Still Life and Landscape 13
Yang Zhenzhong
杨振中
Production date
2017-2018
Object Detail
Media
oil on canvas
Measurements
121 x 121 cm
Notes
Yang Zhenzhong’s ‘Still Life and Landscape’ series of paintings are images appropriated from official press photographs downloaded from the internet. These interior scenes of conference rooms and meeting halls were repainted by a number of anonymous painters hired by the artist to reproduce them. Apart from the occasional ambiguous part of a hand or foot, or the legs of interpreters and secretaries taking notes in the background, all the figures have been removed. Thus, the canvases become still life paintings featuring stiff flower arrangements, lidded teacups, water bottles, microphones and the kind of official armchairs used in formal meetings between high officials or heads of state. ‘Still Life and Landscape #27’, for example, has its source in a photograph of Deng Xiaoping meeting Margaret Thatcher in 1982. The subject of their negotiation was the handover of Hong Kong and its return to Chinese sovereignty. Each image in the series is bland, and the low resolution of the original newspaper photographs has been preserved; blown up onto large canvases, their poor quality, blurriness, soft edges and digital ‘noise’ are emphasised. The edges of the canvases are painted with borders that mimic the selection tool in Photoshop, suggesting they are about to be edited – or censored. When exhibited as an installation, the grey and white grid on the wall behind the canvases comes from Photoshop too: it’s the checked pattern denoting a blank background layer. What part of the image is ‘still life’ and what part ‘landscape’? Critic Lu Mingjun says, ‘Yang Zhenzhong intentionally preserved the traces of the image editing process to reappraise the process of editing, broadcast and circulation of images, as well as how this editing, broadcasting and circulation happen.’ These quasi-political images are the background landscape of the contemporary world. Such ‘poor images’ traverse the globe at lightning speed, in the service of different political agendas and various forms of ‘fake news’. Yang suggests there is no such thing as ‘truth’, despite the ubiquity of the apparatus of surveillance.
Accession number
2018.048