55

The autumn wind rises, the rainy night invites cool.

On September 15th, 2023, Gallery 55 will be honored to present Yang Chongguang’s solo exhibition "It’s a cool bull....". The exhibition will feature the artist’s newly created mixed-media series combining live performance, image output and post-painting. The exhibition is scheduled to last until October 25th. This is the second solo exhibition by the artist at the gallery since "Spring is a liar" in 2021.

Yang Chongguang has been active in the Chinese contemporary art scene since the 1980s, and is widely known for his persistent expression and exploration of body image. Through his multifaceted and systematic works, the viewer is able to witness the embodiment and otherness of the soul, and empathize with the confusion and joy, compassion and pain it evokes.

Yang Chongguang’s creative practice often stems from his feelings and reflections on the twists and turns of history and reality, bringing together the memories of individuals, families and collectives, and focusing on expressing the feelings that linger in a world of forgetting and missing, because they cannot be lightly erased and ignored. His vast body of work is filled with symbols of mutilated bodies that float, pile up, bump into each other or crush each other in a never-ending ritual.

In recent years, Yang Chongguang has put his body in the ruins constantly produced by the rapid urban change, like a knight facing the challenges of the "windmill" of the times, directly facing the ruins with a large pen like a rafter, smear the immortal mark of naked life. As an extension of this action, the artist began to shoot the scene of the performance and output the digital airbrush on the canvas, and then paint the second time on this basis, so that different body movements, time and media are superimposed on each other, forming a more mixed level, but unexpectedly vivid and light new work, opening up another aspect of Yang Chongguang’s creation in response to the change of the times.

Yang Chongguang was born in Wuhu, Anhui Province in 1955. He studied at the Brunswick Academy of Fine Arts in Germany from 1990 to 1996 with a Master’s Degree. From 1997 to 2014, he was the director of the Centre for Modern Art of the University of Science and Technology of China, and lectured on the history of modern art. He now lives and works in Hefei, Anhui Province.