Wei Dong B. 1968

The complex painterly tapestries that make up Wei Dong's work look at once back on the traditions of Chinese painting and out on the Western iconographical tradition. The present work (Lot 84), in ink and color on paper, belongs to the "Comparisons" series, in which the artist generally takes Ming landscape paintings as backdrops for his signature compositions of androgynous and racially ambiguous figures clad in disconcerting outfits often covered in visual references to politics and pop culture. Here, however, Wei Dong has chosen to frame his composition with figures based on the well-known early Yuan Dynasty murals at the Daoist Yongle Palace in Shanxi province. The quotations are direct, as in the case of the "jade woman" bearing a bowl of fruit at the center of this composition. This figure in its original version is regarded as one of the highlights of the Yongle Palace murals, and adorns the cover of the standard reference on them.

Against this background of classical forms and muted colors, Wei Dong sets his menagerie of gaudy, almost raucous contemporary caricatures. Bare-breasted women bound in chains, uniformed guards sporting red Cultural Revolution-style armbands, mallard ducks and propaganda posters: these incongruous elements populate the pictorial space in full color, creating a productive tension between these two painted realms. The tension actually opens up the image to multiple interpretations, ultimately bringing it beyond the simple dichotomies of East and West, tradition and modernity. The true angst in this image - felt most in the spaces where the muted, often stern expressions of the Daoist guardians meet the Hieronymus Bosch-like decadence of the colored figures who have come to entwine them - speaks to the exigencies of the current situation in China, where worlds collide with little regard for each other.