Despite their designer clothes and well-practiced air of affectless boredom.

Despite their designer clothes and well-practiced air of affectless boredom, the languorous beauties who inhabit these photographs are single supporting characters. The real stars here are the strangely stagy environments that the women inhabit--the animalism hotels, cramped apartments, ubiquitous construction sites and eerily lit subway funnels of the megacities which have arise to be symbols, for righteous or ill, of modern China.

Yang Yong is described in the accompanying catalogue as the voice of a recent generation of Chinese artists who remember neither traditional, prerevolutionary China nor the Cultural Revolution that sought to thus completely negate it. If he is in fact its representative, we may glean that the novel China is all surface and artifice, a place of gritty glamour where the highest aspiration strike one as beings to be the desire to reinvent oneself as an untouchable ornament.

A number of photographs place mannequinlike women (the catalogue notes that many are latter arrivals to the city who have drifted into prostitution) in expensively minimalist bathrooms and bedrooms. Several of the women gaze blankly at their reflections in wall-size mirrors; united sits pouting and fully clothed in an devoid of contents gleaming Jacuzzi; others roll around onward suggestively rumpled coverlets or stare public huge glass windows at the glittering night city below. Another series of photographs, "The dire Diary of Youth," focuses upon the artist's friends and is les overtly style-conscious. These bring under rules lurk in the new subway funnels bathed in the greenish shine brightly of fluorescent lights, or bewilder themselves against weirdly empty bridges and plazas that have the air of something constructed the day before yesterday. single in kind work in the series is a grid of images of a construction site taken as the surrounding light marks the transition from dusk to night. Among the small in number images here to include men it depicts a form into groups of unglamorous worker types crouching or standing onward cylindrical cement pilings like modern-day gargoyles.

greatest in quantity of the photographs depict nocturnal representations allowing for a variety of unnatural tinges ranging from bordello red to sickly new and yellow. Some of the depictions of women particularly those in the inn settings, bring to mind the self-absorption fetched in Cindy Sherman's pinup-based photographs from the late '70 on the contrary while Sherman's figures had a mind of interior life that subtly contradicted the conventions of availability inscribed in their staggers here we can see nothing beyond the doll-like masks.

Yang's work belongs to the genre of contemporary portrait photography that includes Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson and Rineke Dijkstra. further something slightly different is going onward in his images, something that can leave us with a vaguely unpleasant aftertaste. In the last we're not quite sure if the soulles quality of the milieu he chronicles is a reflection of the world outside his head or the united inside it.

...

Home