欧阳江河：在中国当代艺术的发展进程中，你的绘画的出现是一个非常非常大的意外。你觉得这里面包含了一个必然吗？
杨黎明：也有人这样讲，比如周春芽在2003年第一次看完我的画，给我写了一篇文章，题目就叫《意外》。我大学毕业之后教了一年书，然后把工作辞掉，准备一心一意画画的时候，我的参照首先是西方美术史，从古典、印象派，到后印象、立体主义，表现主义等等，到美国的当代艺术。对那个系统进行逐一的尝试有三年多的时间。我喜欢克利，波洛克、纽曼，罗斯科。特别是波洛克滴洒式的，我也尝试了很长时间。我发现，我在线条运用上既不像克利那么理性，也不像波洛克那么感性。之后，更重要的是我对中国的书法和绘画从晋唐到宋元、明清也进行了逐一的学习和研究。并且找回了我小时候写书法的感觉，于是我开始用毛笔来画油画，那时我运用毛笔的技巧相对简单了点，于是我又每天开始练习书法。所以我后来形成的结合体是以东西方这两个坐标来的。我对八五新潮后直接表现社会和政治性的东西没有兴趣。我更愿意回到个人的比较内敛的东西上来。
欧阳江河：现在，中国在本土语境内对“当代艺术”的定义，与走出中国语境的定义，这之间有很大的错位。你的创作似乎不是追随主流，而是另辟蹊径走了一条道路。
杨黎明：对，这不重要！对于我来讲重要的是艺术人生。往内看，人的内部和外部是一个镜像对称的世界。也就是说，我们不仅有一个外围的世界，而且在人的内部还有一个内观的世界。表现那个世界里呈现的东西很有意思。
欧阳江河：我特别感兴趣的是你在2004、05年后的绘画，这批绘画有一个特点，颜色越来越少，表面越来越简单，内部越来越复杂，颜色最后缩减到三种主要颜色，黑色是主调，辅以灰色和红色。在向内部观察的过程中，你有一个表面的减法和内部无限扩充的过程，非常有张力。为什么只剩下这三种颜色？
杨黎明：画画有的时候不是主动去做，而是内心提示你如何去做。黑色是一个很纯粹的颜色，一个人要进入潜意识的最深处，你必须把很多东西避开，黑色是可以帮助你进去的。画灰色是另外一个问题。这种宁静淡雅的颜色很有意境，和我身体里中国传统文化的东西很接近。画红色是最近的一个新想法，我想尝试一下用红色来为我想表现的东西注入一种温暖的感觉，这个是很难的。
欧阳江河：日本艺术家Aki Kuroda曾举办过一个轰动一时的展览《黑色》，法国作家玛格丽特.杜拉斯为这个展览写了序言。杜拉斯本人也很喜欢黑色，他们对黑色有共同的看法。Aki Kuroda认为黑色是人类根本无法进入的一种物质。当时杜拉斯问他：你认为黑色和黑暗在你的作品中有没有什么差别？Aki Kuroda回答说，黑色是完全无法进入的物质，黑暗尽管也很难进入，但人其实是可以进入黑暗的，并且融化在里面。我想黑暗是有可以被驱散的，比如灯一开黑暗就没了。而黑色不是，黑色是一种纯物质。Aki Kuroda所界定的黑色，与你刚才说的黑色有一种微妙的、相互呼应的关系。
杨黎明：我还是比较同意他这种说法。蓝色，红色、或其它颜色都容易带给人某种情绪，而黑色不会。但它有某种精神上的绝对性无时不刻的牵引着你。把它化为气态的并赋予它人文的节奏和韵律在某个绝对虚拟的时空中穿越是我的工作。
欧阳江河：你的黑色暗含着灰色。中国传统对黑色的界定分七种层次，灰是由黑向白过渡的中间阶段，黑色表面灰色的介入，是不是说明了你的画中包含了“反黑”元素，或者说是黑的淡化和稀释，向“反黑”过渡的一种可能性。
杨黎明：黑色里面有灰色是因为有光从里面透出来和黑发生关系。我以前是把黑色画黑现在想把黑画透明。
欧阳江河：你的大尺寸的画，光是从里面向外透的，它遇到自然光线就会反光，这种结合产生一种非常魔幻的效果，是非常偶然的，每一个不同的角度就会有一个不同的现实。这个不确定性使得你的画包含了很多东西，包括你对颜色的解读，以及精神的暗喻，还包含了诗意和反诗意的东西，内在空间的无穷旋钮，物质世界和非物质世界的互换互否，互相印证，互相排斥，互相吸引的一种混沌的状态。所以说你绘画里包含的信息量是巨大的。
杨黎明：我不是画一个单纯的黑色，而是一个空间，一个纯粹精神上的虚拟空间。这个空间里的演变从2005年传统中国画的意境的空间，推进到2006年西方直线直角的分割式的空间结构，到2007年转为各种各样的圆和方的结合，结构愈加复杂。象一个气盘，里面有许多通道。
欧阳江河：在我看来，评价一张画是不是杰作，关键是看这张画的背后有没有一个巨大的场，就像写作一样，如果只是表面的修辞效果，那只是一些词语的搬运组合，音乐也是这样，是不是一个好的音乐作品要看它的背后有没有一个更大的场。我所说的这个场可能是精神性的场，可能是社会史、文化史、思想史的场，或者是整个人类历史的巨大的精神空间。《黑色2007》这幅画包含了一个非常巨大的场，第一眼很可能看不见。看你的画除了空间的光线在起作用，时间也在起作用，一瞬间看到的东西和长时间持续观看以后看到的东西是很不一样的。
杨黎明：对！需要完善的是那个场。我喜欢听音乐，一方面是基于韵律，但更重要的是感受音乐家的内驱力和弦震动方式。所以，相对来讲声音不重要，重要的是大师的内驱模式是个什么样子的？也就是那个场的原形。当然技法的完善也很重要。
欧阳江河：这个技术问题是不是两方面的，一是材料的问题，一是思想的问题？
杨黎明：实际上画面和内心也是一个镜像对称的关系。这个技术问题一是各种信息的接收，输入到体内，然后筛选，处理和呈像，最后输出到画面上。二是另外一个与现实相反的方向就要困难点了。有些东西想象中的和画出来的是有距离的，要不断的修正。比如材料方面：黑色很特别，湿的时候很黑，干了会变灰，搞不好就模糊一团。要反复的叠加才能达到效果，这是一个很漫长的过程。
欧阳江河：这幅画有很薄很细碎的黑，也有大块大块的黑，由于种种奇妙的重叠，它内部产生出一种微妙的光，从中会看到一种星云变化的世界。对这个东西你有什么样的感受。
杨黎明：把内心呈现的像输出到画面上很累。一张画画完了就考虑的是下一张画了，只是偶尔会看一眼。最好的感受是：晚上合适的光线下，另一个空间触手可及。
欧阳江河：看你的草图，里面出现的椭圆交叉重合，让我想到了中国古文化中的同心圆，这是一个文化概念。你的绘画跟中国传统文化，传统思维出现了一种有意无意的连结。我想是不是越抽象的、越西方的东西，反而越会有中国古文化的痕迹。老子说，一生二，二生三，三生万物。老子的“大象无形”跟你的绘画有某种连结。
杨黎明：中国传统文化是我们的根基，但必须转化成现代的形式并融入到当代的生活中去。
欧阳江河：同心圆最后都有一个汇集点，或者说是一个消失点，在你绘画的起稿中我看到了这个点，但在最终的成稿中这个点不见了。是你有意抹去吗？你的绘画，西方式的透视关系不存在，东方式的散点透视也不存在。
杨黎明：我根本不考虑透视的问题。它只是一个虚拟的。我在画第一遍时会把这个点描绘出来。然后不断地朝这个点推进，但最后消失在正中间那些白光的后面去了。
欧阳江河：你的画在同行的评价中，可以说上是非常高的，大家为什么会这么喜欢你的画，这是我一直在思考和探讨的。我个人对你的画真怀有敬意，并抱有非常深的兴趣，我甚至是把它视为我生命的一个点，比如说对巴赫的，舒伯特的聆听都是我生命中不可或缺的一个点，你的画就是这些点中很重要的一个点。借助对你的画的观看、思考和探讨，有可能会升华我生命中的某个部分。我现在比较感兴趣的是文化和绘画形式本身，西方的藏家是从哪个点上对你的画感兴趣呢？你上次跟我讲到，有一位英国著名画廊的艺术顾问看了你的画，她说你的画像六七十岁的人在考虑的问题，结果你才三十岁就把它画出来了，她感到非常奇怪，不知道接下来你会怎么画，老了后会怎么画。这就是从生命的终极经验和体悟来理解你的画，他已经能看到一个老年人的智慧，她是从什么角度来理解和感悟的呢？
杨黎明：西方人受到的艺术教育是比较系统的，经历了从具象到抽象的一个循序渐进的过程。但东西方有一个不同是：西方人喜欢把自然的，社会的，人文的等等问题分开来研究，而东方人更习惯把他们融合在一起来感悟。我喜欢一个中国女作家评价我的黑色画“仿佛让人置身于一个孤绝的境地来重新审视自我”。明天我们不知道，我只能把今天看到了，感受到了，画出来罢了。
欧阳江河：在你之前完全画黑色抽象的人有吗？
杨黎明：罗斯科晚年时有画过。
欧阳江河：我没有看过他的纯黑画。
杨黎明：我也没有亲眼看过。我听周春芽向我描述过他在德国留学时，在一个教堂中看到过罗斯科晚年时创作的三张纯黑色的画，给人很强的震撼力，纯粹精神上的。
欧阳江河：我去过二十多个国家的近百个城市，每到一地我都会去当地的博物馆、美术馆，但从没看到过一张纯黑色的画。你提到的波洛克的几张大画给我很大的震撼，但跟你的画给我的震撼很不一样。他的画还是从内部世界向外输出，而你是向内收敛，这个向度我还从没看过，而且里面出现的物理的空间，思想的空间，逻辑的空间，音乐的空间，观看的空间，数的空间，诗意的空间，空间和时间、和反空间的纠缠，我还真是没看见过。
杨黎明：法国的苏拉热在晚年阶段画过一些黑色的，纯粹的西方表现方式，有一种升华的感觉。
欧阳江河：你说的这个艺术，我一直把它定位在尖端艺术，它当然也是一个前卫艺术，但前卫还不如尖端这个概念，因为尖端是一个向上的过程，前卫只是就时间向度而言的，今天的前卫也许十年后就是滞后的东西了。你看待艺术的眼光像诗歌，在某种程度上来说诗歌是一种亡灵的语言，有招魂术在里面，我觉得在你的作品中有一种亡灵的眼光。最好的艺术家是赢得了死亡的权利，再来回避死亡。
杨黎明：在我看来活着就是由生的本能和死的本能来双重驱动的。对我个人而言 ，在结束的时候回顾人生是和艺术同行那是很幸福的！
欧阳江河：最伟大的诗人通常会有一个内在的写作抱负，就是要跟死人较量。我在写作过程中，会确定一个假想的读者，有时是中国古诗歌领域的伟大诗人，有时是像保罗.策兰，荷尔德林，庞德，史蒂文斯这样的一些诗人，我想我这首诗是写给他的，与他较劲的，虽然他早就不在人世了。
杨黎明：以前我比较，和波罗克，罗斯科，汤布利。现在不了，因为不同。但我每天都有一大堆死人交流，其实没有死的问题只有时空的问题。生活中如果没有天才活着都是乏味的。
欧阳江河：明年全世界将聚焦中国奥运，中国在经济、政治方面的崛起，以及由此产生的世界性影响已经成为一个现实，但当代中国在文化方面的影响力又怎样呢？我想有很多正面的东西，也有某些负面的东西。正面的更多的是传统文化，当代文化中正面的东西还不是很多，中国当代美术在世界上已经有了自己的位置和一定的地位，在这样的背景下，中国的很多画家都朝大的方面努力，包括徐冰、张晓刚、岳敏君等等，他们认为现在轮到中国人给世界提供更多的艺术产品和文化输出，而你的抱负更是一个艺术家个人的。像何多苓这样的画家在艺术抱负上也大体如此。
杨黎明：我没有这么乐观。把中国传统文化和现代文明融合起来形成我们自主的文化再到国际化是一个漫长的过程。今天中国当代艺术在国际市场上红火是件好事，但艺术家太关注市场最终会带来精神上的失败感。我们的艺术缺乏文化的底蕴和正直的品质。艺术的高度是创新并达到真正的自由，还是去享受追求吧！
2007，9
The Inside and Outside of Man are Mirror Image Worlds
- A discussion between Yang Liming and Ouyang Jianghe
Ouyang Jianghe: In the progression of Chinese contemporary art’s development, the emergence of your paintings was a huge surprise. Do you think that some of this was inevitable?
Yang Liming: Some people say this. For instance, when Zhou Chunya first saw my paintings in 2003 he wrote an article entitled Surprise. I taught classes for a year after graduating college, then I quit my job. In preparing to fully dedicate myself to being an artist, my primary reference was Western art history, from classical to impressionism to post-impressionism, cubism, expressionism, all the way to American contemporary art. I tested this system step by step for over three years. I like Klee, Pollock, Newman and Rothko. I especially like Rothko’s drip style, which I tried out for a long time. I discovered that my implementation of lines is neither rational like Klee nor sensual like Rothko. More importantly, I began researching Chinese calligraphy and painting through the dynasties, and I rediscovered that feel for writing I had when I was young, which led me to use the traditional Chinese brush in oil painting. At the time, my brush technique was not very complex, so I started practicing calligraphy every day. The composite that I formed later draws from both Eastern and Western coordinates. I’m not very interested in the direct expressions of society and politics that emerged [in China] after the ’85 New Wave. I’d rather go back to an internal personal cultivation.
Ouyang: Right now there is a big discrepancy between the definition of “contemporary” art in the Chinese domestic context and in the international context. Your creations seem better fit to the global definition and description of contemporary art. What I’m saying is, art must have orientation and latitude. One side links to your personal experience, including your personal style and language, and the other side is the sensitivity to material. In my view, you haven’t submitted to the demands of art history, social and human history, rather, you have taken your own understanding of art, of abstract art and of technique, and to the highest degree, synthesized it in an open and relaxed way. You’re not chasing the mainstream, but opening a new path to the core of art, a path that leads directly to the most basic, deepest and darkest peak of contemporary art, and you have walked this path.
Yang: I can only face myself, and use the methods that I know best and am most comfortable with to show my perception of reality.
Ouyang: There is a discrepancy between the concept of Chinese contemporary art and the concept of contemporary art we’re talking about.
Yang: Right, that doesn’t matter! What matters is the self-cultivation that takes place once you’ve opened a channel into yourself. When you look inside, I feel that the inside and outside of man are mirror image worlds. That is to say, we have not just a world around us, but inside us there is an internal world. When you show what you see in that world it gets interesting.
Ouyang: I’m very interested in your paintings from after 2004 and 2005. The thing about these paintings is that the colors grew fewer, the surface grew simpler and the inside grew more complex. The colors were eventually reduced to three main colors with black setting the tone supported by gray and red. In the process of observing the inside, you have this process of reducing the surface and limitlessly expanding the interior. It has a lot of push. Why are there only these three colors?
Yang: Painting is not always proactive; sometimes your heart tells you how to do it. When I fell into one of the deepest ruts of my life in 2004, when survival became very difficult, I turned blue into black. When I came to Beijing in 2005, things got better, and there were changes in my understanding towards black. I think that black is a very pure color; if you want to reach the depths of the subconscious, you need to push past many things, and black can help you get in. So I’m willing to use eighty percent of my energies in it, and this is one of my main directions of attack. Gray is another matter. This tranquil and quietly elegant color has a lot of creativity, and is very close to the things of traditional Chinese culture inside of me. Painting with red is a new idea I’ve had recently. I want to try and use red to inject a sense of warmth into what I’m expressing. These three colors maybe also reflect some of my concepts about nature, society and between people.
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Ouyang: The Japanese artist Aki Kuroda once held a momentous exhibition entitled Black, and the French writer Marguerite Duras wrote the foreword. Duras also likes black, and the two of them have shared views on black. Kuroda believes that black is a material that man can never enter. At the time, Duras asked him, do you think there is any difference between the black and the darkness in your works? Kuroda replied, black is a material that cannot be entered, and though darkness is also difficult to enter, people can enter into it, even fuse into it. I think that black can be diffused, for example, it disappears when you turn on a light. But black is different, black is a pure material. Kuroda’s definition of black subtly echoes that of your own.
Yang: I agree with what he says. Blue, red and other colors all have sentiments, but black doesn’t. You can only go deep and far when you have no distractions whatsoever.
Ouyang: Your black conceals a bit of gray. The traditional Chinese definition of black has seven levels. Gray is on a middle level in the transition from black to white. Does the entry of gray into the black surface show that your paintings contain an “anti-black” sentiment? In other words, the dilution of the black is the potential to move towards “anti-black”.
Yang: The gray is there in the black because there is light coming out from inside and interacting with the black.
Ouyang: In your large paintings, light seeps out from inside. When it comes in contact with natural light it reflects it. This combination creates a very magical effect, very serendipitous, where you see a different reality from each different perspective. This undefined aspect makes your paintings contain many things, including your decoding of colors, metaphors about the spirit, poetic and non-poetic things, the infinite knobs of internal space, the murky state of mutual denial, verification and attraction between the material and non-material worlds. So there is a vast amount of information contained in your works.
Yang: For example, the Bodhidharma faced a wall in the Shaolin Temple for nine years. He wasn’t just facing a wall, he was facing a vast spiritual world with many problems. I’m not simply painting black, I’m painting a space, a completely spiritual virtual space. This space has developed from a creative space of traditional Chinese painting in 2005, to a Western space structure delineated by straight lines and angles in 2006, to a combination of all kinds of circles and squares in 2007, getting more complex with each step. It is like a chamber with many passages throughout.
Ouyang: It is like Glenn Gould, the thinker among pianists. He viewed Bach’s most abstruse fugue pieces as an internalized process of removing the interference of all external sounds.
Yang: The process of musical composition is also an entry into a virtual world, a process of hearing inside. All of the notes are in his head. When a performer plays, he enters into that state. Hearing is not important, just as looking is not important when looking at paintings – you want to enter into that painting.
Ouyang: The largest painting in Black 2007 is 3x5 meters. How long did it take you to paint?
Yang: I painted on and off, finishing in august. I only paint one large painting a year.
Ouyang: In my view, when determining whether or not a certain painting is a masterpiece, the key is to see whether or not there is a huge scene behind it. It is like writing. If it is just a superficial rhetorical effect, then it is just the operation of words. To see if it is a great piece of music, you have to see whether or not it has a big scene behind it. This scene I’m talking about is a spiritual scene, maybe the scene of social history, cultural history or conceptual history, or maybe a massive spiritual space of the entirety of human history. Black 2007 contains a vast scene, though it may not be visible at first glance. In the image, aside from the light of space in action, time also comes into play. What you see in an instant is very different from what you see after a long time of viewing it.
Yang: Right! What needs to be perfected is that scene. I like listening to music. Part of it is rooted in the rhythm, but what’s more important is to perceive the musician’s internal driving force that shakes the chords. Relatively speaking, music is not important, what’s important is what kind of thing is driving the master musician? It is the primal form of that scene. Of course, the perfection of technique is also very important.
Ouyang: Is this technical problem a two pronged one, one of material and another of thought?
Yang: Actually, the image and the inner mind also have a mirror image relationship. This issue of technique includes the reception and insertion of all kinds of information into the body, which must then be selected, arranged and presented, finally being sent out onto the picture. Sometimes there is a distance between what is imagined and what gets painted. One must always revise. On the materials side, black is very special; when it is wet, it is very black, but when it dries it turns gray, and if you do it wrong it gets murky. You must repeatedly layer to reach the effect. This is a very slow process.
Ouyang: This painting has small and thin pieces of black as well as big chunks of black. Because of exquisite overlapping, it produces a delicate light inside, through which one can see a nebulously changing world. What is your understanding of this?
Yang: It is very tiring to present what is inside as if it has been directly transferred onto the image, a process somewhat akin to a worm spinning silk. When I finish one painting, what I think about is the next painting; I only look back here and there. The best feeling is when the light is just right in the night, and it feels like I can touch another space.
Ouyang: This painting gives me a faint impression of a Buddhist pagoda. How do you explain that?
Yang: I painted this under normal light, and I was painting abstract things, but when it is hit by direct light, reflections in the center form an image resembling a Buddhist pagoda. I didn't notice this at all when I was painting it. This thing keeps appearing in all my recent works, and I find it a bit strange myself. I'm not a Buddhist, though I sometimes like to walk around in temples. I never burn incense or bow to the Buddha. Maybe it's just a coincidence.
Ouyang: Looking at your sketches, the intersecting ellipses make me think of the ancient Chinese diagrams of concentric circles. This is a cultural concept. Your paintings have this intentional and accidental link with Chinese traditional culture. I wonder if the more abstract and Western something is, the more it will be marked by ancient Chinese culture. Lao Tzu says that one produced two, two produced three, and three produced the myriad things. There's some kind of link between your paintings and Lao Tzu's “the great form has no shape”.
Yang: In terms of form, my paintings appear Western, but the content is actually purely Eastern. Those intersecting circles in Black 2007 are the natural result of my spatial constructs. You talked of ancient Chinese philosophy; that stuff is deeply embedded in our minds.
Ouyang: Concentric circles in the end all have a point of convergence, or a point of disappearance. I saw this point in your draft sketches, but it isn't there in the final product. Did you wipe it out on purpose? The Western concept of perspective relationships is not present in your paintings, nor is the Eastern concept of the cavalier perspective.
Yang: I depict this point int the first go a the painting, and then I continuously move in from that point.
Ouyang: Is the point present in Black 2007?
Yang: Yes, but it disappears behind the white light in the center.
Ouyang: That point is not present in terms of perspective?
Yang: Right, that's not important! What's important is that the point is always pulling me. I might follow that point for five years, ten years, twenty years even fifty years and finally open it. So it is said that art is a game played by artists, but once the artwork leaves the artist, it becomes a wholly different game.
Ouyang: Your use of perspectives rails against Western perspective studies, and is also wholly unrelated to the Chinese cavalier perspective.
Yang: I don't think about the perspective at all. It is just a virtual construct of unreality.
Ouyang: The big scene behind your work might be your presentation of the virtual construct of unreality. Once anything is presented, it becomes a physical reality. With so-called black for instance, this is a physical reality, but behind that physical reality is a giant scene of unreality.
Yang: Right. I am steeping in this scene of unreality.
Ouyang: Your creations are very important in Chinese contemporary art, and unique. They could be described as an unprecedented undertaking.
Yang: Virtual unreality has only just begun, and it remains very distant.
Ouyang: Your work is highly regarded among your peers. I've always wanted to figure out why everyone likes your paintings so much. I have the utmost respect for your work, and it deeply interests me, to the point that I see it as a part of my life, just as I can't do without listening to Bach and Schubert, that's the level your work is on in my life. By viewing, pondering and exploring your paintings, I might be able to raise up a part of my life. Right now I'm very interested in culture and the painting form itself. What is it that makes the Western collectors so interested in your paintings? You told me last time that there was a British woman who saw your works and said they resembled the issues that a man in his sixties or seventies would be pondering, but you painted them when you were only thirty. She was amazed, and wondered what you would be painting when you grew old. This was an understanding of your paintings based on the most extreme of life experiences and insights. She saw the wisdom of an old man. From what angle did she approach and understand your paintings?
Yang: Artistic education for Westerners is very systematic, spanning from figurative to abstract step by step. She has no problems with abstract. But the West differs in that Westerners like to separate all of the natural, social and human issues to research them while Easterners prefer to bring everything together and understand them. She was an artistic consultant for a very famous gallery in England. I replied to her, can you ensure that I'll live to be sixty or seventy? I can only see and perceive today, then paint it.
Ouyang: You emphasize that the content of your paintings is Eastern, but you still use Western methods to present it. When you emphasize the Chineseness and Orientalness of your paintings, do Westerners ever project their imaginings about Chinese contemporary art into their understanding of your paintings?
Yang: I don't think about this problem; it's not important. Art has no borders, and this is an era of melding. China didn't have abstract painting before, but this doesn't mean the Chinese lack the capability for abstract thought. They put abstract things into calligraphy, painting, opera and many other fields.
Ouyang: Has anyone painted totally black paintings before you?
Yang: Rothko did in his later years.
Ouyang: I've never seen his completely black paintings.
Yang: I've never seen them with my own eyes. Zhou Chunya described seeing three of them in a church while he was studying in Germany. They're very powerful, utterly spiritual.
Ouyang: I've been to nearly one hundred cities in over twenty countries, and whenever I arrive somewhere I always go to the museums, but I've never seen a pure black painting. The giant Pollock paintings you mentioned really shocked me, but in a different way than your paintings do. His paintings emit from the inner world, while yours are introspective. I've never seen this direction before, and I've never seen any of the the physical space, conceptual space, logical space, musical space, observational space, mathematic space, poetic space, and the tangling of space, time and anti-space that appear inside.
Yang: The French 苏拉热 painted some black paintings in his late period, in a purely Western expressive method, a feeling of sublimation. Also, there are some very sensitive contemporary artists abroad who are also inside virtual unreality. Maybe in another fifty years, today's unreality will become the reality, and a new realm of unreality will emerge.
Ouyang: I've always seen this art as cutting edge, and of course it's also avant-garde, but avant-garde is not as good as the concept of cutting edge. Because cutting edge is a process of moving upwards, while avant-garde is just a term of temporal direction; in ten years, today's avant-garde might be well behind the times. You're vision art looks from the height of fifty, even one hundred years in the future. Your vision already has a bit of the vision of the dead, like something from a departed soul. It's just like poetry, which in certain respects is the language of the dead, imbued with conjuring properties. I think that your works are imbued with the vision of the departed. The best artists are those who have won the right to die, and then evade death. Your vision today already has some of the vision with which you will view problems fifty years from now.
Yang: I worry that in fifty years people will say I'm just a monkey (laughs).
Ouyang: The greatest poets all have an internal aspiration to writing, like they want to compete with the dead. In my writing process, I often set a hypothetical reader, and sometimes it's a great poet from the realm of ancient Chinese poetry, sometimes a poet like Paul Celan, Friedrich Holderlan, Ezra Pound or Wallace Stevens. I think that this poem is written for him, and competes with him, even though he died a long time ago.
Yang: I used to compare myself with Pollock, Rothko and Cy Twombly, but not anymore, because I'm different.
Ouyang: When you're painting, do you have an aspiration or dream to become the best artist in art history?
Yang: This is very unclear. There's no reason to think about this problem.
Ouyang: Next year the whole world will focus on China's Olympics; China's economic and political rise and their global effect have already become a reality, but what of contemporary China's cultural influence? I think there is a lot that's positive, but there is also some negative. The positive is mostly traditional culture, and there's not a lot of contemporary stuff in the positive. Chinese contemporary art already has status and position in the world, and against this backdrop, a lot of Chinese painters always strive towards the big stuff, including Xu Bing, Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Minjun, who all believe that it's China's turn to provide the world with more art products and cultural output, but your aspirations are more personal as an artist. Painters like He Duoling are pretty much the same in their aspirations.
Yang: I'm not so optimistic. I think that recent Chinese culture has reached a low point through thousands of years of development. Total contact with Western culture has only been going on for a short time. This kind of thing needs time, and what comes after will be some new product of this contact. It's a good thing that Chinese contemporary art is very hot on the international market today, but that's a different issue. I think that the work of most Chinese artists today is very insubstantial and imitative. The height of art is to innovate and reach true freedom.
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