Rooted in traditional Chinese painting, Yang Yongliang's art turns his landscapes landscapes to transpose them to the Anthropocene era. The eye first sees Song-era mountains, only to discover that a tangle of skyscrapers has replaced the rocks, and forests of cranes and electricity pylons cling to their flanks. Yang Yongliang, who lives between Shanghai and New York, takes the codes of shanshui - "landscape", "mountains and water" - in the opposite direction, reconstructing a world where urbanization and excessive industrialization have become the norm. As metaphors for modern life, his black-and-white digital photographs subtly reveal a world that is being consumed, as in his 2007 installation Cigarette Ash Landscape, which is highly topical.
By Sophie Reyssat