Joan Stanley-Baker , Yin Xin and Asian Art Today, October 1993

“Since the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), contemporary art in Mainland China has undergone a kind of self reassessment. Reaching for a glimpse of the outside world, young artists yearned to learn what their peers were concerned with in Europe, in America, in the countries where the art scenes were, they imagined, more alive, more exciting.

At the same time, as they learned of the intense interest in contemporary Chinese art shown by members of Western academic circles an, increasingly, foreign commercial dealerships, huge numbers of Chinese artists from both the Mainland and from Taiwan came to seek their fame and fortunes in art.

Now art, especially its most readily portable form, painting, became an international commodity. Soon astronomical figures were being paid for works by (or ascribed to) famous recent masters like Pu Baoshi, Qi Baishi, Li Keran, etc. International auction houses began to sell increasingly greater numbers of works by these artists, making their names a new household world for this new ans exciting market. Eventually, auction houses came to devote entire seasonal sale exclusively to the genre of Contemporary Chinese Painting, with separate sessions for Western-style oiles ans acrylics, etc., and Oriental-style ink-based works. Now, in the Far East, along with soaring land prices, the price of art joined the scene as a desirable and prestigious item for speculation.

So now, for Chinese painting, too, collectors and investors around the world are seeking works by named masters, regardless of quality or authenticity, for a piece of the art-market action. Many of the new, powerful buyers of contemporary Chinese painting are these days no longer buying art because it brings them a sense of beauty or spiritual deepening. They buy in order to sell, in future, at a sure profit.

And, of course, art magazine of the glossy type sprang up, full of marketplace news, and advertisements of commercial galleries with their latest discoveries, the bestsellers of tommorow. Taiwan magazines followed Japan’s thirty-year lead in the trade, covering island-wide art activities. Now new magazines with a more international coverage have popped up as well, devoted to art activities of the entire Asian region. Several of these are based in Hong-Kong, and one out of Australia seeking to encompasse the entire Pacific Rim. Published by Westerners for world consumption, and written in English, these international monthlies, bi-monthlies and quarterlies have helped spread the commercial viability fo today’s Chinese painting. It is now clear that recent and contemporary Chinese art is switfly catching up with the Western couterpart in financial clout if not in social prestige among elite circles. But certainly amont the « nouveaux riches », the name Li Keran is as well known as that of Mao Zedong or, for that matter, Willem de Kooning, and is here the stay.

What about the art itself ? What is contemporary Chinese painting ? What, if anything, are people looking for when they invest in a Chinese painting ? And from the side of the artist, what is the modern Chinese art patron like ?

These anonymous buyers have replaced the traditional patron who used to be a known quantity and predictable. They used to be a readily identified as part of a particular social milieu with its particular standards and preferences. Scanning over the past three of four centuries, we can see a stream of patrons emerging, from members of the imperial court who were catered to by representatives of the highly homogenized painting academiy, to officials painting and writing poems in their well-trained calligraphy hand, for their own pleasure and for each other, to members of certain powerful mercantile groups centered in particular regions, such as the salt merchants of Yangzhou, with their preferences for the more flamboyant and creative painters, to the Shanghai and Suzhou clientele with their traditional penchant for the more delicate taste, both in brushwork and in format, and, until the recent commercial boom, post-republican devotees of Chinese painting who have been almost exclusively members of the intelligentsia noted more for their taste then for their wealth. These, curiously, hail as much form European and American academic circles as from China’s own intellectual elite, and are as a rule highly knowledgeable about Chinese history in general, and its art history in particular.

But what of now ? What are the buyers like who now focus on the profitable Chinese painting ? And who are the artists painting for such a market ? Here the scene, it would seem, is as unpredictable and perhaps as full of thrills, musch as the fashion world is for the store buyer. What will next spring’s dominant colours be ? And which will be the moste exciting fabric, the most popular contour, hem-length, shoulder slope, and cut of sleeve ? Who will be the most exciting designer (who will be less expensive but more in demand, turning of the buyer the greatest profit next year) ?

For such and art scene, the end-buyers or collectors get their news and buy their art from dealers and agents who function like store compradors. While the end buyer may originally have wished to own works of art that he can display and enjoy in his home of work place, the kind of art that is mainly stored in the bank vault, or art-for-profit, has recently become more alluring. Thus the direct one-on-one experience of art patron and artwork, is in this new environment reduced to secondary or, at worst as in cases of pure speculation, zero significance. In other words, the art market is more market than art.

And how does this anonymity of today’s patron affect the average Chinese artist, or the Asian artist in general ? The lack of a direct encounter between the patron or his close representative and the artist severely reduces the artist’s sens of his audience, the eye of mind to which he is addressing himself. He no longer knows to whom he is talking, let alone baring his soul. He is aware only of how rapidly or how slowly is market prices are climbing. He also knows, by watching the journals, how he and his rivals are faring in the degree of public exposure by the media. For now, instead of the delight, understanding or appreciation by his tradional friend and patron, today’s artist seeks the most tangible sign of his success form a consensus of unknown collectors, media writers, and speculators.

It is natural for most human beings, including artists, to seek the quickest way to the highest buck, that is, to find the easiest manner or style of painting (and marketing) that will win them the most money, in the shortest time. Such artists therefore rely almost exclusively on the advice of their agent or art dealership, much as a boxer must listen to his coach on matters of training routines and fighting stratagems. The dealer or agent becomes brocker for the new commercial art, advising on colours most clients want for their living rooms, on the most readily saleable sizes, and especially on subjects most suitable for framing. These paint-for-pay artists, who are now appearing by the hordes in the myriad newly established art galleries in Hong-Kong and Taiwan, represent by far the vast majority of fortune hunters whose primary aim, like that of their « clients » is gain. And they depend for the news of the buyers’ tastes, almost exclusively on the art dealer an, indirectly, on the media.

On the other hand, there are also those artits who seek more lasting glory, that is, fame, as masters acclaimed by the highest arbiters of taste and the most critical of art historians. These artists, once established, will become icons of future worship by pundits and art lovers around the world, to be cherished and displayed in museums, and reproduced ad infinitum in art history books. This long and arduous path is by no means assured of success, but its rewards of fame accords with traditional Chinese values of serving one’s clan, making one’s family a name that will be respected and lauded by posterity. This is one sur way in which the Chinese elite have over the past two and a half millennia honoured their ancestors by elevating them postfacto throught their own efforts and renown, and becoming themselves in turn the objects of iconic worship by their own descendants and future generations in turn.

These relatively few artists ar commited to their inner vision, oblivious to physical hardships. Although they alsa watch the activities and successes of their rivals in calibre, and comment on the declining tastes of the time, they have on the whole a basic knowledge of the history fo Chinese painting, reflect upon the standards to which traditional masters had aspired, and are ready to hew their tools, refine their techniques, sharpen their perception, and devote entire life energies to the creation of a personal style that will hopefully be here to stay. Compared to the dedication to their inner vision, market tendencies have little or nos sway on their work, being, for them, more or less beneath contemps, a yardstick for the commercial hack.

These more serious artists are by no means averse to making money. Only money has not been as a rule their primary aim, and had been a secondary testimony to the recognition they are gaining. But they will rarely follow the advice of a dealer and change their working style in order to sell sooner or higher. This is the line that separates the true artist from the commercial painter. For while the one lives in order to paint, the other paints for a living.

But to the average investor-collector, this distinction often does not exist. And for many collectors, it is only the heat of a name that matters, not so much the nature or quality of the work. Especially in Taiwan, it is the zhimingdu, degree-of-renown, that trends to serve as the investor’s yardstick.

In today’s relatively open environment, with its numerous and rather diverse options, we find surprisingly few artists who make the most of their freedom to create truly compelling individual works. One such is Yin Xin (born 1959, Kashgar), whose first one-man show at the National Tsing Hua University Art Center in early 1992 launched his international career.

From that exhibition of woodcuts, Yin Xin has in the following year and a half gone on to hold one-main exhibitions in Beijing as well as in Paris where in a single year he has shown prints and oil paintings in no less than four different exhibitions. Moreover, his works have been collected by National Tsing Hau University, by artists and scholars in Australia, Taiwan and France, and by French museums and libraries. In Great Britain, Orde Levinson of Magdalen College, Oxford, has commissioned a whole edition of Yin Xin woodcuts to be included in a somptuous anthology of prints by printmakers aound the world, in which Yin Xin represents China. The portfolio, The Hope and Optimism Portfolio, has since been accorded the Haut Patronage by UNESCO. For the French journal on prints, Les Carnets de l’Estampe Contemporaine, of 1993, the scholar of Chinese art Christophe Comentale wrote a lengthy essay, « Primitivism et Occidentalism dans l’œuvre de Yin Xin » (Primitivism and Occidentalism in the art of Yin Xin). Moreover, his forthcoming book on Chinese printmakers of the ‘90s, Commentale devotes remarkable space to Yin Xin.

After having had the artist here on campus with us for a year, wer are able to review Yin Xin’s works once more, in another one-man show. But now we look at him as an artist of already some international renown. In the two short years since he had first exhibited in Melbourne, Yin Xin has gone some way toward making a name for himself. And he has done this without compromising his own inner vision.

His work exudes a rugged individuality that is both genuine and compelling. It is not the result of delibarate design to appear different from other artists. Instead, the childlike forms and childish compositions come straight from the artist’s subconscious, nd are unleashed upon the wookblock or canvas in their wild, compulsive and primitive force, unadorned.

People stare out at us, grinning their huge, toothy, icy grin. They go about their bizarre activities quite unperturbed, riding motorcycles, sporting pinwheels, feasting on parts of the human anatomy, gazing in children’s forms at aspects of adult life like spectacles and wine glasses, or embrace and copulation…The world of Yin Xin’s inner eye is bleak, savage and without mercy, though not without its zany, calculating irony and wit. We sense in his powerful images both blunted pain and flattened hilarity, as his space fairly explodes with agonized tension.

Here we do not contemplate the beauty or grandeur of nature, nor the fantasy of fairy people in enchanting colours. Yin’s art is neither of fashionable conceptual puzzles, nor of abstract expressionist combinations. There is nos shared of evidence that link his work to the legacy of Chinese painting traditions, nor to any Western manifestation. Instead, the eternal child in Yin Xin emerges as unobstructed, universal primal energy, and confronts us with a fierce honesty that is as rare. He has the courage to be entirely himself, no matter how absurd or nakedly self-revealing this may appear. His figures are generic human beings, but they do not have racial or social feature. In this they are direct expressions of humanity as Yin Xin sees humanity. In his paintings the colours are mostly in dark and sombre combinations that are sometimes even sinister in effect, as are many of the toothy smiles. The scale and proportions of the figures and buildings or furniture provide his spaces with an incredible tension that matches the wild vigour of the forms in intensity. But then the wildness is subject to an equally maniacal control, so that nothing flies out of place.

Creative endeavours are mirrors of the artist’s innermost sensibilities. By laying bare his soul, an artist is vulnerable to the ridicule and mockery of onlookers, and the long-winded and often distracting exegeses of critics. For this reason most artists cover up, or slightly disguise, their own private, innermost vision with some nod toward the socially acceptable, resulting in many areas of similarities among artists. For many find safety in resembling or in quoting aspects of the famous, respected masters. And for this reason we often confuse artists, mistaking one for the other.

But this is not true of Yin Xin. One glance tells us we are in the world of his innermost, distinctive mind. Moreover, there is no superfluidity in his art, no unnecessary flourish, no extraneous motif. It is with a flendish economy that Yin Xin makes his statements, and it is through this simplicity and economy that he lays bare his inner substance without blushing, without concealing ougth behind decorous gestures. The originality of Yin Xin’s art lies not only in his images and his minimalist approach, but in his remarkable integrity and honesty free of the least disguise.

As he progresses Yin Xin’s work will be subject to increasing analysis by learned pundits. Already the French and English have taken to analyzing his work attributing motives and tendencies. The artitst has no conscious intent to proselytize or to impress in one way or another. He only gives form to inner visions that well up in a rather unaffected manner from the imagination, uncensored by intellectual deliberations. The explanations, the interpretations and the analyses are but projections of viewers who fell, perhaps, that only by dissecting Yin Xin’s art are they able to feel able to cope with, and to share in, its refreshing simplicity and genuineness.

In the end, as Yin Xin the artist maintains his terrifying directness of expression, we may experience each of his paintings of woodcuts in the same way as they take form form inner vision to tangible image, if we also keep an open mind and an unaffected heart. Only then will we experience the full impact most directly, and we will be transformed as we are moved, by the power, the droll humou, and the savage force of Yin Xin’s creative energy. ”