany
Education
2001 - 2005 Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg, Germany
(professors: Olav Christopher Jenssen, Anna
Guðjónsdóttir, Norbert Schwontkowski and Werner
Büttner)
1992 - 1994 Shandong Art Institute, Shandong, China
Grants and prizes
2006 Grant from Die Zwölf, Hamburg, Germany
2004 Grant from Karl H. Ditze-Stiftung, Hamburg, Germany
2003 DAAD Prize for excellent foreign students
Solo Exhibitions
2012 carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Germany
2011 Investance, Paris, France
2009 carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Germany
2007 carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Germany
Malerei, Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany
2006 Kailiang Yang. Paintings, carlier | gebauer, Berlin
2005 Um den Kirschbaum, Kunstclub Hamburg, Germany
Group Exhibitions
2013 Painting Forever! Keilrahmen, Kunst-Werke, Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin
2010 Index Kunstpreis 2010, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Weltsichten. Landschaft in der Kunst seit dem 17. Jahrhundert -
Situation Kunst (für Max Imdahl), Bochum, Germany
2009 Open, ZOYA Museum, Modra, Slovakia
2008 Wir nennen es Hamburg - Interdisziplinäres
Kunstfestival, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg
2007 DIE ELBE [in]between - Wasser, Ströme, Zeiten, Kunstmuseum
Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany
Malkunst, Galerie Davide di Maggio, Mailand, Italy
carlier | gebauer
2007 Kunststudentinnen und Kunststudenten stellen aus, Kunst und
Ausstellungshalle Bonn, Bonn, Germany
2006 Kunst in der Börse, Handelskammer, Hamburg, Germany
2005 Der Himmel ist schön, Galerie im Prater, Berlin
Index, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Germany
2004 Der Himmel ist schön, Exhibition room “temporär“, Hamburg,
Germany
1999 9th National Art Exhibition, Shanghai Art Museum, China
1997 Towards The New Century – Young Chinese Painters, National
Museum of China, Beijing
1996 First Exhibition of the Chinese Association for Painting,
National Museum of China, Beijing
1994 8th National Art Exhibition, Shanghai Art Museum, China
Kailiang Yang | Catalog Text by Gesine Borcherdt
A cool breeze spurs Kailiang Yang’s images. His cityscapes seem to be deserted, mostly rainy, and sometimes even forbidding – streets, bridges, facades – which the artist brings into being on his canvases in damped shades of greyish blues. In sometimes monochromatic surfaces, intersected by visible brushstrokes, sometimes watercolour-like, sketchy planes, full of carvings from pencil lines, the artist transfers a German metropolis, more precisely, his adopted hometown, Hamburg, into melancholic ambiences on canvas. He draws his beholder into foggy streets, in which singular trees and their branches are often the only points of orientation, he punctuates his canvases with luminous spots, floodlights, in relation to which the contours of a car or the banister of a bridge are only vaguely hinted to. With lining out just a few clear contours, everything is reduced to the bare minimum – the cityscape returns as a dreamlike stage on which objects anperspectives seem to be out of joint. Nothing remains unambivalent and nothing remains tangible.
With his concentration on the urban environment, which he distances himself from intellectually at the same time at which he transcends it through the filter of painting, Kailiang Yang positions himself in the tradition of the flaneur, which, in the 19th century, lingered through the rushed masses – his distanced perspective of the bustling activities of the city rendering him as an outsider. Just like him, Kailiang leaves the everyday behind on his walks. He abstracts the population from his images and foregrounds the city, smoothening it out with his gentle duct, covering it in mild varnish, which rather reminds one of the meditative landscape sceneries of Asian paintings – in which Yang’s flaneur-like characteristics immediately attract a reductive reading, which again lies decidedly beyond the realm of the real: the paths which lead into nowhere seem almost surreal, carriages are appearing
as mere allusions, all details are missing („Elbbrücken 4“ (2008)) – a damped and silent atmosphere emanates from the paintings in which everything seems to coalesce into a dreamlike stream of thought, a decomposition. It is only Yang’s concentration, again and again returning to the figures of trees („Wallgelände“, 2010), which bears witness to a sensibility directed exclusively towards nature, articulated in an almost calligraphic hand. Yang’s innate knowledge of the aesthetics of traditional Chinese landscape painting is consciously fused with the depictions of Western cityscapes, which originate from the Impressionist work of the 19th century. But in contrast to Auguste Renoir or Max Liebermann, who captured the jolly atmosphere in the cities and gardens with colourful impressions of light, Yang constrains himself to
minimal points of orientation, characterizing his paintings in an almost minimalist sense as veduta, as demonstrated in „Wandsbeck“ (2008) or „Elbbrücken 4“ (2008). What seemed to be idealized in Renoir or Liebermann, floating into an almost otherworldly sense of beauty and sometimes exaggerated loveliness, in Yang’s works returns as the panoramic view of a dark poetry, more related to the sfumato characteristic of Edward Streichen’s photographic records of the city, in which nature seemed to emanate from its opposite: the wet streets in front of the „Flatiron Building“ (1905), the view onto which is obscured by finely chiselled twigs, forming a graphic structure on the image, are exuding a subtle atmosphere which seems to return in Yang’s „Sieker Landstraße“ (2005). How close
Yang’s images come to being photographic in themselves becomes apparent in paintings like „Finkenwerder“ (2006) or „Außenalster“ (2007). It seems as if the artist was himself captured right behind a glass screen on which the rain runs down, offering a new anticipation of the houses, streets and trees behind it. In any case, trees: in any of Yang’s newer works nature comes to the absolute foreground – as it did in
earlier works such as „Kirschbaum“ (2004), in which the artist painted fully flowering trees, in a photo-realistic style, in front of brick-lined facades. But now these trees return in a much more sketchy manner. They are applied to the canvas with crayons and pencils, cutting into foundations of intense brushstrokes and thus appearing as edgy signs („Phönixallee“ (2010), „Eichenallee“ (2010) or „Eckernförder Straße“ (2011)). With these newly found forms, Yang comes close to practices such as the informel paintings of Peter Brüning or Georges Mathieu, the écriture automatique of whom was developed from Surrealism in the 1950s. Or rather: whose interest in the unconscious was paired with the desire to dissolute all form for good – an approach which has often been discussed in direct
relation to Asian calligraphy and was adapted by Japanese exponents of the Informel, such as Kazuo Shiraga. What is seemingly dream-like and unregulated returns in Yang’s images in newly articulated ways, alluding to German romanticist art from the high-times of landscape painting, such as Carl Gustav Carus or Caspar David Friedrich in the beginning of the 19th century. Friedrich’s melancholic
and existential atmospheres – in which a shade of violet reappears also present in Yang’s canvases – are clearly thematic in Yang’s paintings, even if the latter draws his abstracted foggy landscapes from Hamburg’s asphalt jungle.
Even though Kailing Yang’s works are shifting between the painterly traditions of Asia and Europe, his paintings never strive for direct quotes or art theoretical visualizations. His paintings stand for themselves and are seismographic notations of the painter’s own delicate impressions at the same time as they are - and that is their imminent strength – the articulations of a 21st century flaneur, the gaze of whom is facing the raw contours of postmodernity and returns it with the inscriptions of a cool but nevertheless gentle atmosphere. An atmosphere, which does not reconcile Yang’s relation to
metropolis – but which turns it into an eased and emblematic romanticism, which lightens reality.
Translation: Kerstin Stakemeier
1974 born in Jinan/Shandong, China
lives and works in Hamburg, Germany
Education
2001 - 2005 Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg, Germany
(professors: Olav Christopher Jenssen, Anna
Guðjónsdóttir, Norbert Schwontkowski and Werner
Büttner)
1992 - 1994 Shandong Art Institute, Shandong, China
Grants and prizes
2006 Grant from Die Zwölf, Hamburg, Germany
2004 Grant from Karl H. Ditze-Stiftung, Hamburg, Germany
2003 DAAD Prize for excellent foreign students
Solo Exhibitions
2012 carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Germany
2011 Investance, Paris, France
2009 carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Germany
2007 carlier | gebauer, Berlin, Germany
Malerei, Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Germany
2006 Kailiang Yang. Paintings, carlier | gebauer, Berlin
2005 Um den Kirschbaum, Kunstclub Hamburg, Germany
Group Exhibitions
2013 Painting Forever! Keilrahmen, Kunst-Werke, Institute for
Contemporary Art, Berlin
2010 Index Kunstpreis 2010, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany
Weltsichten. Landschaft in der Kunst seit dem 17. Jahrhundert -
Situation Kunst (für Max Imdahl), Bochum, Germany
2009 Open, ZOYA Museum, Modra, Slovakia
2008 Wir nennen es Hamburg - Interdisziplinäres
Kunstfestival, Kunstverein in Hamburg, Hamburg
2007 DIE ELBE [in]between - Wasser, Ströme, Zeiten, Kunstmuseum
Magdeburg, Magdeburg, Germany
Malkunst, Galerie Davide di Maggio, Mailand, Italy
carlier | gebauer
2007 Kunststudentinnen und Kunststudenten stellen aus, Kunst und
Ausstellungshalle Bonn, Bonn, Germany
2006 Kunst in der Börse, Handelskammer, Hamburg, Germany
2005 Der Himmel ist schön, Galerie im Prater, Berlin
Index, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Germany
2004 Der Himmel ist schön, Exhibition room “temporär“, Hamburg,
Germany
1999 9th National Art Exhibition, Shanghai Art Museum, China
1997 Towards The New Century – Young Chinese Painters, National
Museum of China, Beijing
1996 First Exhibition of the Chinese Association for Painting,
National Museum of China, Beijing
1994 8th National Art Exhibition, Shanghai Art Museum, China
Kailiang Yang | Catalog Text by Gesine Borcherdt
A cool breeze spurs Kailiang Yang’s images. His cityscapes seem to be deserted, mostly rainy, and sometimes even forbidding – streets, bridges, facades – which the artist brings into being on his canvases in damped shades of greyish blues. In sometimes monochromatic surfaces, intersected by visible brushstrokes, sometimes watercolour-like, sketchy planes, full of carvings from pencil lines, the artist transfers a German metropolis, more precisely, his adopted hometown, Hamburg, into melancholic ambiences on canvas. He draws his beholder into foggy streets, in which singular trees and their branches are often the only points of orientation, he punctuates his canvases with luminous spots, floodlights, in relation to which the contours of a car or the banister of a bridge are only vaguely hinted to. With lining out just a few clear contours, everything is reduced to the bare minimum – the cityscape returns as a dreamlike stage on which objects anperspectives seem to be out of joint. Nothing remains unambivalent and nothing remains tangible.
With his concentration on the urban environment, which he distances himself from intellectually at the same time at which he transcends it through the filter of painting, Kailiang Yang positions himself in the tradition of the flaneur, which, in the 19th century, lingered through the rushed masses – his distanced perspective of the bustling activities of the city rendering him as an outsider. Just like him, Kailiang leaves the everyday behind on his walks. He abstracts the population from his images and foregrounds the city, smoothening it out with his gentle duct, covering it in mild varnish, which rather reminds one of the meditative landscape sceneries of Asian paintings – in which Yang’s flaneur-like characteristics immediately attract a reductive reading, which again lies decidedly beyond the realm of the real: the paths which lead into nowhere seem almost surreal, carriages are appearing
as mere allusions, all details are missing („Elbbrücken 4“ (2008)) – a damped and silent atmosphere emanates from the paintings in which everything seems to coalesce into a dreamlike stream of thought, a decomposition. It is only Yang’s concentration, again and again returning to the figures of trees („Wallgelände“, 2010), which bears witness to a sensibility directed exclusively towards nature, articulated in an almost calligraphic hand. Yang’s innate knowledge of the aesthetics of traditional Chinese landscape painting is consciously fused with the depictions of Western cityscapes, which originate from the Impressionist work of the 19th century. But in contrast to Auguste Renoir or Max Liebermann, who captured the jolly atmosphere in the cities and gardens with colourful impressions of light, Yang constrains himself to
minimal points of orientation, characterizing his paintings in an almost minimalist sense as veduta, as demonstrated in „Wandsbeck“ (2008) or „Elbbrücken 4“ (2008). What seemed to be idealized in Renoir or Liebermann, floating into an almost otherworldly sense of beauty and sometimes exaggerated loveliness, in Yang’s works returns as the panoramic view of a dark poetry, more related to the sfumato characteristic of Edward Streichen’s photographic records of the city, in which nature seemed to emanate from its opposite: the wet streets in front of the „Flatiron Building“ (1905), the view onto which is obscured by finely chiselled twigs, forming a graphic structure on the image, are exuding a subtle atmosphere which seems to return in Yang’s „Sieker Landstraße“ (2005). How close
Yang’s images come to being photographic in themselves becomes apparent in paintings like „Finkenwerder“ (2006) or „Außenalster“ (2007). It seems as if the artist was himself captured right behind a glass screen on which the rain runs down, offering a new anticipation of the houses, streets and trees behind it. In any case, trees: in any of Yang’s newer works nature comes to the absolute foreground – as it did in
earlier works such as „Kirschbaum“ (2004), in which the artist painted fully flowering trees, in a photo-realistic style, in front of brick-lined facades. But now these trees return in a much more sketchy manner. They are applied to the canvas with crayons and pencils, cutting into foundations of intense brushstrokes and thus appearing as edgy signs („Phönixallee“ (2010), „Eichenallee“ (2010) or „Eckernförder Straße“ (2011)). With these newly found forms, Yang comes close to practices such as the informel paintings of Peter Brüning or Georges Mathieu, the écriture automatique of whom was developed from Surrealism in the 1950s. Or rather: whose interest in the unconscious was paired with the desire to dissolute all form for good – an approach which has often been discussed in direct
relation to Asian calligraphy and was adapted by Japanese exponents of the Informel, such as Kazuo Shiraga. What is seemingly dream-like and unregulated returns in Yang’s images in newly articulated ways, alluding to German romanticist art from the high-times of landscape painting, such as Carl Gustav Carus or Caspar David Friedrich in the beginning of the 19th century. Friedrich’s melancholic
and existential atmospheres – in which a shade of violet reappears also present in Yang’s canvases – are clearly thematic in Yang’s paintings, even if the latter draws his abstracted foggy landscapes from Hamburg’s asphalt jungle.
Even though Kailing Yang’s works are shifting between the painterly traditions of Asia and Europe, his paintings never strive for direct quotes or art theoretical visualizations. His paintings stand for themselves and are seismographic notations of the painter’s own delicate impressions at the same time as they are - and that is their imminent strength – the articulations of a 21st century flaneur, the gaze of whom is facing the raw contours of postmodernity and returns it with the inscriptions of a cool but nevertheless gentle atmosphere. An atmosphere, which does not reconcile Yang’s relation to
metropolis – but which turns it into an eased and emblematic romanticism, which lightens reality.
Translation: Kerstin Stakemeier
