The exploration of art and the experience of life often work in concert with each other. The subject matter of Fitlea Yang’s creation varies in different periods, but has always been pivoting the theme of human nature. There is a panoptic power of thought about his works. In the process of conceiving and polishing the layers of the images and the color collision, his own memory is also folded, extended, abstracted and purified. His overbriming and moving concern about human things flows along each brush stroke with a Bressonian style, concealing the impurities and returning to the essence. In this way, he explores the relationship between self and nature, fiction and reality. Yang observes and creates, and on top of that he thinks comprehensively and rationally about the respective properties, cultural connotations of and interrelationships among materials, media and techniques, which could be attributed to his background in printmaking and many years of painting experience, so as to make further refinements and attempts in his ongoing works based on his own explorations.

Compared to Yang’s earlier works, which focused purely on environmental portrayals, the new series pays more attention on people themselves and makes sincere expressions about people, their environment and various relationships among them. Moy is the central element in the works. It is the main character created by Yang, in which sometimes the artist puts his own memories or emotions, and sometimes he incorporates people and things he comes into contact with in real life. These sources of inspiration are always concrete and realistic, yet seemingly unreal when presented in Moy’s image. This unreality is accentuated when the light is cast from above in those pictures, as if everything is nothing but calm and pure in a frozen space-time where the hustle and bustle and the vicissitudes never existed. In this series, Yang and Moy have reached a brand new, and seemingly more equal model of collaboration - Moy is no longer a symbolic tool in the usual sense, but a ‘creator’ with independent thinking. In the collaboration, Moy is repeatedly translated and diversified, the process probably started from a certain reading, chance encounter or sudden enlightenment of Fitlea Yang, and is finally presented in the medium of painting. Through Moy, the various subtle changes in the relationships and states of the narrative characters are also delicately displayed.

Fitlea Yang’s paintings are simple in nature, and he replaces aesthetic imaginative pretensions with daily attention to the living world. His pictures look wonderful and hazy, with a bit of rustic loveliness, but in fact, they are showing life in reverse with another kind of thinking. Yang uses the idea that everything has a spirit to convey the alienation and integration of people and the environment in the current diverse and mixed social ecology. Just like Brecht’s drama, he uses simplified poses and color blocks to create complex scenery without the help of other materials, thus providing a more concise and powerful stimulus for our association and reflection.

Fitlea Yang practices art with romanticism and a childish attitude. Through Moy, he leads us to explore modern life and human beings from different perspectives and the eternal proposition of life, presenting the simplicity and poetry in a broad sense, showing the spirituality of life, and interpreting scenes that are both routine and unreal, in which we can reflect on the ‘unseen’ of our personal life history and inner state. The forest is a metaphor for the gathering lives. Song of the Forest is to depart on a journey once in a lifetime with an imagination that is even further than far-away.