Yang Shiliang, Still Life: The Equation of Love, 2003, with orange, burgundy and blue geometric vases, a pale grid and the words I LOVE YOU

Still Life: The Equation of Love - Oil on canvas by Yang Shiliang, 76 × 102 cm, view 2

Still Life: The Equation of Love - Oil on canvas by Yang Shiliang, 76 × 102 cm, view 3

Still Life: The Equation of Love - Oil on canvas by Yang Shiliang, 76 × 102 cm, view 4

Still Life: The Equation of Love - Oil on canvas by Yang Shiliang, 76 × 102 cm, view 5

Still Life: The Equation of Love - Oil on canvas by Yang Shiliang, 76 × 102 cm, view 6

Still Life: The Equation of Love - Oil on canvas by Yang Shiliang, 76 × 102 cm, view 7

Emerging

Still Life: The Equation of Love

Name: Still Life: The Equation of Love
Brand: Paint For Heart
Price: 5157.0 SGD
Availability: InStock

Artist Yang Shiliang

Creation Date 2003

Material Oil on canvas

Size 76 x 102 cm

Category original

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Current total $5,157.00

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Perspectives

A closer look

Artwork Notes

Art appreciation

Three vases stand across the middle: a narrow orange vessel at left, a burgundy trapezoid in the centre and a blue vase built from vertical bands at right. Stems rise in their respective colours towards circular centres and pointed rays. Behind them, a grey-white grid joins pale yellow, blue and orange rectangles. The vessels appear ordered, while slants and fragments repeatedly depart from the horizontal and vertical structure.

Paint is pressed flat, scraped back and cut into hard edges with a knife, exposing earlier layers through cracks and gaps. Orange, burgundy and blue each govern one vessel and its stems, while low-chroma geometry keeps distance between them. Incised lines and ridges give the radiating flowers a sharp directional presence. The letters below are partly obscured within blocks of colour, subject to the same material treatment as the objects.

“I LOVE YOU” is direct language, yet here it enters a structure resembling an equation sheet or design study. The three vases act like variables; stems, grids and displaced signs propose relationships marked by arrangement, testing and revision. Palette-knife handling joins the physical weight of oil paint with the speed of Chinese freehand gesture. Yang Shiliang's long use of the palette knife makes that tension material: love is declared plainly, while scraped revisions and displaced signs resist complete order.

Theme

Style and context

Twentieth-century still life absorbed Cubist division, collage-like surfaces and written language, allowing objects, letters, grids and flat colour to share a composition. Still Life: The Equation of Love uses that modernist vocabulary while keeping the vases and flowers recognisable. The inscription “I LOVE YOU” functions as both language and rhythmic shape.

Yang Shiliang works between Expressionism, Impressionism and Chinese image-based painting, using the palette knife as a principal tool. The scraped passages, hard edges and rapid radial lines show that method directly. Geometry controls the placement of colour, while broken surfaces and handwritten text preserve the variability of the hand and keep the declaration from becoming a flat slogan.

Artist Profile

About the artist

Yang Shiliang (born 1964, Jilin City) graduated from the Art Department of Northeast Normal University and later studied at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. His teachers included Yan Zhushi, Song Huimin, Pan Shixun, Zhu Naizheng, and Guo Xiaoguang, giving him a foundation that spans academic realism, expressive abstraction, and modern Chinese pictorial thinking.

His practice occupies a position between expressionism, impressionism, and Chinese yixiang painting. Yang is known for using the palette knife as his primary tool, treating oil paint with a large-scale xieyi approach associated with Chinese freehand painting. This method allows him to join Western oil’s physical materiality with an Eastern concern for spirit resonance, movement, and expressive force.

Over decades of practice, Yang has developed a personal language that brings together Chinese painting and oil painting, old and new, traditional and reformed, Eastern and Western, classical and modern.

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