The Pearl River Delta of China is seen as a site where national and personal mythmaking collide in the latest exhibition by Yang Jiechang, titled King of Canton. Running the gamut of artistic mediums – from painting to video and sculpture – the show reveals the Foshan-born, Paris-based artist’s uncanny versatility in traversing very different modes of working while maintaining a consistent and singular vision.
The cornerstone of this display is Self portrait – King of Canton, a miniature stuffed toy animal draped in regalia that bobs and yodels on command with the press of a button. An adjacent video features a horde of these in action. Their confident strangeness, no doubt brought to the forefront by a somewhat sinister looking mask covering their faces, gives this sculpture an uneasy bite that goes against easy description. The exhibition’s highlights are the ink paintings, in which Yang gives age-old material a subversive kick with his irreverent and fearless ink handling. Two large paintings of the show trace the outline of the Pearl River Delta region like a map, inscribing into the territory squiggly mountains and iconic traits of the area, from being the birthplace of Sun Yat-sen to the home of Macau, China’s capital of hedonism. Yang’s ambition for his place in art is deftly revealed in the epigraph of one painting, borrowing a phrase from German artist Joseph Beuys, another outsized talent for prodigious times: “La rivoluzione siamo noi,” or “we are the revolution.”
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