DRAWING on INSTINCT

In artist Su Yang's mind, people's lives look pretty much alike on the surface, the biggest difference is the perspective from which each person sees the world.

"An image is seen differently by different people. Music, painting, or any other type of artwork, is just a reflection of different feelings toward the world," he says.

Su shared the story of his transformation from a folk rock musician to a painter, and his thoughts on life and the arts at a salon held last month at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) Yinchuan, in the capital of Ningxia Hui autonomous region, where his paintings are on display until mid-March.

The exhibition, titled Spatio-temporal Configuration — Contemporary Reproduction of Historical Cultural Elements, invites 19 groups of artists, including Su, to display installations, paintings, videos and other media works, and features 66 exhibits in total.

It discusses three topics — the Long March, a military maneuver carried out by the Red Army from 1934 to 1936, the Great Wall and the Yellow River.

Zhao Ziyi, curator of the exhibition, describes Su as an artist who fits the theme "the Yellow River", insofar as quite a lot of his music, painting and writing all present the feelings between people who live along the Yellow River and in the Yellow River basin.

"His works have strong vitality and provide visitors with a distinctive experience," Zhao says.

Born in Wenling, Zhejiang province, in 1969, Su moved to Yinchuan at 8 years old. He fell in love with guitar in 1985 and formed his band "Arc" five years later.

A representative folk rock musician, Su worked hard, improved and deconstructed both traditional Shaanxi opera, northwest folk music and modern music, creating a new musical language through the theories and techniques of Western modern music.

After releasing several albums and winning multiple music awards, Su has been busy with concert tours.

In 2016, Su launched a multimedia exhibition project named the Yellow River Runs Forth, which combined multiple art forms, including music, painting and video.

In the two years before the launch, Su got to know many folk singers in Northwest China and collected documents pertaining to folk songs of the region. He tried to understand the folk-culture gene in modern people and present it in artistic ways, such as concerts, exhibitions and sharing sessions.

An exhibition was held in a gallery in Manhattan, New York, in September 2016. Apart from the United States, Su also took the project to Brazil and Colombia.

Alongside the music, painting has been an important part of his life over the past couple of years. Su says the tools he uses for painting are commonly found on construction sites.

He sometimes uses a shovel to smash the colors onto the canvas, and other times, he uses his body. By making a connection between his body and the canvas, Su finds his unique style of creativity.

Su's paintings are instinctive and very much integrated with his feelings. Like his music, his paintings have an original, untamed power, even though he has no formal training in painting.

Su hosted his first painting exhibition in Haihui Modern Art Museum in Zhengzhou, Henan province, in August 2022, during which he exhibited 50 paintings created from 2020 to 2021.

Zhang Xi, founder of the Modern Art Museum Shanghai, connects with Su's instinctive art style. "When I look at his works, I feel his creation has a raw power rooted deeply in some part of his life," Zhang said at the salon.

"He is like Dutch artist Christiaan Karel Appel (1921-2006), who exerts his natural sensibility to the extreme and removes the cage made by rational techniques," Zhang said.

Besides painting and music, Su is also considering installation art and sculpture, as he tries to keep pushing himself forward.

"I'm not in a rush to define myself, and I care more about continuously exploring my cognition, perception and possibility. To this day, my understanding of myself is still changing," Su says.