Majestic Momentum - Yang Chihung
Majestic Momentum - Yang Chihung
Curator: Wang Shaoqiang
Academic Support: Yin Shuangxi, Wang Duanting, Peng Feng
Artist: Yang Chihung
Organizer: Guangdong Museum of Art
Supporting Organizer: Asia Art Center
Date: Apr 4, 3 - May 5, 2019
Venue: Guangdong Museum of Art
Asia Art Center is pleased to announce the Opening of Majestic Momentum - Yang Chihung at Guangdong Museum of Art on April 3rd, 2019. The exhibition marks a sequential milestone peering shrewdly into the artist’s expansive oeuvre since his solo exhibition at The Ueno Royal Museum, Tokyo, in 2015. The organizer of this exhibition is Guangdong Museum of Art, Asia Art Center as the supporting organization. Wang Shaoqiang is the curator, and three scholars: Yin Shuangxi, Wang Duanting and Peng Feng as academic support. In the display are: more than twenty pieces of monumental-sized paintings, drawings and historic documents including letters, manuscripts, photographs and print publications from the 1970s and 1980s; overall, the curation retraces the sophistication of Yang’s artistic creation toward the abstracted realm.
Yang Chihung was born in 1947, in Taiwan. After graduating from the Taiwan Academy of Arts (now Taiwan University of Arts), he emigrated to the United States of America in 1979. Yang is the first artist of Chinese descent to be awarded a fellowship at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center National Studio Program in New York. His pioneering works soon landed him the Outstanding Asian American Artist award in 1989. Yang Chihung’s artistic career spans over photography, prints, sketching, ink, ceramics, paintings and other fields. The core of his practice is stemmed within his explorations into the meaning of life. His art has journeyed through a course from figuration to abstraction: from his earliest reflections on self-existence, then came criticisms of urban civilization; he ventured into post-modernist expression of romanticism and symbolism when he first emigrated to the United States before beginning a series of abstract paintings with the theme of botanical aesthetics in the 1990s. After the year 2000, he started to delve back into spiritual explorations of the inner world.
The monumental-sized paintings displayed in this exhibition are full of vivid vigour and majestic momentum, showing the overtone and poetics of Eastern aesthetics. Yang Chihung's profound understanding of Chinese calligraphy has subliminally inspired his abstract art creation, which manifests an Eastern expression connoted of intrinsic essence and spiritual harmony.
In addition to being an art creator , Yang has also contributed tremendously as an art disseminator. His book New Trends in Modern Art, published in 1987, provided in-depth introductions on the newest theories of western art and inspired lots of artists. In 2013, Discovery Channel invited Yang as the representative artist of painting to documented his artistic achievement in the program Chineseness, was broadcasted all over the world. His works have been collected by many important institutions such as The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Huntington Art Gallery, Arkansas Art Center, The City University of New York, Singapore Art Museum, the Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Guangdong Museum of Art, etc. Yang's art creation over the decades has revealed his dialectical thinking about abstraction and figuration, the East and the West, the tradition and the present. These thoughts have become the backbone of his characteristic aesthetics, as well as consolidated into an influential art career.
