Liao Yibai’s Vision and Symbols

I

Liao Yibai’s angels first make me think of Oscar Wilde’s children’s book The Happy Prince. The statue of the prince looks down on the suffering of mankind, and in that suffering he expends himself. Aside from the big happy ending where he enters heaven, there is no happiness to be seen in the book. It is a tragedy, or more accurately a book of grief. The happy prince is truly a tragic prince.

The similarities between Lia Yibai’s art and Wilde’s literature are not just in form. Wilde’s dejection and tragedy unfolds in a carefully crafted script. Just looking at The Happy Prince, the language is pure and translucent, and the text is full of delight. It is the literary equivalent of a Turner watercolor.

Liao Yibai’s paintings are the same. He is “sickly” entranced by the details of lighting, especially with refraction and reflection. Light could be seen as his first theme – he has named his paintings Ordinary Light, Ordinary Fire, Reflection and Shimmer. Overall, one could say he’s got his sights set on light.

Light, which bears little relation to form, belongs to color and brushing. It is the realm of Turner and the Impressionists that followed. But Liao Yibai is definitely not reproducing an objectivity in his paintings, but defining a symbolic world. Behind the symbolism are the 19th century European traditions that found new life in bestselling books, films, pop music and fashion in the nineteen nineties. It is also in the tradition of modern literature from Republican Era Shanghai all the way up to 1990’s urban literature. In Turn of the Century Magnificence, Zhu Tianwen uses intricately colorful descriptions: “shrimp red, salmon red, linen yellow, milfoil yellow. The sky goes from pink to dark green, and right before the curtain falls, a fire lights out on the horizon, the roaring city afire.” This is the sky she saw through Monet’s eyes, but this description can definitely be used for Liao Yibai’s paintings.

The key is not in the surface painting language, but in the deeper cultural construction: In cultural history, dejection, aestheticism and symbols have always had a deep tripartite nature. They are both a mental state and a cultural indulgence as well as an artistic concept. This tripartite body also appears in Liao Yibai’s works, so we must set them against a backdrop of dejection, aestheticism and symbolism to perceive and understand them.

They have this deep cultural pedigree. In appearance, Liao Yibai’s works bear a familial relation to the painters of previous generations – that angel with the giant head and frail wings should be the offspring of the Cyclops, while the gorgeous colors and intricate brushwork are descended from Gustave Moreau.

II

The tide in Chinese contemporary art is towards starting out with an eye-catching form, and once that form has become a recognizable sign, turning it into sculpture. The object of this is usually to open a market and provide more levels of service for the galleries and collectors. Liao Yibai also makes both paintings and sculptures, but not because of the market, but because of an internal artistic path of reasoning.

His working method and the ideas behind it are truly special: make a 3-D model, virtually sculpt it, make it in stainless steel, take a photo and turn the photo into a painting. He is a transmedia artist in the truest sense, not just in that he makes both animation and film as well as painting and sculpture, but more importantly in that he has blazed a hidden trail that runs between these media, setting off a dialogue and shine between these media.

There is a conscious line running between his paintings and sculptures, which is his infatuation with the visual, more like his infatuation with appearance. Ever since romanticism, the feel of sculpture was reborn. One important method for manifesting the feel is with light, in that under the light, the feel becomes more apparent. This feel departs from the form and spatiality of the sculpture, as we can see in the sculptures of Rodin. After modernism, with the application of the new material feel of stainless steel, the relationship between sculpture and lighting could become closer, but sculptors were either buried in pure spatial games (like David Smith), or used stainless steel as a conceptual symbol of industrial culture (like Jeff Koons), while we seldom see aesthetes who look right at the visual properties of stainless steel.

Liao Yibai’s sculptures can be seen as a special case. To emphasize the visual aspect, he even uses an acetylene torch to burn scars onto the sculpture. These marks have nothing to do with form or space, and nothing to do with concept or implication. They are purely for visual effect.

This visual aspect has been brought a step further in his paintings. He first transfers them to photographs, taking close-ups of certain areas, splitting the sculpture into frames. When he transfers them into paintings he uses colors and brushstrokes to bring the visual aspect out fully independently. The full visual is a setting-aside of the will, a temporary dispelling of the subject, changing into a compact notion, hypnosis.

It is because of this that the infatuation with the visual is an infatuation with appearance. Of course, true dejectionists like Oscar Wilde do not see appearances as appearances, or they think that only appearances are reliable, and what lies outside of art, outside of the script or the frame, is what is fake. The true reason that dejectionism is called dejectionism is because of doubts about the primary position of the absolute truths and values of our civilization, which is also the intellectual background for the marriage of dejection, aesthetics and symbols.

III

In the end, we must return to symbols. Symbols (象征), from symbolism (象征主义), not sign (符号). A sign is a unit of a system of indicators, and in this system, signs carry the burden of expression and exchange of meaning. Therefore, signs are social, realistic and moreover conceptual. But symbols are entirely different.

In ancient Greek tradition, parting friends would break a piece of pottery in two and each would take one. Many years later, the descendents of the two would use these pieces to lay claim to their intentions. That half piece of pottery is a true symbol. If we say that signs indicate meaning, then symbols indicate a lack thereof, and hint at what is not there. In this sense, symbols are a call, “a call to that eternal order that can be restored” (Gadamer).

Therefore, symbols always occur where reality is deficient, and symbolism always emerged in the historical periods where reality was deficient. In the mid 19th century, spiritual discord caused a split in the pottery of the world, and symbolism became an option for bridging between the split.

Overall, there is not need to explain the significance of Liao Yibai’s works, or his contextual implications, because his works are not signs, they are symbols. The angel in his pictures with the head drooping like a drop of water, the reflections on the head and the wax that is about to burn are not part of reality’s system of indicators, nor any system of indicators. They only represent themselves.

Their maker, Liao Yibai has the same resolute attitude. He stands independent in this deficient reality, and is wholly different from those who cover reality’s deficiencies.

Bao Dong
August 16, 2007