Tang Contemporary Art is pleased to present “Disorder and Coexistence,” a major solo exhibition by Yuan Yunshengon at 4 p.m. on October 31, 2025 at its Beijing 2nd Space. Curated by Cui Cancan, this marks the artist’s first exhibition at Tang Contemporary Art and showcases creations spanning more than five decades of his prolific career, featuring over thirty oil paintings on canvas and works on paper, as well as more than ten painted porcelain plates.

 

Glimpses into the Art of Yuan Yunsheng

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I.

In 1979, Yuan Yunsheng returned to Beijing after more than a decade of displacement and joined the landmark mural project at Beijing Capital Airport. That same year, his work Water-Splashing Festival—An Ode to Life constituted a seminal moment in the history of Chinese art, signaling a decisive break from socialist realism and heralding an era of modernist experimentation and expressive liberation.

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Yuan's extensive career encompasses a remarkable stylistic plurality, from Yunnan ink sketches to airport murals and expressionist paintings. Each phase marks a critical turning point in the evolution of modern Chinese art. Given his profound influence, Yuan’s oeuvre and legacy remain enduring subjects of scholarly inquiry.

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This exhibition refrains from a mere restaging of that celebrated "1979 moment". Instead, it excavates the peripheral narratives—the subtle preparations, slow preludes, and subsequent developments, those ostensibly “minor” episodes. The selected works focus on the years surrounding 1979.

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In the early 1970s, while in Changchun, Yuan painted a series of still lifes and landscapes. Within a tense social atmosphere and a dominant realist paradigm, his vivid palette and “unimportant” everyday subjects appeared strikingly unconventional. A work like Floral Cizhou Ware Vase is instructive: it reveals Yuan’s sustained interest in the visual language of Impressionism and Modernism, his reverence for Chinese cultural traditions and artifacts, and a celebration of life, where each blossom is imbued with vitality. A similar spirit can be seen in Changchun Botanical Garden, where vines climbing a trellis radiate an untamed vitality, metaphorically piercing circumstantial constraints like sunlight and reflecting the artist’s personal yearning for freedom during a difficult period.

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In the summer of 1972, as the long northern winter thawed, Yuan’s yearning for renewal seemed to resonate with the landscape. In Changchun Nanhu Park, he depicted swimmers and visitors enjoying leisure under the sun. The subject and painterly language aligned e

ver more closely with Impressionism. Rather than static scenery, Yuan captured fleeting moments of modern leisure, akin to the vignettes of Manet or Seurat: people playing in the lake, lovers meeting on boats, families sharing an afternoon. Such depictions of urban recreation were rare in 1970s China and artistic vision of modern life.

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By 1978, as social conditions loosened and publishing industry revitalized, Yuan was invited to Xishuangbanna for on-site studies by Yunnan Fine Arts Publishing House. The three resulting Yunnan Sketches served as a direct prelude to the Airport Mural. The ethnic costumes, layered textiles, and Dai festivities provided an ideal conduit for Yuan’s modernist aspirations and for the revitalization of Chinese line drawing, heralding new expressive and allegorical possibilities.

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Sketch of Yunnan Plants No.3 reveals the artist’s deeply local-centric practice—how he learned from plants, rainforests, and nature itself, constructing a spiritual metaphor for life. The intricate, intertwined roots and stems evoke a symbiotic rainforest world.

This sense of organic growth offers a metaphor for Yuan’s artistic development throughout the 1970s, culminated in the Airport Mural. His trajectory can be likened to an inverted tree: the delicate branches represent diverse stylistic explorations; these seemingly “insignificant” experiments nourish the trunk, which grows robust and rooted. Sustained by the soil of history and a profound connection to place, Yuan’s synthesis of modernity and national identity found its definitive expression in the Airport Mural.

 

II.

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A celebrated masterpiece not only establishes an artist’s position but also, in subtle ways, codifies public expectation.

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In 1979, audiences were captivated by the lyrical beauty of Yuan’s Airport Mural, which seemed to crystallize his artistic language. Yet life of a human resists linearity. It is multidirectional and dynamic, sustained by inner tension. In 1980, Yuan revealed a different energy beyond the Airport Mural: wild, untamed, and rebelliously self-affirming—a more incandescent and primal light within his creative vitality.

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Works such as Love and Song of Life (1980) depart from the meticulous deliberation of large-scale murals, embracing a freer, more spontaneous mode of expression. This relaxed, improvisational character is epitomized in Yuan’s painted porcelain plates, executed with fluid confidence and vitality. In these works, speed becomes a gateway to the unexpected, allowing the subconscious to guide the hand.

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These ceramics echo the creative spirit of Picasso and Matisse. They are rhythmic dances of form and color—unrestrained articulations of life. Yuan's three early core convictions emerge from these 1980 works:

1. 1.Vitality transcends geography and ethnicity.

2. 2.Art knows no national boundaries, capable of synthesizing Western modernism with Cubism, and Fauvism while remaining rooted in Chinese mural and ink traditions

3. 3.Artistic media are inherently fluid; whether it is mural, oil, paper, ceramic, or ink, each can be a potential vessel for artistic freedom.

 

Vitality, however, is not always graceful. At times, it demands surrender to pain and intensity. The ink paintings Juvenile and Lovesickness reveal another side of Yuan’s art—the restless turbulence of desire and the ceaseless struggle between passion and restraint. These works foreshadow his mature ink paintings and expressionist turn; they encapsulate the central tensions of his practice: between expression and abstraction, tradition and modernity, national and western, personal and the historical—all of which would erupt fully in the 1980s and 1990s.

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Suspended high within this exhibition space, the only recent work included—Love and Compassion (2015)—presides over the narrative below, serving as both witness and quiet culmination.

 

III.

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In early 1982, Yuan Yunsheng departed for the United States. Prior to his departure, he published Return of the Soul—Reflections on a Journey to the Northwest, which articulated his longstanding preoccupation with the relationship between art, the individual, and the nation. The ideas in that essay became an enduring framework, serving as both a touchstone and a point of contention during his years abroad, and providing a critical vantage point from which to observe the West.

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This section begins with Disorder (1980). In it, traces of Cubism and Cézanne intersect. The sense of “disorder” recalls the fragmented reproductions of Western art in poorly printed Chinese magazines. For Yuan, a true understanding of Western art would begin only in America. From initial acquaintance to deep comprehension and critical reflection, he required time and the perspective afforded by direct encounter.

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In 1982, Yuan visited the studios of Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, George Segal, Robert Rauschenberg, and others. These encounters provided him with an intimate understanding of their conceptual motivations, making him one of the first Chinese artists to engage directly with the postwar western art.

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His extensive museum visits during this period afforded him a comprehensive grasp of Western modernism’s genealogical development. His 1985 sketch studies explore line and narrative tension, while his 1990 pastel drawings investigate rhythm and color structure. These exercises reveal how Sorrows (1994), though related in spirit to Disorder (1980), achieves a far more mature and authentic expression, executed with a mastery that engages the Western modernist giants.

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The works Time, The World, and Ninefold (1989) epitomize Yuan’s synthesis of Expressionism and Abstraction and mark the maturity of his American period. He treated painting as an act, with each gesture embodying a different mental state. Yet throughout, Return of the Soul remained his internal compass, enabling a critical dialogue with Western modernism from a position grounded in Chinese civilization. Even his titles reflect this duality: Ninefold evokes Eastern cosmology, while The World transforms a classical Chinese worldview into a metaphor for life’s flux on canvas.

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Yuan’s artistic path was cyclical. He viewed the West through an Eastern gaze and reimagined the East through Western forms. His path was a dialectical engagement: in the 1970s, he longed for modernism’s liberating promise; in the 1980s, he dedicated himself to uniting Chinese tradition with Western form. Many works were revisited over decades. Admiration (1991–2015) stands as testimony: across twenty-four years, interpretation continually reshaped interpretation, and yearning continually refined yearning.

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Yuan’s intense creative drive often eclipsed recognition of his theoretical contributions. Yet his writings profoundly influenced Chinese art discourse. From On the Nationalization of Oil Painting? and Return of the Soul to later essays on Mexican muralism or on how Picasso, Matisse, and Pollock rooted their innovations in history, Yuan explored how artists draw power from their cultural ground. These theoretical inquiries were inextricably linked to his practice, transforming historical exemplars into a usable past for his own artistic project.

 

IV.

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For decades, “modernism” and “formalism” have been considered the hallmarks of Yuan’s art. Yet works like The Glutton and Card Game (2001) reveal his complexity. In these paintings, tinged with a grotesque realism, Yuan reflects on American consumerism. The scenes—marked by indulgence—depict human desire through distorted figures and swollen bodies. These charged compositions lend contemporary reality a theatrical intensity, forming what may be described as Yuan’s unique form of magical realism.

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Through these works, Yuan maintained a sharp awareness of social and moral reality. Life in America shaped not only his visual language but also his thinking about modern life’s contradictions. These predicaments address his enduring concern with the human condition, exploring how expression and theatricality can reinfuse modernism’s formal language with renewed moral force.

 

V.

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In the exhibition’s final gallery, two groups of works stand side by side: Yuan’s ink-on-paper paintings from the 1990s and his recent oil-on-canvas works. Together, they reveal the artist’s enduring aspiration to move from the pursuit of nationalization toward a broader civilizational awareness, seeking a synthesis within a shared humanistic space.

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The juxtaposition of these two series, separated by more than two decades, invites reflection on contrast and balance—abundance and reduction, intensity and calm—all central dialectics in Yuan’s artistic journey.

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The early 1990s ink works remain accumulative and expressive, continuing the dialogue between Expressionism and Chinese painting. Though their lines originate from tradition, they possess a raw power that transcends literati refinement. The tangled lines multiply with primal energy. Yuan sought to infuse the charged spirit of Expressionism into Chinese landscape, rupturing its formal and moral conventions.

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In contrast, his 2017 works embody deliberate reduction. Lines are restrained, emotions subdued. In his later years, Yuan relinquished complexity, embracing the beauty of incompletion and allowing space to breathe. He appears to return to origins—to the simple yet resonant lines of western ancient sculptures he once encountered, to the poetic mountains, rocks, and rivers of his memory. The grand oppositions of nationalization and civilization recede into serenity. In one work, a small train winds through mountains, carrying a sense of childlike wonder. Much like the late works of Picasso, Yuan’s late style achieves a clarity born of simplicity.

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As a curator, even after several collaborations with Mr. Yuan, I always remain deeply curious about artists born in the 1930s, whose personal destinies became intertwined with the fate of the nation. Why did their artistic paths remain inseparable from the themes of Return of the Soul and collective renewal? How did they shoulder both the modernization of oil painting and the weight of cultural inheritance? In his essay Impressions on Contemporary Western Art, Yuan wrote with humility and conviction: “I place my hope in the future of Chinese art. It will be a gradual process, but one thing is certain—in this world, we should not always walk behind others.” Perhaps his own words offer the most fitting closure: “Let us return to the source, immerse ourselves in our own culture, soak in it, roll in its mud. Let a sprout grow from this ancient soil, nourished by dew and rain. It will be tender, warm, and worth cherishing.”

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