Yibing Huang

Li Bai, a poet in the Tang Dynasty, wrote a poem, Sitting alone in Jingting Mountain, “Birds fly away. The silent cloud stays alone.” I think my works coincide with the poem. Everything passes like birds while only silence stays.

I have been longing for the poetic outside world and harmony, which undoubtedly relates my works to my experience and cultural background. Worringer said, “The opposite side of empathy is abstract impulse, which is realized in the artistic ideas of Eastern nations. The close, all-round and mysterious relationship between human beings and outside world is the condition of empathy. The abstract impulse is the result of the upset mentality caused by the outside world…… Eastern culture always sees the obscure outside world…… Eastern nations’ fears to space and intuition to relativity of existing things are  like primitive nations. Their feelings do not predate their recognition but surpass their recognition……Their happiness from artistic works originates from the extraction of things from outside world and abstraction of these things to make them eternal. In this way, they find a resting place in the flow of phenomena.” [1] An artisitic group in Finland, IC-98, the Hunguarian photographer, Akos Major and the Japanese artist, Hiroshi Sugimoto contributed a lot of artworks inspiring for me. They all flattened their works to some extent. Their layouts and color matches are increasingly simple and their contents are as plain as Easten style. Taking Hiroshi Sugimoto’s Sea View as an example, the only objects are water and atmosphere. He thinks these two materials change the least while the other materials change with time.

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[1]Wallinger：《Abstraction and Empathy》， Wang Cai yong translation，Jing cheng press，2010-8 press，p012-014