The Mermaid’s Nightmare

-Understanding Yang Yu’s Painting Art

Author: Shiheng Ge

Yang Yu, a vagabond in the roaring city who was trying to find himself, was also a soul saver floating in the rootless world. As a young man devoted in art, he holds the belief of “I am happy about what I choose” and faces the world with a pure mind. His art describes the inner feelings of the contemporary world and the people in his specific way and perspective.

Yang Yu had paid attention to death and soul ever since he was a student. This tendency was vividly shown in the early works. His understanding about death and soul was explained in Death is Beautiful created when he was a student. Facing the torment of death and soul, people do not appear calm and beautiful any more. They become extremely panic because they are hypocritical. At this time, it is the hypocrisy of these people that was twisted rather than the facial expressions. Yang Yu started to challenge the other side of human’s nature.

Following this road, Yang Yu started creating the ink-wash drawings Behavior ELLE in 2000 using iron tower and girl as the characteristic symbols. We could see a beautiful girl and a grand iron tower from far away but when we got near the painting, we see that the girl was twisted and strange rather than beautiful. The iron tower was smaller too. A girl with ambiguous and dull expressions and an exaggerated small iron tower which was out of shape make up a strange fable of the city. These works lasted until 2004 and were potential foreshadowing for the creation of Mermaid Series.

At last, he chose mermaid as symbol. But it was not the mermaid in traditional meaning. It was the mermaid in variation combined with contemporary scenes to be the art symbol. Yang Yu used it to reflect the impractical prosperity and repressive life at the time.

The nightmare of the mermaid had come again. People in the city got completely lost and purchased shortsighted utilities. They do things against their conscience just for a living. Contemporary people were helpless, empty and painful in the nightmare but they did not want to wake up from the mirage in it.

For Yang Yu, what he truly wants to express is the real life and feelings of contemporary people. He said: Mermaid is a transformation for the art symbol. I feel the floating living conditions of the contemporary people through the hard process of the pursuing of art. The symbol of mermaid exactly matched the theme. Her melancholy, her beauty, her loneliness and her fear, all these things came from the self understanding and analysis of contemporary people and of course, it was also my self analysis.”

The fairy tale of the mermaid was an inerasable childhood memory. But the beautiful imagination was smashed by the cruel reality on the road of growing up which was full of frustrations. In Yang Yu’s works, human or mermaid might be the witch, the sea sprite or the ghost. It overthrew our visions and concepts and established a new ideal after the deconstruction of traditions. From Submarine Castle to Cat Fish, what we see are souls that wish to be saved.

Beauty is only one side of the mermaid. From Submarine Castle and Flower Ball, we could clearly see that the mermaids were beautiful. In the other works such as Ghost and Sea Girl, we could not only see reflections on the beauty, but also a guilty shadow hanging over. This shows that contemporary art contained multiple elements and the essence of the contradictions of traditional rebellions. The symbol of mermaid not only carries the happiness, nice and real things but also carries pain, ugliness and illusions. The latter one is a kind of pleasure transformed from pain rather than pure beauty. It might be closer to the essence of objects and discloses the world more deeply.

Yang Yu tends to describe a sea world, especially the animals with a sharp sense of touch such as jellyfish, fish and octopus. All of this potentially indicated the sensitive and stressful nerve of contemporary people. Through Yang Yu’s works, we seem to feel something more important: the unremitting exploration on the nature of life and meaning of existence.

The loneliness caused by other people passing away as well as the happy time of childhood along with the imaginations was getting far as time flows. No one can get back the already lost laughters and tears. Childhood will no longer be back. Only the pale soul was left wandering in the endless submarine sea.

There was a helpless ghost in the dark corner of the sea acting in a moving drama, the ghost sang a sad song and danced sentimentally. It had no intention or consciousness, all it had was a panic expression. And it was exactly the pain and desperate status that established the true world. It had criticism and introspection in itself. We listen to Afternoon Garden describing the painful memories and the Whirlpool of Life was playing the melody of life and death.

Where does dignity lie in life? Is it the belief in humanity itself or the faithful oath to the ceremony? The bridal veil of the Evening Dress and Sea Bride answered all the questions in silence. What his works reveals is not only the true descriptions of the life of contemporary people but more importantly, he is trying to reveal the nature of humanity and think deeply about the meaning and value of living beyond life.

Wandering along the edge of life and death, floating on the boundary of real and unreal, struggling between the inner contradictions of sufferings and happiness, Yang Yu’s works reflect the contradictory living status of contemporary people and the embarrassment under such contradictions. Spring Under Sea is a complex of the contradictions: Dark sea bed with bright spring, lively flowers with pale and rotten body, beautiful decorations with ugly face. The works of Yang Yu shocked your inner heart, what is it that gets to your acute nerve? It’s the subtle The Mermaid’s Nightmare which cannot be refrained from continuing.