Man of the World
- Source: Global Times
- [08:53 April 08 2011]
- Comments
Lips & tongue
Masses, works of Tie Ying.
By Michael Gold
Conceptual graphic artist Tie Ying's The World is Yours will premiere at +1 Space in downtown Beijing on Sunday. It will be the renowned cultural commentator his first solo exhibition in the capital since his 1994 show at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Tie's alma mater and site of his early training in the chromatic, visually twisted style that has become his trademark.
Drawing inspiration from sources as disparate as classical Chinese art, Tibetan religious symbols, current events and pop-cultural tropes, Tie's work represents a fusion of the familiar and the exotic, the mundane, eerie, the traditional and the innovative. Infused with a strong, stark sense of color, form and movement, Tie's art has seen viewings in galleries from New York to Copenhagen, where his latest show saw him side-by-side with fellow countryman and sculptor Zhou Chunya.
Yet according to Tie, the shrinking of the global artistic community via through modern technology haves rendered cultural differences less and less significant in how his pieces have been are received around the world.
"I think we're always too hung up on cultural differences in artwork," he said in a recent interviewtold the Global Times.
"There are always differences between people, whether you're Chinese or Wwestern or whatever. The most important thing is to use art to break down those artificial barriers."
A common thread in Tie's art sees him alluding to the physical form of the human body in a skewed, warped fashion faces are replaced with plain white ovals, bodies starkly superimposed with Shakespeare quotes, mouths and lips stylized into a near-unrecognizable visual bslur.
Such manipulation of the human body is representative of Tie's overall outlook. "We are living in a conceptual world," he
said, "one in which people are dominated by ideology." "Masses," for example, depicts a birds-eye view of a crowd of people through a prismatic, pixilated lens, imparting to the viewer an unsettlingly Ppanopticon-like sensation of being an unwelcome voyeur on an otherwise ordinary situation. Letting the eye linger long enough over the scene sees the tiny action-figure bodies disappear in a formless mass of lines, light and shade.
"I don't see myself as traditional artist who has a kind of prefect artistic skill that has to be practiced and repeated," he said. "Finding your own vision is the secret code to making good art."
Born and raised in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, the 40-year-old Tie began his artistic journey as a student of classical Chinese oil painting at CAFA, where discovering the work of such subversive vanguards such as Marcel Duchamp exposed him to the subversive and edgy but compelling nature of more modern artistic movements.
Though to the casual eye his current output doesn't bear much input from his canonical Chinese forebears, Tie maintains the supremacy of such painters in his list of top influences.
"In particular [the 17th century Chinese artist] Bada Shanren is my favorite," Tie said. "His painting and calligraphy to me is modern and full of wisdom even now."
Circling the globe with his work throughout the 90s and 00s, The World is Yours sees Tie's homecoming in an intimate setting far removed from the veritable art circus more commercial environs of Beijing's ever-popular 798 Art District.
"Contemporary art has become a money-making machine over the past 10 years," he said. "I decided in cooperation with +1 Space to make this exhibit feel more private and personal, so people can really connect with the entire environment along with the artwork."
Indeed, Tie posits that the power of art truly lies with the audience itself, and that the onus is placed on the audience to share just as much as the artist has in order to experience the work fully.
"That's why I called it The World is Yours." he said.
