Press Release
Jin Yangping (1971) studied through to the Doctorate level at the Oil Painting Department of the China Academy of Art. Here he shows a new series of large-scale sqaure format painting in which he demonstrates his mastery of the idealized realism of the Academy. However, like his allegorical twin, in Soul Garden he is searching for meaningful ways to respond to a vibrant much less certain present.
The still frames in Soul Garden are conventional seeming, painterly images but which dissolve and fade away at the edges. He has painted on the card of opened out packing cases as though to reveal the dismantling of the structure that contained his own professional training. Yet Jin has not abandoned his academic painting language, rather he is in the process of unpacking it, transforming it and giving it new life.
Here is an artist who constantly and precociously sifts his point of view like the quick cut editing of the movie director. At the same time he has a strong interest in social questions and the life of the everyday in which commonly experienced elements such as the mass housing apartment block or a cheap wash basin are overlaid with fantasical mages from tradition or folkflore. In his film life editing he is capable of dizzying shifts in perspective and thought provoking juxtapositions.
Jin Yangping’s eye is always trained on external world which he bserves with some irony and wit. Yet in many ways he is engaged in creating internal psychological landscapes. These may be products of a particularly fevered imagination but he maintains a generalized and impersonal stand point and so never falls into Surrealistic indulgence of presenting personal dreamscapes and psychoses. Rather these are commentaries on a mediatized, aspirational that are populated by generalized fears and aspirations. This is a mediatized world.
Simon Kirby
