"
A Single Minded Passion "
Yu
Xiaodong
"When
I was five years old," painter Yu Xiaodong recalls, "I wanted
to be an artist." That single-minded passion to create art never
deserted Yu, who has made an important mark on the contemporary
Chinese art world with his well-known series of Tibetan portraiture.
The artist's profound respect for the Tibetan people, their complex
beliefs and culture, as well as Tibet's extraordinary landscape,
radiates from his meticulously detailed oil paintings of the colorfully
nomadic people with whom he lived and worked from 1984 to 1997.
Yu Xiaodong
was born in 1963 in Shenyang in the northeastern province of Liaoning,
China. It was there that he was educated from primary school through
university. He was raised in a city environment by parents who
earned their living, as many Chinese did during the time of Mao
Zedong, working for the Communist Chinese government. However,
when he was eight years old, he went to live with his grandparents
in the countryside for two years. Yu's grandfather, a painter
himself, encouraged his grandson's interest in art. "I definitely
have his artistic genes," says Yu.
An exhibition
of oil paintings entitled "The Tibet Series" by Chen Danqing that
Yu saw in 1983 was the spark that fired Yu's fiery imagination
and burning desire to go to Tibet, long called "the roof of the
world," and live among its people. Chen, along with a number
of promising young artists, had been involuntarily sent to Tibet
in the 1970's as a part of the "reeducation" movement spawned
by the Cultural Revolution. There, the artists spent years of
their youth working the land and sympathetically painting the
life of minority people and villagers. This school of artists,
called the Scar and Country Life Painting School, recorded not
only their own experiences during the Cultural Revolution, according
to art critic Zhang Zhaohui, but also their reflections upon life's
hardships and bitterness. Chen Danqing's "Tibet Series," so inspirational
to Yu Xiaodong, is considered to be some of the masterpieces of
this school of Chinese oil painting.
Unlike
Chen, who was involuntarily conscripted to go to Tibet, Yu demanded
that he be sent to the remote autonomous region, voluntarily giving
up the coveted chance to stay at Luxun Academy of Fine Arts in
Shenyang after graduation in 1984. In Tibet, he eventually
became the head of the Art Department of Xizang University established
in Lhasa. "I lived in Tibet for 13 years and it was the best time
of my life," Yu states. "Tibet's arduous physical environment,
as well as Tibetan Buddhist beliefs and philosophy, made me strong
and have helped me become a better person as well as a better
painter."
It was
during his leisure time in Tibet that Yu Xiaodong began to read
voraciously, especially about the history of art in both the East
and the West. The painter's influences have been as varied
as his reading material. Stylistically speaking, he cites the
important effects the disparate work of Northern Renaissance master
painter and printmaker Albrecht Düurer (1471-1528), Spanish
Baroque court painter Diego Velasquez (1599-1660), Dutch genre
painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), 19th century Russian realist
Ilya Efimovich Repin (1844-1930), French Impressionist Claude
Monet (1840-1926) and German Expressionist printmaker and sculptor,
Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) have had on his painting style.
It is a distinctive style that incorporates the devoted attention
to light, shadow, color, detail and line quality that have characterized
the work of these European artists throughout the centuries.
There
is no doubt about the effect that Chen Danqing's "Tibet Series"
from the early 80's has had on Yu Xiaodong's paintings, though
the tenor of each artist's work is altogether dissimilar. In stark
contrast to Chen, Yu's work is infused with a sense of transcendent
elegance and mysticism .
