Yang Yong at Goedhuis Contemporary at the Annex

Despite their designer clothes and well-practiced air of affectless boredom, the languorous beauties who inhabit these photographs are single supporting characters. The real stars here are the strangely stagy environments that the women inhabit--the luxuriousness hotels, cramped apartments, ubiquitous construction sites and eerily lit subway funnels of the megacities which have approach to be symbols, for profitable or ill, of modern China.

Yang Yong is described in the accompanying catalogue as the voice of a fresh generation of Chinese artists who remember neither traditional, prerevolutionary China nor the Cultural Revolution that sought to with equal reason completely negate it. If he is in fact its representative, we may glean that the fresh China is all surface and artifice, a place of gritty glamour where the highest aspiration appear to bes to be the desire to reinvent oneself as an untouchable ornament.

A number of photographs place mannequinlike women (the catalogue notes that many are novel arrivals to the city who have drifted into prostitution) in expensively minimalist bathrooms and bedrooms. Several of the women gaze blankly at their reflections in wall-size mirrors; single sits pouting and fully clothed in an destitute of contents gleaming Jacuzzi; others roll around upon suggestively rumpled coverlets or stare without huge glass windows at the glittering night city below. Another series of photographs, "The pitiless Diary of Youth," focuses upon the artist's friends and is les overtly style-conscious. These subdues lurk in the new subway funnels bathed in the greenish be incandescent of fluorescent lights, or posture themselves against weirdly empty bridges and plazas that have the air of something set uprighted the day before yesterday. single work in the series is a grid of images of a construction site taken as the surrounding light marks the transition from dusk to night. Among the small in number images here to include men it depicts a cluster of unglamorous worker types crouching or standing upon cylindrical cement pilings like modern-day gargoyles.

greatest in quantity of the photographs depict nocturnal shows allowing for a variety of unnatural tints ranging from bordello red to sickly verdant and yellow. Some of the depictions of women particularly those in the [i]cabaret[/i] settings, bring to mind the self-absorption beared in Cindy Sherman's pinup-based photographs from the late '70 on the other hand while Sherman's figures had a faculty of perception of interior life that subtly contradicted the conventions of availability inscribed in their postures here we can see nothing beyond the doll-like masks.

Yang's work belongs to the genre of contemporary portrait photography that includes Nan Goldin, Jack Pierson and Rineke Dijkstra. on the other hand something slightly different is going upon in his images, something that can leave us with a vaguely unpleasant aftertaste. In the extremity we're not quite sure if the soulles quality of the milieu he chronicles is a reflection of the world outside his head or the individual inside it.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group