The Leap of Freedom and the Possibility of Art Redemption on Yang Wen’s Abstract Art

In a conversation supposedly titled “Art is a way of life,” Willem de Kooning said that what fascinates him was making something that he could never be sure of, and that no one else could be sure of. He would never understand, and neither would anyone else. This is the “positive nihilism” recognized by artists from the perspective of their own creation, and the uncertainty contained in it is just verified in another dimension of the development of modernity – the art market. As a very important part of modern art creation and life experience, the relationship between the artist and the market, in fact, often constitutes the source of the artist’s dilemma, and it is this point that also constitutes the possibility of the development of free spirit.

Olav Velthuis’s book Talking Prices: Symbolic Prices or the Market for Contemporary Art made an in-depth study of the uncertainty of the Art Market. One memorable anecdote is that the early 20th-century Dutch art dealer J. H. De Bois took a self-portrait by the 19th-century Dutch artist Matthjs Maris in his suitcase on a trip to Switzerland. De Bois came to show the painting to a collector and sell it at an ideal price. Arriving at the Swiss border, De Bois was accidentally picked up by the authorities. The customs officers examined the painting carefully and decided to impose an import duty. De Bois then realized that he did not have enough money to pay the duty on the painting, because it was expensive, although the price was uncertain. At the same time, the customs officers drew a scale, calculated the duty according to the weight of the articles, and charged De Bois 13.5 francs — a negligible sum.

For all its dismay, customs also represents what Velthuis called a “pricing script for determining the value of material goods”. Clearly, there have been many different pricing scripts in art history. In Italy and Northern Europe, where artists were not rewarded for their originality until the 16th century and where the original concept itself had not even taken off, people were used to buy art copies. However, when the artist’s personal skill is introduced as a determinant of value, it leads to difficulties that cannot be accurately measured. This difficulty does not exist when pricing for material or graphics-related factors, that is to say, the change in pricing models from tangible pricing scripts to intangible pricing scripts based on artists’ skills introduces great uncertainty into the art market.

In the post-Cultural Revolution era, China has experienced three decades of rapid economic growth and rapid changes. With total sales estimated at 11.2 billion euros, according to a 2015 study, China has become the world’s second-largest art and antiques market after the United States and it is far and away the world’s largest emerging market for art and antiques. In his preface to the Chinese version of his book, however, Velthuis makes clear that despite its similarities to the Western art market, China’s art market is not entirely a product of learning from the West and globalizing. In fact, the global model has never been fully adopted in China. There are several notable differences between the Chinese and Western models, such as the relative lack of an independent, authoritative, non-commercial third party to determine the price of art in China, as well as a strong commercial gallery industry. This makes it difficult for Chinese artists to obtain exclusive gallery representation and promotion, which is the mainstream practice in the contemporary European and American art markets, or to get opportunities to show their work in independent institutions to advance their careers. In other words, on the one hand, the Chinese art market preliminarily establishes its own “legitimacy” through the “imitative isomorphism” of the European and American art markets; on the other hand, the differences between the Chinese and Western art markets clearly indicate that cultural and social and political factors lead to the immaturity of the Chinese art market. If Chinese artists were to rely on this fragile market, their works would be in a more uncertain situation than their Counterparts in Europe and the United States. At the same time, this situation also means that contemporary Chinese artists are facing more arduous challenges on their way to freedom from the constraints of economic necessity. This road to freedom is undoubtedly a “glorious thorns road” full of dim sparks.

In fact, according to Robert Hughes, Mark Rothko was not good at dealing with anything other than painting, especially money, which was one of the things he feared most and was least able to handle. What Rothko represents is the group of painters that characterised their time: abstract expressionists, confined deadly to a framework in which they could never hope to make money, most of whom, before 1950, could not even imagine an audience of a few dozen people for their work. Hughes does not see this as a good thing for artistic creation. He has a scathing critic of the American contemporary art market and argues that it affects their sense of authenticity as artists and as people: it is deeply intertwined with their distrust of material success. Indeed, even as he rose to fame, Rothko was still ill-equipped to deal with the fog of uncertainty in the market.

For a long time, Yang Wen upheld the artistic law of free exploration and defied the market and commercial operation. Under the circumstances of the great development of the art market promoted by neoliberalism (although its construction is still weak) and the social mainstream’s pursuit of material and the extreme decline of spirit, this kind of self-sacrificing art exploration is almost miraculous. Contempt for the market naturally led to exile from the market. Yang Wen lived an ascetic and simple life for a long time, which was in sharp contrast to the strong and spiritual will in his paintings. It is worth noting that in the past two years, his paintings have begun to undergo some changes: in addition to the changes in the size, the subjects of his paintings have gradually presented more reflections on the reality of the age (such as the works in the solo exhibition “Therapy” in 2020). No longer living in an either-or binary confrontation, Yang Wen is still wary of the market’s endless power of coercion and penetration, but he has learned to open up his experience through a mixture of asceticism and play. He experiences and learns the great uncertain force of the market in silence and makes it his basic experience of modernity. After all, the market is supposed to be the driving force of art, not the vanity fair of capital orgies; Respecting the law of the market, incorporating the law of the market into one’s own experience, and steadily advancing the art career in the antithesis of modernity of profession/Beruf is also the embodiment of the free spirit of modern art.