Yangjiang Group: Yangjiang Group

Yangjiang Group was founded in 2002, its members include Zheng Guogu, Chen Zaiyan, Sun Qinglin, and its focuses on Chinese calligraphy as its medium to create contemporary art.

For Yangjiang Group, The reality of the contemporary world for them is a living piece of calligraphy. Chinese characters have the power of reflecting the changing world and also to incorporate the unknown forces encountered in life, calligraphy writing can thus naturally be transformed into a unique contemporary art practice: I calligraph therefore I am.

In these chaotic and displaced social contexts, Yangjiang Group’s writing often becomes illustrations embedded with certain metaphors of the reality which aims at indicating the unpredictability and ‘xuan-ji’ (contrivance, mystery) in life. There are no determined elements or forms, but only ever changing, ever new forms. Calligraphy can be integrated with the ubiquitous heterogeneous social activities: news, gambling, football, clearance sale… Time and materials are transformed into an integrated tableau for calligraphy via the joint fermentation of the quotidian, alcohol, tea and discourses.For example, in the work Meal is Over, the artists turned an ordinary household dinner into a spontaneous theatre, the leftovers became the key material to create calligraphy. Food integrates with art , as an experiment to connect spirituality and the materialistic world. The content of the calligraphy worked as a motto to reflect the relation between human activities and the surroundings within the process of the performance.

Calligraphy works as a metaphor for Yangjiang Group to indicate the unpredictability, the mistery the chances hidden under the surface of a materialistic and confusing world. The very occurrences of life itself influence the art form of Yangjiang Group by offering a wide spectrum of diverse experiences, with which the artists have each time to engage through a different response, according to their perception of a certain tendency of energy.