Yang Shaobin - China Avant-Garde: The Farber Collection London Friday, October 12, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist

  • Literature

    Q. Zhang, ed., Yang Shaobin: The Essence of Violence, Hebei, 2006, p. 93 (illustrated.); Q. Yang, Yang Shaobin – Artists of Today, Sichuan, 2006, p. 2 (illustrated); Xin Dong Cheng, Art Now Gallery, TAIDA Contemporary Art Museum, and Alexander Ochs Galleries, Yang Shaobin, Beijing and Berlin 2004, p. 166 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Violence was spread throughout cynicism; Yang Shaobin concentrated it. His fist—a fist of steel—shut tight and bit by bit he was able to develop a specialized style that would allow him to crystallize the instantaneous and the partial. His paintings are like an ultimate challenge, challenging the body to repulse to its farthest limits the lesions and shocks that it cannot withstand. At the same time, it is a challenge to the optic nerve of the viewer.

    “Will of steel,” “Man is evil,” and “Flesh is weak,” such are the themes that make up his oeuvre.

    Here is how, in a letter written in 2002, he defined his work: “As art is the spiritual product of accumulated experience, I do nothing more than expose facts or stories that took place in reality, memories from which I draw my production, marked by a specialized esthetic that finds its foundation in life and art history. They are images of violence, but there is a great distance between art and reality: the state of mind of my paintings is one of moral disorder, they suggest implications and have a sense of confusion. The figures and forms are treated in such a way as to give a strangely unreal feeling and from this feeling is born a sense of alarm, a fright that goes straight to the soul. We could talk of psychological reality. Art is tiresome, life is a bore, and yet day after day we continue to live. I say that to comfort myself, it is perhaps merely the reaction of a weak heart but in that way I establish a distance in order to be able to scrutinize the universe. I like that feeling of distancing: it gives me room to express my sensibility. At the core of my work, there is the destructive element in that moment when feelings become actions.”
    L. Huang, “Monster Revolution, Insurrection on Canvas – the Art of Yang Shaobin,” Yang Shaobin, Beijing and Berlin 2004, pp. 82-83

524

Untitled (Head No.10)

1997 - 1998
Oil on canvas.
90 1/2 x 71 in. (229.9 x 180.3 cm).
Signed, titled and dated “’No. 10’ Yang Shao Bin 1997–1998” lower left.


Estimate
£80,000 - 120,000 

Sold for £144,000

China Avant-Garde: The Farber Collection

The Farber Collection
13 October 2007, 7pm
London