Yan Lei

Yan Lei’s work is an extended commentary on the structure and function of the global art world as it relates to his own career and to China more generally. In a breakthrough 1997 performance work, he and Hong Hao (Lots 33, 47, 48) drafted and mailed invitation letters to a fictional Chinese section of Documenta X to the stars of the Beijing avant-garde under the pseudonym Ielnay Oahgnoh, a reversal of the romanized spellings for the two artist’s names. The eager, then angry reaction of those duped by the hoax spoke astutely to the inequalities of a system in which the futures of Chinese artists lay so clearly in the hands of interested Western curators.

In the early part of this decade, Yan began to interrogate the painting process itself, producing a massive monochromatic series of twenty canvases depicting jars of presumably brightly colored) oil paint for the 2002 Shanghai Biennale. His more recent Triptych series, in which a jar of paint and a more traditionally Chinese element such as a Buddha head flank a color wheel that determines the hues of the entire composition, have expanded on this initial insight. Yan’s painterly praxis, in which paint-by-number canvases generated from photographs are dutifully filled in by a studio of untrained assistants, adds to the satire.

The Super Lights series, begun in 2005 and of which Lot 136 is a superb example, presents notable images from recent art-world headlines in rigidly bifurcated hues. In the present work, Yan pokes fun at another work with an extraordinary auction record: an abstract work from a group of three by a three-year-old chimpanzee named Congo (b. 1954) sold at Bonhams in June 2005 for £12,000 on an estimate of £600-800. Congo was something of an art-world celebrity himself: in 1957 he was given a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, and his works are believed to have been in the collections of Picasso and Miró.

The ratio of canvas allotted to each color scheme is derived from the ratio of filter to tobacco in a Zhongnanhai brand “Super Light” cigarette. Yan thereby argues that his reproductions “have less kick” than the originals, just as a Super Light cigarette can be smoked more smoothly than a heartier blend. (Interview with the artist, January 2005) If a fascination with authorship, derivativity and reproduction runs throughout contemporary art, the Super Lights series is unique for the sophistication of both its overarching metaphorical register and its choice of specific targets for deconstruction. The idiom of Zhongnanhai cigarettes, a staple of the Beijing art world, at once grounds the works in local material reality and suggests that art can be bad for you. The selection of an original composition with such an astounding—and unwitting—commercial history hints at the anxieties felt by a Chinese avant-garde presently facing the exuberance of the international market.