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DUBAI DIFC |
SINGAPORE ION |
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Yin Yang
The Chinese painter Yin Yang, was born on August 12, 1953 in Jiawang, Xuzhou in the Jiangsu province. His father was an officer, trained in the Whampoa Military Academy and his mother was descended from an old family of the Qing dynasty. Considered as one of the families belonging to " the five categories of disgraced people ", his father was sent to prison and his mother was sent to work in the mines with her three children. Their mother taught them how to accept the injustices of life with dignity. Their father's absence, very early on, obliged Yin Yang to undertake every kind of work, and he matured at a very early age. He was an excellent pupil, described as a " genius ", but in 1966, when he was thirteen years old, the Cultural Revolution put a stop to his schooling. His parents were once more sent to prison, and the children were sent out to do field work in the country and to plow the soil. Back in the coalmines, he learnt carpentry, bench work, and stone masonry. But he also read a number of "forbidden books" taken from his father's " dangerous " collection.
In May 1970, when he was seventeen, he became a miner and spent eight years working under ground. These three experiences of life and death led him to reflect on the subjects of dignity, tolerance, and endurance and on human kind's finality. From 1976 on, he nonetheless started to train as a painter by copying magazine stories and he also took up drawing with passion. His pictorial work was shown in the Jiangsu province, then in 1982 his works were exhibited in the National Art Museum of China. He sat for the entrance exam for the painting department in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and he was immediately admitted.
He worked very hard, and for his diploma, he showed a portrait of a coal miner. In 1987, he traveled to Tibet, where he spent six months. He undertook a series of paintings, but a return to the miners' series was only a question of time.
In 1989, he made a series of experimental works that are probably at the forefront of experimental art works in China. There is " Photo Coloring - Circle, Life Series - Cross Section of Genital " that are reproduced in the book " Sélection de peintures à l'huile de Yin Yang ". In 1989, he also carried out two introspective series entitled " Fractured Sun " and " Impression of Coal Mine " where he transmitted onto the canvas' surface, through his use of colors, evidence of a rational artistic emotion.
In 1993, a one-man exhibition entitled " Yin Yang Black Art Exhibition " was shown in the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Peking and in the Cultural Foundation of the Chinese Miners: it included fifty-three works that were noticed equally by the art critics and the media. Later on he was to win the Painting Prize of the China Oil Painting Biennale. The paintings of that period emphasize the mental instinct, the impulse for life and, of course, the artist's spiritual characteristics.
In 1994, following his father's death, he went back to live in the Jiangsu province with his family. He started to paint the series " Black Flower ", taking joy in every aspect of beauty through his painterly gestures, through colors, the speed of motion and the richness of textures. Suffering has vanished, the men in the shadows are once again back in the sunlight. In 2002, he repainted " Five Coal Miners " by reproducing only their profiles' visual effects. In 2003, he once again met up with his old colleagues from the coalmines, transcribing their stories and information on their living conditions. Then, in 2006, through his pictorial work and so as not to forget the past, he expressed it in " Life is Beautiful " where the survivors are the kings of life. In his painting there are natural forces, simple and complex, open and shut and his works reflect his integrating qualities, an extension of his human qualities. Since he is by nature a philosopher, Yin Yang helps us to understand, through his works, the fundamental elements of the world that surrounds us.
His works are to be found in important collections in China and abroad.
Since 2006, he has regularly exhibited with the Opera Gallery in Paris, Hong Kong, New York, London and Venice…
Yin Yang lives and works in Peking.
ANTE GLIBOTA, Paris, August 30, 2007.
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