The great sculptor Yang Ying-feng, known as Yu Yu Yang, has been dead for three years now, but casting an eye around the world, we find his monuments everywhere. Examples include "Phoenix Scales the Heavens" on permanent display in the Beijing Olympic Sports Center, "East West Gate" a stainless steel lifescape sculpture in front of the Orient Overseas Building in New York City, a series of marble sculptures entitled "Peace and Prosperity" at the Mandarin Hotel in Singapore, the monumental stone and stainless steel sculptures for the Kasumigaura Golf Course in Tsukuba, Japan (including "Birth," "Growth," "Cosmic Encounter," and "Source of Life"), the giant statue of Guanyin in Taipei's Ta-an Forest Park, and the sculpture series "Ancient Musical Artifacts" at the National Concert Hall in Taipei. Yu Yu Yang's art works cross international borders and express global values. A man who experienced repeated high tides in a lifetime of many changes, he vowed to himself never to waver from his own artistic vision.
This new book, both biographical and critical, fleshes out the details of the life of this master sculptor and goes beyond that to provide a fresh outlook on the essential spirit of Chinese and Western sculpture philosophy and fine art.
Perhaps this new book should be called "A Critical Appraisal of Yu Yu Yang," for in it the author Zu Wei does not confine himself to merely telling us about the life of Yang Ying-feng. Zu Wei comes from mainland China. He graduated from the Nanjing Institute of Architecture but found his true calling in literature. After leaving China in 1989 he settled in Paris where he is now a reporter and columnist for the United Daily News publication Europe Journal. He met Yu Yu Yang in 1993 in connection with an article about the French Contemporary International Art Fair (FIAC)'s 20th Anniversary Exhibition. The two men became engrossed in animated discussions about modern art and made plans to publish some of the ideas they'd discussed as a dialogue, in a similar vein to the Analects of Confucius.
In this new book Zu Wei employs a fictional narrative style which transcends time and space, life and death, and invites the classical artist Michaelangelo, and Picasso, a leading figure in the modernist movement, to engage with Yu Yu Yang and the author in a series of conversations and debates exploring and attempting to answer the questions of modern art: What does art actually do? And what is it about art that makes us enjoy it? In the process they also bring into clearer focus the position of Yang's work in the spectrum of Chinese/Western, and Classical/Modern art
Yu Yu Yang was born Yang Ying-feng in Ilan on January 17, 1926, and died October 21, 1997 at the age of 72 at the Fayuan Temple in Hsinchu. His style name, Yu Yu, was taken from a line in the Book of Songs. ("Yu Yu cry the deer, as they eat the wild duckweed.") The Yang family, originally from Fujian, migrated to Taiwan and engaged in trading for several generations, becoming a prominent family in Ilan.
But although born into a distinguished family, Yu Yu Yang's own life was full of setbacks. His father, Yang Chao-hua, and mother, Chen Yuan-yang, operated businesses in Manchuria and Beijing, and only returned to Taiwan once in three years. Yu Yu Yang dealt with the feelings aroused by thoughts of his mother by responding to the beautiful and enchanting landscape of Ilan. It was not until he was 13 that he was finally reunited with his parents.
Yu Yu Yang's marriage was not ideal. At his parents' behest he married Li Ting, a maternal cousin, while still young. His pursuit of an education was a troubled one, marked by hardship. He was a student at four different universities-in the Architecture Department at Tokyo Art School, the Art Department of Fu Jen Catholic University in Beijing, the Art Department at Taiwan Normal University, and the Sculpture Department at the National Academy of Art in Rome-yet he never obtained a single diploma. "As far as I was concerned, formal study was something I was just not destined for," Yang lamented.
His path may well have taken him wandering from place to far flung place, but it also propelled him into the inner world of the mind, and into probing the deep inner parts of his heart. His third daughter Shih Kuan-chien says of him: "My father was a very reserved and self-restrained person, but while he experienced so many ups and downs in life he was able to overcome his great anguish and transform it into a creative force. His works express joyful engagement, unhurriedness, inclination to do good, and an inner harmony."
Tracing the sources of Chinese art and sculpture, Yang was highly talented in a wide range of media, including paper cutting, woodblock prints, oil painting, inkwash painting, sculpture, and laser sculpture. Tracing back the artistic threads in his work one can discern how deeply he was influenced by the extensive and profound complex of Chinese culture and the Buddhist carvings of the Wei and Jin periods.
Yang acknowledged this himself. "I've seen through Western civilization's trends towards disintegration and disorder, and so what informs my creative work is the quintessence of the culture of the Chinese people, a culture which has been cultivated and developed for 5,000 years. In particular, I take inspiration from the period of the Wei, Jin, Tang, and Song dynasties, when Buddhism entered China."
In September 1946, Yang passed the entrance examination to Fu Jen Catholic University in Beijing. On a trip to the Yungang Grottoes at Datong, he found himself overawed by the more than 51,000 stone carvings of the Buddhist world, stretching for a kilometre through 53 grottoes. He became aware of how vastly different the Buddhist carvings in the Yungang Grottoes were to ancient Greek sculptures: the East emphasized tranquillity, capturing the essence, whereas the West stressed unrestrained energy and realistic depiction. Western figurative art considered the human body as a geometric form, an approach which culminated in the cubism of Picasso, whereas the Wei and Jin carvings of the Buddha give the human figure a sense of life and their forms embody and evoke a sense of more of life's elements.
"Yu Yu Yang reinterpreted where the sources of Buddhist carving lie, discarding the idea that the Gandhara style was influenced by Greek sculpture, replacing this with the round healthy face of a Chinese person as the model, which is far more in keeping as a model for the aesthetic principles underlying Chinese sculpture," the former director of the Palace Museum, Chin Hsiao-yi wrote of him in a paper.
Yang spent a period of six years immersing himself in the ancient capital Beijing, a setting steeped in Chinese culture. "This was the happiest period of my father's life," his daughter Kuan-chien remarked.
During his creative life, as fate would have it, Yu Yu Yang had the chance to visit three great repositories of art: the Yungang grottoes in the 1940s, the Palace Museum in the 1950s (when it was still in Wufeng, Taichung County), and the sheer paradise of Italy's religious art in the 1960s. He also had the good luck to study under a number of special people including one of Rodin's disciples, and the master sculptor and educator Asakura Fumio, who is honoured with the title of "the father of Japanese sculpture." He studied Eastern life aesthetics with Yoshida Isoya, and oil painting with Kuo Po-chuan, an expert on the French impressionist school, and met the great inkwash painters Chang Ta-chien and Pu Hsin-yu, from whom he sought advice about the finer points of traditional Chinese painting.
Yang was the first artist to use stainless steel and huge slabs of rock to shape lifescapes imbued with the imposing grandeur of great mountains and waters. Great in their imagery, composition, creative scope, and their expression of compassion, Yang's lifescapes express a vast breadth of mind and boldness of spirit. These pieces established lifescapes as an art form.
Yang's lifescapes (jingguan yishu) are quite different to Western landscape art (dijing yishu). They emphasize the unity of humanity with the environment. Elaborating further on the concept behind her father's work, Kuan-chien said, "The word for lifescape is jingguan, where jing signifies the outer manifestation and guan refers to inner perception. The creative artist transforms the form of the outer world into lifescape images; the art work becomes a vehicle for the viewer to understand the artist's intentions and thoroughly grasp the work's inherent message, leading to a merging of the artist and the viewers' hearts and minds."
Opening this new biographical work, over 400 pages long and comprising some 120,000 Chinese characters, which took seven years to complete, the figure and ideas of master sculptor Yu Yu Yang spring to life fresh before your eyes, under the author's deft touch.
Yu Yu Yang gazes straight at us, dressed in traditional black Chinese clothing. Has he really gone?
It seems not.
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Title: Lifescape Harmony: The Master Sculptor Yu Yu Yang
Author: Zu Wei
Publisher: Commonwealth Publishing
Publication date: October, 2000
Price: NT$380
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The photo shows Yu Yu Yang in his Chitung Street studio, working on a copy of an ancient Buddhist sculpture. The work illustrates Yu's hope for a renaissance for ancient sculpture. (courtesy of the Yu Yu Yang Foundation)
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In this bronze work, "Evolution," Yang evokes the awesome power of nature. It combines the beauty of nature with a reference to the flowing inclusiveness of Chinese culture. (courtesy of the Yu Yu Yang Foundation)
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