Yang Yongliang (b.1980, China) - On the quiet water - Heavenly cityYang Yongliang is a Chinese photographer and painter from Shanghai. He originally studied traditional art at a young age and this training has greatly informed his current practice. The images above come from a series based on Shan shui paintings. These type of paintings stem from a history that goes back more than 1,500 years ago and the images often depict scenes of natural landscapes and beautiful scenery. It’s a tradition that demands a rigorous set of requirements in the hopes of creating the perfect combination of balance, composition, and form. Yang Yongliang’s digital manipulations are clever in their inversion of the imagery of Song dynasty painters and he has created works that are themselves visually attractive. His cold, hard urban images possess a layer of romantic beauty with their mists and towering forms. By making his works “beautiful” he has managed to make them much more than a mockery of modern life. Instead they subtly pose the difficult question of whether urban life can be simultaneously loathsome and possess an intrinsic beauty. Yang carefully made these riffs on Southern Song landscapes because the earlier works have long been regarded in China as a sublime expression of nature’s beauty and mystery. Are Yang’s images meant to be taken as expressions of a city’s beauty or of the terror of urban encroachment. Fantastic rediscovery thanks to OFOTO Gallery.