Ye Yongqing

Acrylic on canvas
150 x 200 cm. 59 x 78 3/4 in.
Signed in Chinese and in Pinyin “Ye Yongqing” on lower right
Exhibited：Today Art Museum,Beijing,China,Chinese Writing,5 - 25 March 2011
Ye Yongqing
The early works of Ye Yongqing were influenced by Western masters. His landscape series Gui Mountain in Yunnan adopted a formalistic style of Paul Cézanne and reshape his canvases. The Gui Mountain,the red soil,and the lush forests of Xishuangbanna in his native place of Yunnan are his inspirations. The tranquil landscapes were a contrast to his life then in the industrialized Chongqing city,and he was thus motivated to adjust his creative style
After the 1989 China Avant-garde exhibition,Ye started to examine issues from a contemporary perspective,and to reflect with the aim of subverting and deconstructing collective ideology. Ye started his Big Poster collage series based on pop art in 1991. From then on,Ye was in a kind of “graffiti freedom”. Starting from 1994,while continuing his Big Poster series,he started his image diary,which records all kinds of life experiences.
In 1999,Ye started to reduce the content in his works by choosing certain elements and symbols from his earlier graffiti works. Starting from 2000,he has been employing birds as his main subjects. The birds of Ye are enlarged based on the projected images on canvas,he drew small squares along the shapes using thin brushes. This is his unique “Ye’s conceptual graffiti”.
According to Ye,“Graffiti” is thought to be quick and simple. If one is to depict something childish in a mature way,and to produce a quick image by a slow process,so that at first glance people would think it is a child’s drawing,only to discover the profound meaning in the painting later. To him,this method of artistic creation is to “set a trap,fool the viewer,and play a joke but never intending to hurt anyone’s feeling”. In Painti