Out of the contemporary Chinese artists born in the 1970s, Sun Yao (孫堯, b.1974) is one who has the potential to elevate Chinese abstract art in the global stage. The beauty of Sun Yao’s abstract art has been shaped by inquiry and research into the expression style of the beginning and development of the oil painting history.
Under the guidance of the renowned artist Xu Jiang (許江, b.1955), at the Chinese Academy of Fine Arts, Yao built a world of artwork containing solid aesthetic theories based on art historical criticism and theoretical fundamentals.
His art world is the result of research on brush strokes and textures, one of the basic elements of painting, rather than just emotional techniques and pedantic brushstrokes of abstract art. He breathed new life on the canvas through his work, studying changes in historical material use from ancient to medieval times, aesthetic criticism, the direction of the world of artwork development, the formalistic expressionist theoretical background of Roger Fry and Clement Greenberg, and the limitations of current abstract expressionist theory.
Martin Heidegger noted, “Truth is the unconcealment of being as being. Truth is the truth of being. Beauty does not appear alongside this truth. When truth places/puts itself in(to) the work, it appears. The appearance is – as this being of truth in the work and as work – the beauty. Thus, beauty belongs to the happening of truth. It is not only relative to the pleasure and merely/only as its object.”
Sun Yao explores these soul archetypes and spaces of reactions. Based on his own personal experiences and solid art theory, he explored the space of revelation, which is the creative source of mankind, and expressed creative movements on canvas in various ways. This space is an exploration of life, death, and fundamental beauty, and at the root of this exploration is the echo in his soul about the Neverland, the original intact space hidden by the sins of mankind.
In Sun Yao’s art world, the source of human beauty is linked to a great sacrifice. He explores the connection point between natural things and the spiritual system that constitutes them. The spiritual connection changes the original form, the form of photographs and works containing the records of events that shook human history, and converts them into brush strokes and surfaces which tell their own perspectives. In this way, he formed the series Deep Forest (2009–2016) and Landscape of Face (2006–2012).
The text first discusses the beginning and change of Sun Yao’s work. Second, the theoretical background of Sun Yao’s art world. Third, the flow of Chinese abstract art history and the position of his work.
I. The Beginning and Change of Sun Yao Art World
As an undergraduate, Sun Yao used to draw works focused on realism. He was familiar with the realism style of painting, elaborating and refining the details of the artwork. Although he pursued realism for a long time, he gradually felt that it was not the direction he wanted to go down. While preparing for his graduation work, he envisioned an artwork that combines abstract styles. He faced up to himself honestly and recognized that he could no longer unfold his art world through realist paintings, amid the changes in the external world. During this process, amid his interest in the basic elements of painting, Sun Yao processed conceptual objects in an abstract way that initially transformed elements such as a person’s face and body.
He recognizes that there must be something for an artist to transcend these experiences and reason, to go beyond the surface depictions of the experience, the rational and scientific world. Yao’s artistic change can be detected in his graduation work Bathroom series, which is connected to his experiential experience.
In his graduation work Bathroom series, Yao creates a dreamy space by erasing realistic depictions. The spatial areas are constructed one by one through abstract brushstrokes. The work in this series received the honor of being collected at his school. Since 1998, Yao has been painting his father. The back of his father in a small bathroom remembers him in various styles and uses him as a representation of various experiments of his abstract expression.
Spatial perception by the body is achieved through various human sensory organs. Humans perceive space through an integrated spatial perception process, and what is sensed by the sensory organ of the body has a relationship with the realm of the soul, such as memory. So, when we encounter a new situation, we perceive it by adding senses to the new situation through the association of memories of what we experienced and perceived in the past.
In the process of perceiving and cognitiveizing the physical environment, humans remember the point or location in space which provided the strongest impression or meaning among the physical environmental elements. The image of space is the product of the interaction between the observer and the environment, and refers to the comprehensive image that an individual has of the physical environment.
By remembering and experiencing a small bathroom as the existence of the body, Sun Yao extends the perception beyond the transmission of meaning at the visual level to the “realm of place”, experienced and recognized through the memory of the body. It embodies the possibility of perceiving the memory, location, and existence of the father through realistic painting. In this process, he expands his artistic field. The artist proceeds the semanticization of the place for a new situation through experience and memory.
From a phenomenological point of view, he continues to expand the interrelationship between time and space, memory, and objects. The artist seeks a new direction of art by differentiating the brush touch and the surface composition on the canvas with traces that confirm the subjectivity of physical perception.
The hard work and sacrifices experienced by the father for the family stimulate the aesthetic views of life’s most beautiful sacrifices through a small space called the bathroom. The artist’s gaze toward his father is expressed as a scene of him washing his body full of love, sweat and tears.
Through the object reflected from the third person’s point of view, the narrowness of the subject and space is expressed, and sometimes Sun Yao uses the method of rough brush stroke to create a surface as if soil is being poured out. The traces of time that can be felt in the bathroom make the audience feel the emotions of the place through the narrowness of the space, the depth of the thick paint, and the combination of colors.
The aesthetic standard of the sublime found in Sun Yao’s art is the expression of the spirit of love and sacrifice that exists behind the movement of the human body. The image of the washing father is remembered in Sun Yao’s soul and acts as a passage into a new space after his father’s death. The father’s mercy and sacrificial love as anthropological values have been transformed into the result of family protection and prosperity.
He induces the possibility of sensation and perception through light and water, changes in brush strokes and human body surface treatment, omission of spatial images, and changes in various colors. He activates the senses and perception of the audience and shifts the focus of appreciation to the area of emotional space by describing the situation of the moment as the space utilization of individual memory and body perception. This is the hallmark of Sun Yao’s early work.
Going against the current dynamic, Sun Yao continued to ground his world of artwork on a realist world that relies on memory. During his master’s degree, he portrayed a self-portrait of a person by emphasizing only objects relating to the person and important aspects of the person. He leaves the corners the painting blurred, almost as if they have been erased. In this way, he resists the tradition of realistic portrait which insists on the finishedness of a whole painting.
He created a new space by connecting images with meta-painting, instead of overlapping scenes at various angles, to leave a three-dimensional effect with the shape and height of the photo and book. His master’s research project was to conduct an expressive experiment on canvas, on the possibility of expressing and combining different artistic styles while attempting to construct an experimental screen from existing realist paintings to abstract paintings.
After completing his master’s degree in Shanghai, in his doctorate course in Hangzhou, Sun Yao establishes a new foundation for his own abstraction through various series such as Landscape of Face (臉之風景), Traces (影之痕) and Deep Forest (密林).
He builds his own formative language through a combination of scattered strokes and colors. In particular, his description, which has theological, anthropological, and revelatory characteristics, is the result of studying brushstrokes and surface texture through the context of Western art history. He completed his doctoral thesis on brushstrokes and surface treatment, studying methods of portraying human history and oil painting history that began in the early days. In the process, under the guidance of Jiang Xu, his Ph.D. advisor, he learns to explore himself and the world, inside and outside, concealment and manifestation, the relationship between multilateral and eternal, and the relationship between the whole being and individual.
To catch the movements of a living soul
Trace No. 20, on the other hand, is reminiscent of Jean Fautrier’s (1898-1964) series of “Hostage” works. Around 1940, Jean Fautrier gave up decades of oil painting and dark shades, marking a brutal scene by making a lump of white material ambiguous with a lump of dough before it is hardened, like a bread kneading chef or a concrete kneading architect. Jean Fautrier paints auditory gunshots and howls in the face of nihilistic death, a combination of joy and fear, in a color arrangement that has no rational connection. The scene depicts the cruelty of Nazis and the objectification of human beings, whose dignity was completely destroyed in the war crimes.
However, Sun Yao already had images processed by photographers, such as old photographs, impressive scenes from movies, and pictures seen on WeChat, and used these to create richer images by varying the relationship between paint and line, contrast and change between light and dark, and various lines and depths. It implicitly showed the change in the traces.
Unlike Jean Fautrier’s method, which maximizes the non-polarity by roughly expressing the surface traces of the human body and the texture of the body, the mark of Sun Yao seem to show the movement of the living spirit that existed in the body. The living and moving spirit can be seen in a variety of aspects that cannot be found in the external shape, and these spirits are established in various intangible forms of human thoughts, personality, speech, and influences.
Therefore, Sun Yao’s work is connected to the perception of invisible but moving beings behind physical properties, rather than expressing physical properties. It captures the thoughts, characteristics, and sensibilities of the “spiritual” world that distinguishes humans from animals, making them fluctuate throughout the screen. When observed in part, the brush strokes form voluminous curves according to their respective characteristics, like mountain ranges and valleys. However, when looking at the entire work, you can experience the harmony of light and shape of the moment that the artist was impressed.
It seems that Sun Yao is trying to explain that it is a spiritual being hidden in the finiteness of a human body, which has the infinite properties of God at the same time. The ontological concept behind this image representation creates a new formative language and creates its own space while maximizing more specific brushstrokes and qualitative aesthetic effects with various materials.
The aesthetics of destruction, the completion of poetic abstraction
Sun Yao’s work “Ragnarök”, to match up to its name, captures the audience’s attention with an atmosphere in which destructive battles and punishment is underway. The depiction of the screen, which seems to have been engulfed in eternal flames, begins to burn through the empty space, leaving only subtle traces of its existing form and nature. It seems this work is heralding the collision of Sun Yao’s aesthetics with the aesthetic nature of building any spatial structure brush strokes, and pouring out flames as if it were at war with material expressions.
His work distorts or destroys certain forms of Baroque art. Sun Yao’s destructive aesthetics melt into Sun Yao’s flames of light and color, leaving only a trace of divine masterpieces and master artists in Western art history. It is as if they had entered Ragnarok, the battlefield of the gods.
Traditional spaces and elements are destroyed and dismantled on canvas, achievements of existing art and historical masters in brushwork are wrapped like elegant rhymes. Whatever his artistic description is, it contains abundant elements to build a new abstract space in his own way and unfold his own unique formative aesthetics.
Where did his conflicting and destructive operations on canvas originate? In the next chapter, I will explain the fundamental elements of his artistic change.
II. The Theoretical Background of Sun Yao’s Art World
The greatest human suffering caused by the conflict between “sky” and “earth”. It is connected to how we form what Martin Heidegger calls the “space” of the sky and the earth. Enthusiastic with Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, Sun Yao contemplates how to create a new space in the conflict between “sky” and “earth”.
This is linked to the action of the “earth”. Heidegger’s concepts of philosophical space, “sky” and “earth” are ideas that originate from the Bible. The concept of “sky” is connected to eternity, and eternity refers the space where the eternal existence of the Almighty resides. The concept of Eden, where the human race originated, is a space that was governed by and belonged to the Almighty. However, our bodies are freed from this eternal space due to sin, and the body has finite characteristics. The symbol of the finite body is linked to the concept of creation and earth. This creature lives on the ground, and the nature of the sky departs from the body. John Milton describes the scene of leaving this heavenly body in Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained describes how we can recover the lost heavenly body through Jesus.
Sun Yao uses Martin Heidegger’s concept of space. Sun Yao describes a scene in the Deep Forest series where the body is connected to the forest. He leaves a trace of man in the magnificent bush. The rugged mountains with dark and light are expressed as if the breath of the wind is cutting the flesh, and the ruggedness of light and mountain is shaken. In this space, we find a figure looking at the audience, leaving a trace of how far the forest is and where the body is hidden in the mountains. Traces of the body represent the human condition in the conflict between “sky” and “earth”. The situation of mankind depicted by the artist through tangled and well-defined landscape paintings.
The most important point of view of this work is the importance of the body using the phenomenological concepts of Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which the artist has consistently put forward. However, since 2020, the concept of space that he has been paying attention to changes. It is transformed into a new space, an eternal island, Neverland, through his family and the COVID-19 pandemic situation. What provoked this change? This change is linked to the death of Sun Yao’s father. The situation of COVID-19 and the prevalence of death made Sun Yao think more realistically about the concept of eternity. If so, in what way are hardships and bodily death converted to the standard of aesthetic beauty?
There are two standards of beauty in the Bible. Isaiah 53:2 describes the figure of a person who appears as a Messiah.
He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. (Isaiah 53:2)
Isaiah says that the figure of the Messiah was not a beautiful and lovely appearance to our eyes. This word that prophesied the Messiah, that is, the word of truth, is incarnated by taking on the human body. The process of the Incarnation of Jesus Christ describes the process of paying for the liberation of the earthy existence which Heidegger claimed. In other words, the liberation of the human body, soul, and spirit belonging to the “earth”.
Redemption is accomplished by Jesus Christ becoming a sacrifice. The connection between “sky” and “earth” is described in the book of “Exodus”, which shows heaven on earth through the building of the tabernacle, which is a shadow of the temple of heaven. The tabernacle provides a place of meeting between the infinite Almighty, who embodies the heavens, and the High Priest, who is the agent of mankind. In this space, blood, which is the payment of sacrifice, is provided for redemption and holiness. When the purification rites are done, it becomes a space where revelations and exchanges between the sky and the earth take place.
The original purpose of the existing purification rates is provide a change in life and a change in direction, that is, repentance. By God’s call, the Levites oversee the purification rates, but as generations go by, the original purpose of the purification rates gradually fade and become forgotten. Furthermore, the purification rites of the sky are clouded depending on how the owners of the earth originally lived. The original purpose of “sacrifice” disappears, leaving only the original desire for salvation and abundance.
The encounter of the heavenly tabernacle with humans has changed like this. However, the “Sky” recognizes the appearance of humanity as full of sin and lost direction early on, and has hidden new revelatory directions everywhere in various ways.
The hidden secret is revealed to mankind as a complete sacrifice, with the Creator becoming a creature. The Creator puts on the human flesh Himself and faces the earth, and this is a judgment for the ruling power of the “earth” and a declaration of freedom for those suffering in the chain of original sin. All creation, too, along with humans, is longing for a time when it will be set free from the state of suffering from sin.
In the Deep Forest series, Sun Yao describes humanity has having been placed in a state of widespread death, darkness, and chaos. In Deep Forest we find the description of various forests and the contrast of light and darkness, caught under the control of the “earth,” and in a frustrated state without knowing what one’s true existence.
The words of the Almighty face the reality of this earth with light in front of a sinful humanity. The figure, who seems to be standing in front of the overflowing waves in chaos, is like the desperate situation of mankind, which craves only light.
The revelation of the “sky” comes to this earth like light. The Almighty himself accomplishes it on a cursed cross, one of mankind’s worst punishments, as a complete sacrifice.
Rembrandt van Rijn’s <Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves - The Three Crosses> etching print, which depicts the crucifixion, undergoes a new transition through Sun Yao. The lines of this work, expressed in an etching method, are especially prominent in the depth of the screen and the structural volume composed of lines. Rembrandt’s prints impressed him so much that he became Sun Yao’s favorite artist.
Sun Yao explores the meaning of human existence and the nature of beauty by converting Rembrandt’s etching works in his own way. The standard of beauty in the Bible appears in the New Testament. Before the crucifixion of Jesus, Mary of Bethany prepares for his funeral, and uses her marriage portion to purchase the incense. The perfume is poured onto Jesus’ head and feet, giving up her happy future as a woman and preparing for Jesus’ death. This commemoration of death and sacrifice is displayed not only Mary of Bethany, but also many others who follow Jesus.
The response to complete love is the outpouring and the breaking of future means of satisfying the body, for the sake of the space of “sky”, which has eternal value. In the process, a new revelatory insight opens. These physical breakages and deaths are completed through Jesus’ crucifixion. Sun Yao takes note of this moment. It is no longer a desire to reach the physical limits of humans on the earth, but to be covered by the eternal body of the “heaven”, rather than a temporary earthly tent.
Paul the Apostle writes in a letter to the Corinthians the following. “Now we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling.” (2 Corinthians 5:1-2)
Sun Yao’s paintings are filled with human figures longing for these existential places, surrounded by temporary forests, sighing, and brush strokes eager to add new bodies. These brush strokes and surface treatments feel as if they are filled with the shaking of the soul longing for something to come after the despair of the body torn on the cross. The image of Jesus, who sacrificed his life and gave everything, offers the most beautiful sacrifice and hope. It is expressed as the highest standard of the sublime in the Bible.
Sun Yao’s world of work connects the two sides of sacrifice and hope in the Neverland series. The concept of “Neverland” actually stems from the connection between “sky” and “earth” mentioned by Heidegger. In this conflict between heaven and earth, Jesus is offered as a sacrifice. Rembrandt also continued to make reference to the Bible in the process of drawing it.
Sun Yao attempts a spatial transformation in the intermediate stage between “sky” and “earth”. He connects the sublime of death, which was constantly detected in Rembrandt’s work, and the spiritual world opened by the death of the body. That is, he connects the sublime spatial creation projected by Rembrandt as light, to his personal experience. He connects the newly recognized spatial presence due to the death of the father to the creative world of the work, the space that was opened through pain and sadness.
In this process, he connects Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s study of emotional space through body perception and the aesthetic theory of the work. His phenomenological concept is one that Maurice Merleau-Ponty talked about simultaneously when developing a theory that excludes body sensation through Clement Greenberg expressive abstract painting. In a way, the two perspectives have opposite theoretical directions. Greenberg revolts against the existing abstract painting theory, which is rife with ideological interpretations, and builds aesthetic concepts that take place on canvas unrelated to the body and formalistic descriptions.
Formalistic abstract expressionism causes the emergence of abstract paintings consistent with Greenberg’s worldview. However, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s contemporaneous concept of the relationship with the body, space, and the combination of space corresponds to Sun Yao’s view of art, which requires an aesthetic state connected to his body rather than formalist abstraction.
The artist also collides astronomical maps with dynamic and volumetric differences in the body’s skeletal, skin, and kinetic forces through the intersection of light and brush with spatial composition by body perception. In this process, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s theory is embodied in Sun Yao’s work. And the space created by him opens the door to a new abstract space for the art world. While repeatedly brushing on a volumetric surface, the line is used as a tool to connect light and flash, body and universe, nature and non-naturalism, and reality and the surreal world.
Sun Yao’s attempt was to build the concept of Western philosophy into his own view of art in the study of Western oil painting history. As an artist who has been educated and grown up in China, he understands the fundamental view of the West and announces the emergence of the first generation that utilizes the brush strokes expression method of Western painting. His value foreshadows the arrival of an era in which the depth of Western understanding of Chinese art can no longer remain in the era of reproduction but challenges art history, along with his deepening notions of the abstract world and the world of works painted on the canvas.
III. The Flow of Chinese Abstract Art History and the Position of Sun Yao’s Works
The beginning of modern Chinese art began in 1918 with the dispute between Cheng Lü (呂澂, 1896-1989) and Chen Duxiu (陳獨秀, 1879-1942). The debate, which started with the enhancement of Chinese painting and the critique of traditional masters represented by the Four Wangs (四王) , is defined by the term “art revolution”, arguing that active learning of modern art, improvement of traditional Chinese painting, and change of thinking are the tasks of the times. In the process of these reforms, learning the Western-style realism painting style is important, and reforming comprehensive thinking was the start of the “the New Culture Movement”. Many artists who returned from studying in Japan and France established schools and were connected to “the May Fourth Movement”, increasing their desire to cultivate power for true independence and learn Western culture.
An art organization called Juelanshe (決瀾社, The Storm Society) conducted works relating to modern art, despite the Japanese invasion in 1932. The pioneers of Chinese abstract art come from this organization. One of them, Ni Yide (倪貽德, 1901-1970), presents a work that expresses the surface of a building with an abstract feeling and applies it to a new form as a painting.
Lin Fengmian (林風眠, 1900-1991), who was a member of Juelanshe, a first-generation artist who studied in France, and the first principal of Hangzhou National College of Art, said, “The form of abstraction is to rely on color in painting, and in terms of comprehensive expression of lines, abstraction is like making music using notes. The contrast between the coldness and warmth of the color body, and the curve and straightness of the line are comprehensively composed to solve the problem of emotion and concept. Abstract is a new formative art.”
Under the leadership of Lin Fengmien, Wu Dayu (吳大羽, 1903-1984) returned from France to study, using poetic abstract paintings that changed color, brushstrokes, and screen structure, providing various artistic opportunities for his students. One of his students, an artist, entered Hangzhou National College of Art at the age of 14. He was later called Zao Wou-Ki (趙無極, 1920-2013), a master of poetic abstraction, by combining empty images of Western abstract paintings and traditional Chinese landscape paintings in France.
In addition, Chu Teh-Chun (朱德群, 1920-2014), who worked in Taiwan and France, and Wu Guanzhong (吳冠中, 1919-2010), who was controversial in the 1980s by emphasizing the abstract and formal beauty of paintings, continued to live in mainland China and occupy an unrivaled position in ink abstraction painting through education and work activities.
Zhongsheng Li (李仲生, 1912-1984) was an artist from Juelanshe who advocated “surreal abstractionism” based on his experience at the Tokyo avant-garde Western-style Painting Research Institute while studying at a Japanese university in the 1930s. He moved to Taiwan in 1949 and had a great influence on avant-garde art, and his students formed the Eastern Painting Society (東方畵會), Taiwan’s first abstractist art organization, to contribute to leading abstract painting in the mainstream.
In 1979, Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平, 1904-1997) took the first step in China’s long march toward reform and opening up socialism. Huang Rui (黃銳, b. 1952) recorded the appearance of the “Star art Exhibition 星星美展” exhibition on the wall outside the Chinese Museum of Art as the first exhibition of abstract painting through Infinite space (無限的空間).
Since the 1980s, contemporary Chinese abstract art has generally grown based on the expression of works rather than theoretical thinking. Yu Youhan (余友涵, b. 1943) attempted to return abstract images to the visual source of traditional poetry, and Ding Yi (丁乙, b. 1962), conducted a personal extreme form of experiment, and so the expression of unconscious abstraction with modern comprehensive materials grow together.
In the early 1990s, abstract art began to boom in art schools across the country. Meanwhile, Wang Yigang (王易罡, b. 1961) from Shenyang, presented the results of his portrait expressionist paintings as a solo exhibition in Beijing in 1991.
By the 21st century, various artists, including Xu Jiang (許江, b. 1955), Zhu Jinshi (朱金石, b. 1954), returned to China, enriching the art school and the Chinese abstract painting world.
Sun Yao is an abstract artist who grew up in China, his artwork based on the theories of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as the expression of works in the history of abstract art in China.
His value presents new possibilities for the Chinese abstract art world, which uses existing expressive beauty as the standard of aesthetic value for abstract painting. In the existing abstract art world which only finds the value of the work on canvas, Sun Yao provides a richer value for abstract art by expressing the spiritual space hidden behind the physical communion and expressionist reality that interacts in and out of the canvas. This is why Sun Yao should be evaluated in a different position in Chinese abstract art history. I’m looking forward to his next move.