DSL Magazine: Issue 6

In his performance Realism (2011), Yan confronted another approach to art, that of surrealism: standing around a 3.5-meter plaster replica of the David by Michelangelo, seven actors, including the artist, whisper, recite or exchange on the topic of the Surrealist manifesto by André Breton (1924). The artist, who is also a singer, plays the role of the initiator of the debates and shares with the others his own reflections upon art, challenging the notions of Beauty in various cultures and defending, beyond any ideology, the idea of the sublime in art. The whole scene offers itself as a ritual in which actors take ownership of the words of André Breton. His work raises the issue of art as an instrument of power, a crushing, sometimes alienating weight to bear, art being constantly instrumentalized by cultures and ideologies. His installation Dirty Act II and II (2013) inspired by Edward Hopper’s Drug Store (1927) presents itself as two pharmacy cupboards, each containing nine television screens. Extracts from the films of Pasolini, close-ups of a bonsai or of a kiss, are displayed and all these shots give the artist a diarrhea, as he says himself. The pharmacy cupboards are there to supply medicine against this indigestion of images, re-used and re-exploited in the name of the dominant ideology. Like Pasolini, whom he frequently quotes, Yan Xing is at war against the standardization of thought and against a discourse about art which has become a system. In the background lies the issue of teaching and transmission of the history of art: for Lenin in 1918 (2013), a glass case containing fake paintings by Mondrian, Cézanne or Malevich in black and white as well as copies of antique sculptures, reproduces Lenin’s imaginary drawing room. Could these pale replicas of masterpieces have been used to give a foundation to Russian revolutionary power? Are these tokens of an endangered species which should be preserved or, to the contrary, of a dangerous species against which we should protect ourselves? Each of these works thus becomes, potentially, an instrument of power that we must know how to use and analyze. Yan Xing, REALISM, 2011, performance and installation Exhibition view, courtesy of the artist and Urs Meile Gallery