Reimagining Tales: Yang Xiaoyan’s Ink-and-Brush Fantasies
AUG.5th, 2025 - DEC.5th, 2025
Just outside Professor Yang Xiaoyan’s modest study stands a square table, about one meter wide. Originally a high-stool dining table, it has been repurposed into a painting desk, laid year-round with felt and set with brush, ink, paper, and inkstone. Whenever he grows weary from reading, writing, or preparing lectures, he simply swivels his chair and leans over to sketch, seamlessly shifting from word to image. Over the years, this quiet routine has accumulated into a stack of small paintings several feet high.
For Professor Yang, painting is a form of rest. Though classically trained in oil painting at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, oil is not something one can pick up and set down at will. Raised in a household steeped in classical literature and poetry, he carries a unique affinity for Chinese painting among his peers, and ink-and-brush work has become his preferred form of desk-side recreation. As such, it allows for a certain unrestrained freedom—but not without structure. In fact, he often spends extended periods contemplating how to portray a particular subject or theme, until his brush captures the subtle feeling he seeks. His widely acclaimed Scholar Portraits series, which toured several cities in past years, is a case in point. This new exhibition at Y Gallery reveals another long-hidden thread—what I call his more allegorical Ink-and-Brush Fantasies.
The title Reimagining Tales is “borrowed” from Lu Xun, who used it to collect eight short stories that reworked traditional myths. Since then, this otherwise ordinary phrase has come to suggest a peculiar tension. Literary critic Qian Liqun noted that Lu Xun infused his Reimagining Tales with “radical skepticism,” seeing satire within grandeur, and unmasking absurdity within passion. Traditional tales often carry an embedded moral function—they are, in essence, didactic. To “reimagine” them is to unravel that didacticism.
Having taught at the university for over two decades, Professor Yang has little patience for solemn preaching. He embraces, encourages, and embodies imaginative divergence—always questioning fixed patterns and standard answers. That is why I call this body of work Ink-and-Brush Fantasies: not only does it challenge conventional narratives, but it also deconstructs formal brush techniques and aesthetic norms. In these whimsical scenes, Wu Song drinks merrily with the tiger of Jingyang Ridge, while a housecat rolls and howls brazenly before the beast… Through these playful and unexpected juxtapositions, through his mischievous visual tone, Yang opens space for tales to be endlessly reimagined—unorthodox, but brimming with suggestive delight.
After all, only an interesting soul can conjure such interesting images—and attract equally curious minds in return.
