Zhang Yunyao at Musée Fenaille

By Ludovic Laugier, Curator of Louvre Museum, Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, for exhibition catalogue

"Winter 2021, February 15th. Zhang Yunyao ambles across the deserted halls of the Musée du Louvre in our company. We go toward the salle des Caryatids to find the Tortured Marsyas, an antique sculpture with a poignant expressivity, an incarnation of pain, that represents one of the most tormented faces of Greek art. For the past few months Yunyao has been working on a diptych of drawings on felt based on this antique model. This project belongs to an ongoing series of large works based on iconic statues from classical antiquity or the Italian Renaissance, such as the Laocoön in the Vatican or Cellini's Perseus with the head of Medusa. This multi-year undertaking has been shown in numerous solo exhibitions of the artist: in Hong Kong in 2017, in Shanghai in 2019, and finally in Paris in 2020. These works give pride of place to the effects of layering and matter. The material texture of the models, whether marble or bronze, are somehow reproduced without the artist succumbing to the temptation of ultimate illusionism. The texture of felt, which replaces the canvas in his work, muffles the quality of the models' surfaces, and creates instead a formal distance, in the depth of which Yunyao's subjectivity resides.

Go picture the tortured Marsyas as such…But on the way, we stop in front of a completely different work, of a diametrically opposed aesthetic: the head of Kéros (n°68), a stripped back depiction of the human figure, atemporal and essential. We begin discussing the upcoming exhibition 'Idoles' at the Musée de Rodez, of Cycladic and Anatolian statuettes, and the role of artists in the first half of the 20th century concerning the reevaluation of these long disregarded prehistoric antiquities. We evoke the ways in which these refined forms may have consciously or unconsciously inspired Picasso, Moore, Modigliani, Giacometti, Brancusi, or Arp. Yunyao remembers the interest he took in these phenomena while a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Shanghai. Two days later, an entire wall of his studio is already covered in studies: the head of Kéros seeming to dominate his attention. Gravitating around that sculpture are statuettes by Jean Arp, a ready-made by Picasso, heads by Brancusi and Modigliani. By spring, Zhang settles on the idea of superimposing the silhouette of 'Mademoiselle Pogany II', created by Brancusi in 1920, on the head of Kéros. The seeming transparencies compel the viewer to adjust their gaze to make out the interlacing curves of both subjects. The models' original textures and the matte effect of the felt surface contribute to the optical play induced by Yunyao's work. The piece is titled 'Inception'; it articulates in its own way the affinities between the avant-garde art of the 20th century - symbolized here by Brancusi's figure - and the minimalist forms of Cycladic art incarnated by the head of Kéros."

The original article was written in French and first published on the exhibition catalogue, IDOLES. L'art des Cyclades et de l'Anatolie à l'Âge de bronze, Edition of Musée Fenaille, 2021, p. 204-207