Follow My Heart Rather Than Principles
--Yang Fuyin and His Paintings

                      Yang Fuyin said he finished painting over 1000 pieces pre year. From day  to night, he worked perpetually 
                      in excitement. And inspiration visited him in  the midst of work. The covert and unexpected will reveal itself. 
                      However, his  paintings can not bring one such feeling, for his works are not the product of  practice but of
                      imagination. Painting, especially that of water and Chinese  ink, calls for copying and practice. Yang Fuyin 
                      reads a lot, and reading is his  favorite habit. His reading covers a wide range. Though he does not 
                      specialize  in art theory, he frequently quotes from others. Especially when he talks about  his works, 
                      almost every brush can allude to some predecessors. If one listens  to his talk about painting, one is 
                      impressed that he is a bookish scholar.  However, such impression will totally change when one takes a
                      look at his  paintings, for his works are both modern and experimental. 
                      I get to know  his experience from our contact. Yang was my art teacher in primary school. He  graduated 
                      from a teachers’ school then. I remembered how he taught us to draw  eyes: it would not do to draw the 
                      obverse side of the eye in place of its side  view. In 1970s when he was still a middle school teacher, he was
                      famous for  drawing. I watched his realism works on exhibition. When I went to seek advice  from him in his
                      working place, the 18th Middle School, he could not  recognize me as his student, and he told me to work 
                      more on sketch and accumulate  more life experience. In 2000, I went to visit his exhibition in China Art   
                      Gallery and I was  impressed. The gross impression was that he bad farewell to realism and  developed a 
                      new style. Maybe it is more correct to say his style was shaping.  He absorbed a lot of techniques for 
                      celadon landscape and created an atmosphere  of solitude, while concealing his skills in the elegance of 
                      images. I feel he  is trying to find a new expressive tool by getting rid of the fetters of the  traditional 
                      landscape. Such an endeavor is not for a fixed style; it tries to  find self by destroying the old style. He
                       makes use of celadon landscape  techniques to get rid of the traditional procedure, and to return to 
                      humanistic  nature. It takes a lot to do that. Yang Fuyin has vast experience of creative  work, and he is 
                      deep-rooted in traditional training. However, such training may  also hamper one’s creativity for any new 
                      move may work against rules. How to  create one’s own style? How to express in my own language? Such
                      questions are  not concerns of many artists. How Yang took these questions, I have no idea.  But I know he
                      wanted to shape his own style and shake the shackles of the  traditions. 
                      There should be  many reasons for a successful artist to seek to have some change in his style  at the 
                      prime of his career. Or there is some gene for change in his blood, or  there are some life upheavals behind 
                      such attempt. “In my memory, the real Changsha is a city of  pebble streets and houses made of boards
                      before the “Wenxi Fire” in 1937. I remember  when I was young the rain always came at night, knocking 
                      doors and windows made  of board. People wearing clogs bumped by the pebble street, leaving the clear 
                      and lingering sounds behind. I was always overwhelmed by such a scene.” The  above is an excerpt from 
                      Yang’s essay, detailing past episodes and memories.  His solitude can be seen among the lines. The 
                      foreign place is where he lost  himself; the real settlement is in the dream. “The present Chinese painting 
                      has  long been divorced with taste. With the lively and buoyant style being  forgotten, only old procedures 
                      and dry and uninteresting techniques are left.  Even “li” is reduced to the degree of similarity. ” Such is 
                      Yang’s comment.  Painting is Life, and life is like painting. Some paintings are reduced to  uninteresting and
                      lifeless techniques. Taste is the element of life, which can  not be produced by any rules or procedures. 
                      Yang’s essays are full of life, as  if he wants to dissolve all the frustrations in the paintings into fragrant 
                      memories of the na?ve past. However, to seek life in paintings, one should  first decompose the old 
                      procedures. Regulations alienate people in them, and to  step out of these regulations is like getting away
                      from the rules. Only by this  can the freedom of life and one’s self be realized. His essays are not merely  
                      memories, but lost boyhood of pebble streets and board houses, just as he tries  to unravel the mist of 
                      painting to find his own style of expression.
                      Another look at  his paintings will show that he has gone far beyond us. His works are not Chinese 
                      paintings defined in a traditional sense. With all the traditional elements  reserved, he innovates the medium
                      and procedures; therefore, he finds the  original language and his self at one swoop. His way of painting is
                      rather weird:  first put the rice paper on a huge piece of glass board, then brush the paper  with light 
                      Chinese ink, begin to work before the paper is dry. It does not take  too much stretch of imagination to 
                      imagine how hard it is to work this way. Under  this circumstance, it is easy to lose control of the ink, but 
                      such danger also  breeds new possibilities. To deal with such new possibilities is also a sort of  control. His
                      paintings involve the control of the ink and lines. While he holds  the traditional front, he tries to realize the 
                      command of form and image, and  to achieve surpassing the tradition in such a conflict. Nevertheless, he
                      never  talks about modern art. His art theory is all about tradition, and he alludes  to past critiques of art 
                      and literature. Any attempt to innovate tradition is  sure to be a sort of modernization. 
                      Yang Fuyin  calls his portraiture as anti-line drawing, which not only heirs the essential  elements of line
                      drawing of portraiture but also emancipates the functions of  this technique. Line drawing is bound to win
                      independence from its object. He  attributes three functions to line drawing: to partially express the object;
                      to  have its own independent aesthetic value; to make contribution to the planar  build-up of the whole
                      painting. The third point carries the flavor of modern  art, and it really finds its expression in his paintings. 
                      Comparing his latest  works and those in the 1990s, we can see that those in the 1990s make use of  line 
                      drawing in a traditional sense. Take the “Note Series” as an example. Though  the portrait may be 
                      subjectively distorted and the lines achieve some degree of  independence, lines still depend on the form 
                      and the potential function of the  title still controls the reading of the picture. His latest works display  
                      different characteristics. Despite the hint conveyed by titles like “Mother and  Son” or “Man”, the main 
                      purpose is to keep the objective linkage between  abstract relationships. The line drawing relationship is 
                      comparatively  confined, i.e. line drawing achieves independent aesthetic value while it  exists among the
                      interrelationship between lines, which should be confined by  the objects. Thanks to the experiment of 
                      media, the lines should be drawn  quickly on the wet paper, and the traditional taste of lines lessens. To
                      a  certain extent, some traditional procedures diminish. Lines only roughly depict  the form. The beauty 
                      of lines is expressed by their relation, or to translate  it in terms of modern art, by the structure of lines. 
                      The objective elements still  play important roles, or rather, anti-roles, for the stillness of man and the  
                      dynamic lines form conspicuous contrast. The structural relationship between  short lines and long lines 
                      is realized by the different forms of the objects (for  example, the big figure of the mother and the small
                       figure of the son) or by  the ratio between trunks and limbs of a figure. In most works, the effects of 
                      Chinese  ink are downplayed by the wet paper. The ink distributed evenly in one spectrum  also stays in
                      contrast with lines. It sets off lines, or rather the form of  lines than the single lines, while it is dissected by 
                      lines and achieves  contrast with the blank space formed by lines. Such is the effect of what Yang’s  third
                      function of line drawing. For paintings of birds and flowers, the objects  require more than portraiture,
                      because birds, fish and frogs should carry  distinguishable features. This challenges his new technique,
                      for it is hard to  control ink by the dissecting and building of the structural relationship between  lines and
                      form. His way out is to use colors boldly. His colors are different  from the spilled colors of modern water 
                      and ink. They have their concrete  referents. Stony pigment has certain degree of density, and will not 
                      distribute  evenly like ink on wet papers. Therefore, it has comparatively distinct  boundary, forming the 
                      natural outline of the object. Yang Fuyin makes use of  this feature. The pigment on the paper gives a 
                      rough image of the lotus leaf,  thus the objective special relationship is established while it forms a  
                      contrast with the lines, just like the ink does. Nonetheless, his is rather  cautious about colors. He never 
                      uses bright colors. The chocolate and dark  green mixed with ink, by their grave and harmonious hues, 
                      keep the essence of  water-and-ink painting.
                      Yang Fuyin  admires the lotus leaf by Qi Baishi. “The overlapping of the two lotus leaves  over water and
                      in water overlap makes all theoretical, creation and  appreciation problems evaporate.” He said that the
                      techniques of Qi Baishi’s  paintings fascinated him, but it is the taste in them that overpowered him. As 
                      he sees it, taste is more crucial than techniques, because techniques are  always confined by rules, and 
                      taste can only show up by breaking these  confines. His lotus leaf, as well as his portraiture and 
                      landscape, is full of  taste. However, he pays a dear price for this taste. The innovation in medium  and 
                      hard work helps him break the confines of techniques and find his taste  back. In many of his paintings 
                      of bird and flowers, he likes putting a fish at  the bottom, which is the technique of “Bada Shanren”. It is
                      like a traditional  symbol freely swimming in his taste and mixed in his special style, which is  also an
                      indication that he comes from the tradition.