Mao Xuhui B. 1956

Sotheby’s is pleased to present a wide sampling of works by the influential artist Mao Xuhui, which together represent each of the major series and phases in a career that has run apace with the entire development of contemporary painting practice in China. Mao Xuhui is one of the great figures of the Southwestern avant-garde, a group that also includes Zhang Xiaogang, Ye Yongqing, and Zhou Chunya. Working separately but in close touch through the early and mid-1980’s, these painters, far from the political squabbles of the capital and the scholarly community of the Hangzhou academy, comprise a major strand in the avant-garde movement that re-shaped Chinese art as the reforms of the Deng Xiaoping era began to take hold.

As Mao Xuhui’s first serious work the Guishan series (Lot 155) tracks his emergence from eager student to young but fully-formed artist. The tradition of “painting from life” (xiesheng) is central to art education in China, and Mao began to travel to this remote region during his student days. It was there in 1983 that he spent the honeymoon that began his short-lived marriage. Returning many times over the next several years he would produce a body of work based on his what the critic Lu Peng has called a decision “to treat the look in the eyes of the shepherd girl and her sheep seriously.”[1]

The Guishan series also marked Mao’s emergence from the taste hierarchies of the official painting exhibition system. In 1985 he submitted a group of works from this series to the Yunnan provincial artists’ association, anticipating that their relatively tame subject matter would make them sure picks for the Sixth National Art Exhibition in Beijing later that year. Only one of the paintings (“Guishan: Remoteness,” 1985) was selected for the provincial exhibition, and even it was not selected for the national show. Spurned, Mao Xuhui decided he would turn no longer to the official system for approval. The present work, “Guishan: Woman and Horse” was among this group of rejected paintings. More important than this however was the lasting impression the scenery of Guishan would leave on Mao and his palette. As Lu Peng has written, “Guishan not only awakened Mao’s memory of childhood, but also enabled the artist to experience more deeply the relief and expressiveness of nature.”

In 1985, Mao Xuhui banded together with artists including Pan Dehai, Hou Wenyi, Zhang Long, and others to organize the traveling exhibition “New Concrete Image,” which premiered in Shanghai and appeared later in Nanjing, Kunming, and Chongqing. In this period, the artist gained confidence and exposure as the exhibition—along with a slide presentation and lecture on its major works organized by the critic Gao Minglu—became the talk of the town in cities around China. Spearheaded by the Southwestern Art Research Group of which Mao was a major member, this exhibition endures as one of the major moments in the artistic “paradigm shift” that occurred in mid-1980s China.

As the 1985 movement waxed, Mao began to envision a new body of work which would occupy him in the years surrounding the landmark “China/Avant-Garde” exhibition of 1989. This series, called “Paternalism,” began with an Edward Munch-esque double portrait of a father and daughter entitled “Portrait of the Head of the Family.” The “Paternalism” works which followed (the name of the series in Chinese is jiazhang, meaning “head of family”) pair increasingly geometric human figures, distinguished by their diamond-shaped heads, with elements from Chinese tradition and material culture. The series is represented here by one of its excellent examples, “Paternalism with Old Bell” (Lot 153). The third of three bell works executed in 1991 in different hues, this work dates to the moment when Mao’s painterly language was expanding beyond the square and angular forms of the “Paternalism-Chair” works and toward the curvatures that would occupy him during the “Scissors” series. The exquisitely layered and extremely rare compositions of “Paternalism” show a painter searching for a balance between realism and abstraction, experimenting with form through an interest in everyday objects.

It was a short leap from here to the paintings of the “Scissors” for which Mao Xuhui is now best known. A small series entitled “Vocabulary of Power” provides the bridge, in which Mao rendered objects like keys and bookshelves along with the chairs of his “Paternalism” works. Soon, scissors emerged as a motif that could not be contained in one or two works, instead evolving into his major obsession for the following decade, remaining into the present. While the earliest “Scissors” works date to 1995, it was not until two years later that the series would come to seem fully formed. Lot 154, “Scissors with Sofa,” is an excellent example of the high tide of this group of works. The composition, centered around an upturned pair of scissors and a bulging couch, features a painting on the wall behind it—a reference perhaps to the artist’s own “Paternalism” works, or even to the “Big Family” series of his fellow-traveler Zhang Xiaogang. A sketch pictured here from the same year provides a glimpse into Mao’s thinking in structuring this composition.

Mao Xuhui would continue to paint scissors for many years, in compositions that would grow increasingly simple, then hazy and meditative. In these later “Scissors” works, the exposed blade becomes a surface for painterly experimentation, as Mao plays with different methods of rendering its sharpness. Lot 152, from 2004, is a major example of this phase in Mao’s oeuvre. Looking back on the development of the series, he has remarked, “Sometimes, I used the scissors as an unusual symbol, pasting it onto different scenes in real life in order to express feelings of indignation and disquiet. Having gone through this phase, I no longer think about authority when I paint scissors; rather I now think it is not important to discuss what they are going to cut, but what feelings are generated—their significance, the meaning of shape—through rough style and not literal effect. I am not actually painting scissors, but rather the image of scissors.”

Asked in 2000 by the critic Monica Dematté whether he saw the form of scissors as a contrast between sharpness and roundness, Mao Xuhui replied that, “These two aspects constitute the dialectic of my being and I am aware that I need them deeply in order to rebuild the harmonic unity within myself.” In both their ordinary form and metaphysical implications, scissors have provided this artist with a source of inspiration that has sustained him through an era in which many ties to the past have been cut.

[1] “Mao Xuhui: Concrete Image of Life and Statement,” in Mao Xuhui, Xin Dong Cheng Publishing House, Beijing, 2005, p. 56