“Strictly speaking, Im not an artist as defined by any medium. Since 1996 I have done some works related to contemporary art issues. I didnt choose a fixed pattern or medium where these issues were involved. That was because I was bored with traditional means of expression and I began to question the essentially modernistic taste that claimed to be contemporary art.”
–Yan Lei

In a certain sense, Yan Leis winning the award of Most Outstanding Artist of the 2002 Contemporary Chinese Art Awards was at once the appearance of a “dark horse” and what everyone had wished. And his winning the award served to remind people of several specific works. In 1997, he and Hong Hao sent members of art circles across China an invitation to the Kassel Documenta Exhibition under the name Ielnay Oahgnoh. This was a combination of his name – and that of Hong Hao – in Pinyin written backward. The countless letters of invitation from Kassel became a hot topic in the fine arts community and having been tricked this hoax made people keep a rare silence. They concealed the joke implied in this work and, as revenge, regarded the letter as a hoax, not a work. Perhaps people were more used to discussing the fate of Chinese artists and international cultural power in various academic periodicals at that time than to experiencing a test for the same purpose.

In 2000, when the Annie Wong Leung Kit Wah Art Foundation invited a number of well known international curators and chairmen of foundations to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, Yan Lei hired some anonymous people to make a monochrome painting of the group photo taken during the trip in a traditional Chinese garden.

It is obviously an underestimation of Yan Leis works if one regards them as a challenge to the international art community. For Yan Lei does not intend to oppose the status quo of international art, which he cannot change; on the contrary, he regards the status quo as the reality. His work questions this reality and at the same time seeks a language and approach to work that is more suited to this reality. As a reflection on the status quo of international art, Yan Lei adopts a stance against two sides. On one hand, he attacks the international art communitys abnormal attention to Chinese art. For example, in “Can I Have a Look at Your Work?” (1997), he replaces the curators and gallery owners with pictures of serious-looking engineers of spy technology. On the other hand, he issues a keen challenge to the outdated practices of the Chinese art community. For instance, he revises Cultural Revolution posters calling for people to do credit to the motherland with such sentences as “Have you been invited to participate in the exhibition in Germany?”

The reality of the status quo of international art has made Yan Lei conscious of the complicated nature of the issue, i.e., if we cannot find an effective pattern of language, then contemporary art from China and even all non-Western countries may be confined to a false framework forever. Even those works making fun of the status quo of international art may end up to be mere comic shows and trivialities, which Westerners smilingly accept: such artists will only end up as buffoons. It was from this point that Yan Lei started his reflection on the methodology of symbolism in contemporary Chinese art. To him, only by shaking off the methodology of symbolism can art achieve an unprecedented tension and keep a distance from the form and language of earlier contemporary Chinese art. Artistic creation cannot gain new energy without “truthfulness”; whereas the symbolist current permeating the contemporary art simplified readings of art and made art something simply corresponding to life, ridding it of depth and a broader outlook. Symbolism relates to the acts that artists put on in their work, or to contradictions that exist between the artists life and real life. In this situation, artistic creation frequently becomes a “performance” completed through a symbolism applied to adaptations of appropriated compositions; such has little to do with the artists personal life, nor does it produce any real effect.

As an artist of the younger generation, Yan Lei hit the road in search of a more penetrating language in two aspects –- rewriting the meaning of art in terms of the medium used, and “turning to life.” He began with breaking through the limitation of the medium as a challenge of symbolism. He said, “Strictly speaking, Im not an artist as defined by any medium. Since 1996 I have done some works related to contemporary art issues. I didnt choose a fixed pattern or medium where these issues were involved. That was because I was bored with traditional means of expression and I began to question the essentially modernistic taste that claimed to be contemporary art.” Yan Lei chose a graphic approach, which in the eyes of contemporary artists is over- commercialized. He started to take photographs, all of which lacked a unified or sequential theme. The lack of a theme makes the system of the works incomparably strong. For the same purpose Yan Lei invented a technique of monochrome painting: he delineated different areas in each photograph according to the different depths of tone, and marked them with numbers. Then he matched these with different shades of gray. Thus a work could be completed by applying a color of a certain number to an area of a certain number. He invented this technique so that he could hire anyone to complete the monochrome painting in “Yan Leis style.”

Meanwhile, the photographs he chose for this purpose had been taken without any meaning attached. These photographs included various city scenes, a dining table after a meal, landscapes, and so on. Yan Lei tried to completely eliminate the meaning of an artists existence and the rationality of his or her work. Eliminated at the same time was the symbolic meaning arising from either the subject matter or the method of painting. To China, a country with a rich tradition of painting, these strange pictures constitute a challenge in concept. And the reason for the invention of this technique lies in the artists bitter resentment of the tendency of contemporary Chinese art towards symbolism.

Rejecting “acting,” Yan Lei started to work along a track closer to everyday life. He set up a second-hand store in various exhibitions, selling his own belongings at discount prices to visitors. In this way, he cleansed both his own and his spiritual space (“Second-Hand Store,” 1999); he decorated a dormitory of artists in Hong Kong with pink lights, making fun of those artists state of existence (“Red-Light District,” 1999). In 1998, Yan Lei migrated into Hong Kong and moved five times within three years. As a result of these shifts of his space of existence, demands for spiritual and material space became the main threads of reflection in his real- life and artistic creation. On one occasion he duplicated the frames of the eight doors along the corridor leading from his home to the street, space them a distance apart according to the real distances between the doors, and cover them with military camouflage, forming a flexible passageway resembling a boarding gate (“International Passageway”, 2001). He regards this passageway as a link between the internal and external spaces, and compares it to the “international passageway” he has gone along as an artist from his studio to exhibitions. His works include a monochrome painting with the landscape in the Central Business District of Beijing as the subject matter, which was done by someone he hired; and a floor laid after the layout of his apartment in the Central Business District. By shifting his own life space, he attempts to test new experiences in vision, space and psychology that metropolitan life provides for the individual.

Being a forward-looking artist, Yan Lei pays attention neither to composition nor meaning, but to methodology. He tries to use this methodology to rewrite the weak, monotonous, limited aspects of contemporary Chinese art. All the rewriting proceeds along a basic axis, which turns behavior into action. Consequently art is no longer a reflection of reality, but a means able to change our life and alter the angle of our vision. It is because of such changes that Yan Leis works gained an unprecedented power, which is presented in his freedom of using various fashionable and outdated languages and resources without being swallowed up by them. Faced with various standards and rules, he retains a smile of a vindictive pleasure.

 

Pi Li
Translated by Karen Smith

2007