“Got Used to Consume Today’s Achievement with Achievement Habitually,” Yang Dongxue Solo Exhibition
Yan Club Arts Center (798 Xijie, 4 Jiuxianqiao Lu, Chaoyang, Beijing 100015)
Yang Dongxue has held three exhibitions at the Yan Club Art Center, each with a title longer than the previous show: “Tell Me How to Be Sad” (2010), “Romance in a Humble Moment” (2012), and “Got Used to Consume Today’s Achievement with Achievement Habitually” (2013). The titles of his pieces are often as intriguing as those of his exhibitions, or else the seemingly context-less texts are manifested within the works. Yang himself has not offered any real explanation, and thus his practice poses a challenge to one’s intelligence. Yet perhaps another reading is still possible — the utter neglect of this “pictographic” language.
For instance, the piece entitled “We Have Got Used to Construct Dreams in Nihility Habitually” on the south wall of the exhibition wall uses wood in three colors — red, yellow, and green — to create a linguistic work that reads “WE NEVER LOVED ART AND ART NEVER LOVED US”. The viewer’s attention can easily shift from the work’s limited visual appeal to reflections on the permutations between art and the artist, art and the spectator, ideals and the artist, ideals and reality, among others.
Yang Dongxue, “We Have Got Used to Construct Dreams in Nihility Habitually”.2013
The obscurity in meaning also appears in another installation piece, “Accustomed, Accustomed We Have Got Used to It,” but unlike with the previous work, the toy-like feeling in this piece almost allows the spectator to ignore the text. The red cabinet has horizontal blinds in the front, much like a storefront. Inside are two pairs of mechanical legs facing one another, moving rhythmically back and forth. On these four legs is a horizontal beam of letters which reads “YOU’RE SHAMELESS YOU’RE HEARTLESS.” Here, the visual significance of the text is clearly greater than the textual meaning, since its content can only trigger guesses about the concrete conditions — it is unable to allow for any mutual interlinking relations. Of course, there is also no way to understand the meaning from the artist — the answer to this piece points to general “reflections on life.” To a certain extent, the content of the text has nothing to do with the overall theme of the piece.
Yang’s work points once more to the relationship between images and writing — one of the relatively trendy themes of contemporary art criticism in China. By visualizing writing, he consciously deals with language/writing aesthetically — or perhaps integrated “readable images” and “viewable texts.” “What do you want to express exactly through this work / exhibition” is a question that the artist cannot and does not want to answer, since this is exactly the curiosity he expects to stir up.
Yang Dongxue, “Accustomed, Accustomed We Have Got Used to It”.2013
Yang Dongxue, “We Have Got Used to Play with a Piece of Flesh in the Fence Seam Habitually”.2013
