Yang Shaobin @ Alexander Ochs

Yang Shaobins works are provocative. They touch the spectator and don’t allow him to remain indifferent towards what is shown to him. Why is that so? What is so agitating, so exciting about his paintings?

Everybody may understand at first sight, that certain illustrations probably can’t be displayed within an ecclesiastic frame.

Hence it was finally not possible to show Yang Shaobins works to the “Ten Commandments” within the space they were actually created for – the church of St. Matthäus in Berlin. The paintings are now exhibited in the rooms of Alexander Ochs’ Berlin gallery for the first time.

No doubt: Yang Shaobins works are provocative. And yet his paintings ultimately reflect exactly what can be seen on the television screens in living rooms throughout the world, day by day. Pictures of violence. Injustice. Frailty. Cruelty. Pornography.

Yet, in the context of art, all of this admittedly gains a special meaning – and becomes a challenge for the spectator.

Yang Shaobin likes to show us the less stunning sides of human behaviour. Unvarnished. We are confronted with our own fallibility. Our vulnerability. This is precisely what constitutes the tremendous provocation, but also the power of his paintings.

The artist works on the substructure of familiar images. We can perceive short-takes from television reports, newscast, but also pornographic scenes. Their original context remains perceptible and gives them a semi-documentary character, at the same time exposing them as products of an artificially created, virtual reality.

In the context of art – and even more so in a churchly sphere – these images initiate something in the spectator, that he arguably wouldn’t have experienced in the same way within his own living-room.

In his early works Yang Shaobin already frequently mediated a feeling of uncertainty and of harassment that he consequently also takes up and makes noticeable in his very personal, artistic interpretation of the Ten Commandments.

Reverting to videostills of television-pictures he shows us human beings in all their fragility and weekness (Untitled 2). In addition, a feeling of loss and precariousness is communicated to the observer in the fact, that the artist deprives him of any image-titles which might serve as an orientation guide. It is up to the spectator to decipher which specific commandment may have served as reference point for each and every image.