Tamen

“THEY” is an artistic team, consisting of two young artists, Lai Shengyu and Yang Xiaogang. THEY’s paintings always impress audiences with a dramatic sense of delicacy and fantasticality in the pedigree of Chinese contemporary art, since the team has never been limited by various modern artistic forms. More precisely, Lai and Yang ingeniously utilize, mix, and even transfer those existing artistic concepts and forms. In their paintings, the composition of montage and forms of Pop Art are both adopted; the concept or position of surrealism and critical realism are integrated. Based on such a methodology, “THEY” illogically reconstructs quotidian natural scenes, objects, figures, and images, which even alter consequently the intrinsic temporal and spatial relationships between these elements. In other words, realism and surrealism, reality and illusions, tranquility and anxiety, order and chaos, objects and symbols are juxtaposed philosophically in THEY’s paintings. Indeed, THEY’s paintings not only reflect conflicts between the outer world and man’s inner feelings, and the sense of bitterness, solitude, and distance resulted by such conflicts, but also ridicule and criticize the human appetence hiding behind images and the falsehood of politics. This is exactly the novelty and uniqueness of THEY’s artistic concept.