Bing Ye

Ye Bing is a visual artist primarily working with the medium of photography and print making. Raised in a family of master sword-makers, Bing’s early training was pervaded by the values and ideals of craftsmanship that have pervaded traditional Chinese culture for centuries. Learning to cast and temper metal, and to carve wood in relief and in the round, were integral parts of this formative process.

As a student at the Chinese Academy of Arts in Hangzhou, Bing specialised in printmaking, not only focusing on the poetry of iconography but also becoming proficient in the ancient techniques of paper- and ink-production, tool-making and the making of movable type - an experience that involved travel to workshops all over China.

Bing’s preoccupation with photography emerged organically from this background. While photography is increasingly becoming a means of digital image production, it is rooted in the tradition of printing and, as a result, has inherited many of its traits. Bing’s work arises where these two thresholds - from the past to the present and from the present to the future - meet.

My recent work, produced as an MA student at the RCA, has focused on the meaning and significance of the notion of nature. Most immediately, it resonates with the Chinese tradition of landscape painting on silk scrolls. In this tradition, the significance of humanity in the context of the natural world is often reflected in the diminutive size of figures in the landscape. The intense craftsmanship of these paintings is carefully displaced into the ‘craft’ of developing the images which I painstakingly undertake by hand: managing tone is akin to managing ink.

Despite its foundation in tradition, my work also quietly questions the conventions of contemporary art. For instance, my interest in the displaying of art works resists accepting the irrelevance of texture and size that is implicit in the mediation of images on computer screens (to the point at which an art work does not actually have a size). On the contrary, the size of my work and the way I display it, is intended to lift the experience of viewing it above mere data transmission to a level at which it becomes a physiologically embodied contemplative act.

I also explore the notion of ‘meaning in nature’ via the association of landscape with calligraphy. The resemblance of the structure of some rock formations to script raises the possibility of ‘reading’ the landscape, or - more simply put - of analysing it in the greatest detail, thereby inviting the viewer to avoid a quick impressionistic glance at the work (such a pervasive mode of engaging with modern media) in favour of a more enduring and contemplative experience. The calligraphic potential of the work is magnified by limiting myself to black and white.

While my work is closely related to Chinese craft traditions, I am also interested to set up relationships to artistic traditions elsewhere. The scale of my largest works taps into the same feeling for scale that made the action- and colour-field paintings of the Abstract Expressionists and Calligraphers (eg. Franz Kline, Yūichi Inoue) so immersive. In this context, I aim to reach the point at which the familiar and representational dimension of my subjects crosses a threshold of recognisability and legibility, whereupon they become abstract and, in a sense, meaningless. In keeping with the aspirations of ancient Chinese painters, I see landscape and nature as a veil of meaningful forms that both screens us from the ineffable, but also, in an accountable moment of insight, reveals it to us.

Ineffable #1

Ineffable #2

Ineffable #3

Ineffable #4

Ineffable #5

Ineffable #6

Ineffable #7

Ineffable #8

Ineffable #9

Ineffable #10

The group of works assembled here were taken over a two-year period during travels. Together they capture aspects of nature that fascinate me: the variations in the rates at which the forces of nature unfold - from aeons to moments, in rocks, ice, leaves and flowing water; the relationship between the force of gravity and the composition of an image, especially as manifest in vertical axes, which can give can an image the dignity, restraint and strength of an icon.

Medium:

Photograph, Carbon archive print, Zerkall fine art paper / Gelatin silver print on paper

Size:

76 x 64 cm / 20.3 x 25.4 cm; 24 x 30.5 cm; 88 x 88 cm

Legible Mountains

Menhirs

My Series Works reflect my interest in distilling the essence of an image, by articulating what a number of comparable forms may have in common at the expense of their variable and contingent elements.

Medium:

Photograph, Chromogenic print on paper

Size:

30 x 30 cm (each image)

— Image 1: Fusion of two images, seen through a stereoscope; Image 2: Stereoscope with dual image; Image 3: Stereographic photograph, Underwood & Underwood, 1905

Normally stereoscopes are used to make two-dimensional photographs look three-dimensional - by superimposing them. In my experimental stereographic works, I adapt the idea of layering images to suggest and evoke the various different ways in which images can be read and interpreted - for instance, at a purely physiological level (in which case they may seem to be abstract) or semiologically (in which case they can be regarded as linguistic forms).