Foreigners call the Chinese art showing up since 1990s “big face school of painting”, which means it focuses on oil painting and attaches importance to the faces of the characters. Paintings of Yangna can be included in this school although she has just begun her career. What is different is that as a female painter, she especially paints female images and has different focuses from many male painters.

 

    Yangna intentionally paints the characters with very big heads and very small bodies. They are somewhat like aliens in science-fiction movies, having special traits of cartoons. This kind of design is liked by the Chinese artists in the computer age. Despite representing high intelligence quotient in science fiction, it often symbolizes mental deficiency in reality. Intelligence and stupidity are contradictions. It is obvious that today’s young people do not just have happy spending and cruel youth. They are often confused in face of personal psychological conflicts.

With the intention of tracing out the perplexed life, Yangna virtualizes the character’s image. The head portrait like plastic toy not only resembles the prototype, with a sense of duplication, but deviates from people’s subjectivity. The narrative heroines have nothing definite to express no matter whether they are gazing at you with wide open eyes or refusing you with closed eyes. They are in your sight, vivid and weary, beautiful and empty. This kind of lonely resignation and resigned loneliness is astounding in visual feelings. You can neither blame them for they do not defy you nor identify with them for they do not care about your identification. Therefore, you can only face the pretty, beautiful and gorgeous feminie. In the silent gaze, you can feel the power of fate: externalization, foreignization and alienation. Whether you surrender or struggle to free will be your own thoughts.

 

    Yangna’s works are good at griping people’s visual attention by bright and grandiloquent partial portrayal, and then reasonably add the narrative description, quietly implying people’s psychological state by properties, poses, gestures, etc. This kind of decorative depiction of details arts the picture up and tallies with the dollish appearance, enhancing its spirit of nihility. It also brings certain readability to the works and makes the painter’s pathos and chanting of the youthful life pervade the picture like the background music, letting you unconsciously enveloped in the emotion set by the painter.

 

    Yangna’s creation thereof highlights new symbolism, using sign images in the contemporary cultural life to signify the real psychological state. It leaves limited living space for individual spirit in an age of worshipping cartoons.

 

                        Prof. Wanglin of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, famous Chinese critic