Ying Yefu Has What It Takes

 

Long touted as one of China’s most exciting emerging art talents, Ying Yefu backs up the hype with a bold exhibition of ink paintings featuring kung fu and fart power.

 

Occasionally macabre, always humorous, Xianbased Ying Yefu is keeping alive the 2,000-year-old tradition of gongbi painting, which uses highly detailed brushstrokes.

This latest exhibition, entitled “So You Look Like You Got What It Takes”, takes as its theme the new Asian hero – the every man whose toil has led fast-developing countries, such as China, to new prominence on her world stage.

In one painting, “The Decisive Battle On China East Fairy Airline”, a plane has its outer shell rendered invisible, revealing an unusual triptych of battles within.

In each section, or room, of the plane, a “guardian” battles, defeats, or lies in wait for opponents, while below, piles of track suited figures lie prone – previously vanquished by the guardians.

The fatal wind of gossip, meanwhile features a deadly fart impaling an understandably shocked bald fellow. The message seems to be that though the hot air of rumours and innuendo may seem innocuous, they have the power to take down a man with the same efficiency as the merciless guardians of East Fairy Airline.

“Mahjong Corporation” is likewise layered with meaning, as three men wearing a combination of western and traditional Chinese attire, play mahjong while balancing inside boxes of water and on top of the dissected blocks of seabed.

Ying, who calls himself an “art worker” rather than artist, says in his exhibition notes that in mahjong, as in life, you win some and lose some – “people should work out their own salvation when life is up and down” he writes.

 

“So You Look Like You Got What It Takes” on show until 30 April at Art Labor Gallery, No. 411, Bldg 4, 570 Yongjia Lu, near Yueyang Lu. Web: www.artlaborgallery.com