Yin Zhaoyang

DF2 Gallery, Los Angeles
Private Collection, New York

Los Angeles, DF2 Gallery, Passing by Mao Zedong, Yin Zhaoyang New Works, February 17 - March 31, 2007, pp. 24-27, illustrated in color

Li Qiushi ed., Tang Contemporary Art, Works by Yin Zhaoyang, Passing by Mao Zedong, Beijing, 2006, pp. 160-168, illustrated in color

Mounted on a stretcher, the work is generally in very good overall condition. Work was not examined under UV.
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Born in 1970 in Henan Province, Yin Zhaoyang is a painter associated with the generation that has followed the performance- and installment-oriented works of such artists as Zhang Huan and Xu Bing. Studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Yin developed an esthetic he calls a "collage of ideals"—a preference for powerful imagery based on such iconic presences as Mao, Tiananmen Square, and China's flag. Looking to such contemporary masters as Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol, Yin composes paintings that reference Mao's life and death, often in an atmosphere of nostalgia. The iconic possibilities involved in rendering Chairman Mao in death remain fertile for an artist such as Yin, who deliberately misrepresents history--sometimes inserting his own face in place of Mao's. Yet the implications are not so much subversive as they are descriptive; in a culture that has pretty thoroughly forsaken Mao's economic and political ideas, Yin's art reads as the acknowledgment of a pragmatism that has swept the country, almost by force.

In Yin's oil on canvas, entitled Passed Away (Lot 34, 2006) of a dead Mao lying in state, we see China's secular emperor in a position acknowledging death's infinite repose. Both the figure and the background are rendered in a dynamic red, with greater light accorded to the figure in state. Mao on his deathbed is a leader whose power is utterly gone, a final finish for a man who wielded power for many years in Chinese society. His bald head and corpulent body are given close scrutiny, but cynicism does not occur. Instead, we find an almost clinical reporting, so that the subject of Mao's death does not lose its pictorial interest or its moral force. Indeed, it is a bit difficult to be completely sure if it is Mao himself—has Yin substituted his own features for Mao's in this painting? As happens in much of Yin's art, the point is mysterious, perhaps slightly obscure, in favor of a reality that neither mocks nor eulogizes Mao's legacy.

-Jonathan Goodman