This monumental and powerful painting of nearly 6 meters in length was one of the highlights in Yang Jiechang's major retrospective exhibition "On Earth as in Heaven at the gallery on the occasion of the artist's 60 years birthday in 2016. The large ink painting "Lifelines 2" from 1999 shows a group of people motionlessly watching some kind of event. Their heads appear like skulls. The artist took this image from a photography showing a crowd watching an execution in the streets of early 20th Century Shanghai. Yang Jiechang is interested in history, in suffering and failure, and, on the aesthetic level, in a raw and immediate appearance. Philosophers such as Karl Heinz Bohrer’s reflect nowadays on the evil as an aesthetic’s category. In his comment on Poe’s Black cat, Bohrer states that “(...) only the terrifying and efficient representation of an evil-like act makes obvious the reflection on its evilness and on its result.” Violence and terrorism would thus become elements constitutive of its claim and its virtues would have an expiatory function and a purifying role to finally engender regenerescence or revival.
Type :
Year Made: 1999, Ink and acrylic on paper, mounted on canvas 90 3/5 × 232 3/10 in 230 × 590 cm This is a unique work.Price :
$60,000.00Category :
Post-War Art