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 only supporting characters. The real stars here are the strangely stagy environments that the women inhabit--the luxury hotels, cramped apartments, ubiquitous construction sites and eerily lit subway tunnels of the megacities which have come to be symbols, for good or ill, of modern China.

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

A number of photographs place mannequinlike women (the catalogue notes that many are recent 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; one sits pouting and fully clothed in an empty, gleaming Jacuzzi; others roll around on suggestively rumpled coverlets or stare out huge glass windows at the glittering night city below. Another series of photographs, "The Cruel Diary of Youth," focuses on the artist's friends and is less overtly style-conscious. These subjects lurk in the new subway tunnels, bathed in the greenish glow of fluorescent lights, or pose themselves against weirdly empty bridges and plazas that have the air of something erected the day before yesterday. One 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 few images here to include men, it depicts a group of unglamorous worker types crouching or standing on cylindrical cement pilings like modern-day gargoyles.

Most of the photographs depict nocturnal scenes, allowing for a variety of unnatural hues ranging from bordello red to sickly green and yellow. Some of the depictions of women, particularly those in the hotel settings, bring to mind the self-absorption conveyed in Cindy Sherman's pinup-based photographs from the late '70s. But while Sherman's figures had a sense of interior life that subtly contradicted the conventions of availability inscribed in their poses, 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. But something slightly different is going on in his images, something that can leave us with a vaguely unpleasant aftertaste. In the end, we're not quite sure if the soulless quality of the milieu he chronicles is a reflection of the world outside his head or the one inside it.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group