A recent MFA graduate from The China Academy of Art, Yang Xu is a pupil of Chen Danqing. He works predominantly in oil on canvas, drawing inspiration from motion pictures, photography and still life.

Unlike his contemporary counterparts in China, Yang Xu art does not have political undertones or explores dogmatic ideologies. In comparison, Yang Xu merely wants to portray, with his brush, people or objects in an unbiased and simplistic manner. It is also with comparison, that Yang Xu chooses Western icons, like Charlie Chaplin & Audrey Hepburn, instead of the over-exploited image of Chairman Mao in contemporary Chinese art.

Motion pictures are essentially repetition of still images. In YOU WON’T BE ALONE, Yang Xu strips away the mass production, or repetition, element of motion pictures by highlighting a particular motion sequence from film. Yang Xu paints frame-by-frame, bringing light to initial insignificant flashes of moments that we miss because of the monotone of repetition. The viewer immediately recognizes that the works are not meant not to be static, but to be viewed in a sequence. This viewing of artworks is very much similar to viewing traditional Chinese scrolls, where the viewer moves from one scene to the next by physically unrolling the next section of the scroll.

In the painting ‘The Great Dictator’ Yang Xu paints a motion sequence from a Charlie Chaplin classic, The Great Dictator, 1940. At first glance downwards the sequence, viewers are mistaken by the seemingly Adolf Hilter’s image but suddenly taken aback when Charlie Chaplin invokes his unmistakable comical facial expressions. Yang Xu captures this moment of plot-twist from his motion sequence works.