Sui Jianguo

Executed in 1997, this work is number four from an edition of six. 

Denmark, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Made in China: Works from the Estella Collection, March - August 2007, fig. 73
Jerusalem, The Israel Museum, Made in China: Contemporary Chinese Art at the Israel Museum, September 2007 - March 2008

Generally in good condition. Some minor rubbing to the paint along the upper edge of the collar revealing the metal beneath. Minor patch of paint loss to the lower right pocket, approx 5mm.
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Sui Jianguo has established himself as one of the foremost sculptors of contemporary China with a varied body of consistently innovative work since the late 1980's.  He is currently Chair of the Sculpture Department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, from which he graduated in 1989.  Over the course of his career, Sui has maintained a persistent interest in the nature of materials and their resonance and references in sculptural form.  While his early work in stone, steel and plaster established his powerful, unique voice, his sculpture of the past decade has provided numerous icons of Chinese contemporary art, of which the three works on offer are superlative examples. 

 

The earliest work offered is Legacy Mantle (Lot 1126), a substantially larger than life painted aluminum sculpture in the form of an empty "Mao jacket."  The Legacy Mantle series marks the first appearance of the Mao jacket in Sui's work, and the present work is one of its earliest manifestations.  Begun in April of 1997, the first of the Legacy Mantle works was fabricated in foam rubber and cast in aluminum; a diminutive sculpture with an awesome presence, the first Legacy Mantle features a seemingly corroded, decaying surface that lends to it the appearance of an excavated relic, damaged but still in tact.  Sui has stated that he wished to find an icon to symbolize modern Chinese history, and the jacket designed by Dr. Sun Yat-sen (later erroneously popularized as the "Mao jacket") seemed most suitable.  But his earliest effort must have seemed unnecessarily revealing, as subsequently, all works in the Legacy Mantle series show the icon in pristine condition.    

 

Conceived both in groups and individually, the full-bodied but empty, self-supporting Mao jacket has been fleshed out by the artist in a variety of sizes, materials, and surface colorations - from large, drab painted fiberglass and aluminum works to smaller fiberglass pieces in a rainbow of neon colors to even smaller almost collapsible works in rubber.  Although the iconic form of the Legacy Mantle series and its ready reproducibility in two-dimensions invites a quick reading, the breadth of Sui's work with the historic garment renders such interpretations flat and superficial; the artist's profound understanding of different materials and the multiple references he is able to evoke with familiar forms bear closer scrutiny if this body of work is to be understood in its multiple dimensions.  The artist speaks of the legacy of Mao as a mantle covering contemporary China, a cloak worn in some manner by all, whether individually recognized or not, and remaining ever present in Chinese society despite the radical transformations of contemporary culture.  In this sense, the fourth dimension of time, which has been so important in the artist's recent video and installation work, is already present in the earliest Legacy Mantle—and, indeed, in the artist's earliest process based work in rubber and plaster from the late 1980's and early '90's.  Although Sui's icons offer a critical if laconic engagement with contemporaneity, his work draws profoundly upon the weight and vicissitudes of history for its considered, monumental impact.

 

Sui's jackets are hollow, like much of the rhetoric of the Maoist past; the legacy this body of work ultimately references, however, lives beneath the jackets and in the spirits of hundreds of millions.  But the sculptures neither redeem nor pay tribute to this ambivalent historical legacy.  Instead, there is a pronounced ambiguity - indeed, a strategic double entendre - in Sui's empty jackets; they offer a reading of history that is at once respectfully referential and critically observant:  respectful in that the iconic form might easily serve its commemorative function as appropriate public sculpture; critical in that the form embodies the emptiness and failure of the same rigidly conformist collectivism that it might at other times be read as commemorating.  This ambiguity is the genius of Legacy Mantle as a work of art.  To the extent the Legacy Mantle is a monument, however, it is one of contemporaneity, one that remembers but moves beyond the past to forge new meaning for the present.

 

The same holds true for the artist's next body of work, begun in 1998, the so-called Clothes Vein Studies or Clothes Drapery Studies.  In this body of work, the artist revisits masterpieces of Western sculpture and literally recasts them in recognizable twentieth century Chinese garb; the Discobolus (Lot 1128) offered here is again an early example of this intriguing body of work.  Despite its symbolism in the Chinese context (of civil powers, cardinal virtues, etc.), it should not be forgotten that the "Zhongshan Jacket" is essentially a Western derivative, borrowed from a modern Japanese (19^th century) outfit copied from Prussia.  In this sense, the multiple significations of the Clothes Vein Studies embody an historical conundrum, at once doubly "Western" and yet quintessentially "Made in China."  But the brilliance of Sui's work again extends deeper for the art historically inclined:  the original bronze Discobolus by the acclaimed mid-5^th century BC Greek sculptor Myron, is now lost and survives only in a myriad of copies, the first discovered of which, in the late 18^th century, being of marble.  Sui's Discobolus, in turn, is a trompe l'oeil painted bronze, which seems to be made of marble or plaster.  In other words, the copy of the original assumes the material of the original and the surface qualities of the copies by which it is best known, much as the Mao jacket itself is a copy of a 'lost original' that became better known through its subsequent dissemination as an icon of twentieth century China.  Such ironies of history and the global legacy of sculptural forms are not lost on this erudite artist, and just as his Legacy Mantle series ambiguously monumentalizes the symbolic jacket, so his Clothes Vein Study series makes manifest the complexities of the encounter between Western and Eastern culture that characterize modern China. 

 

The importation and deployment of Western ideas and values has a long history in Chinese modernity and plays an important role throughout the twentieth century in China's art academies.  As a professor at China's most prestigious art academy, Sui directs his students to study examples of famous Western sculpture just as students the world over are instructed.  Given the present work's overtly academic references and the successive generations of sculptural development it suggests - Antiquity preceding the present, the lost bronze preceding the marble copies, the present painted bronze cast from a copy of an absent original, the work of the teacher as an adapted model for his students - the work also clearly has its autobiographical dimensions.[1]  Amidst this fascinating pile-up of historical references and forms, one feels the ambiguous position of contemporary China as it adopts essentially Western models and yet re-models them with Chinese characteristics.  Neither overtly critical of the Western-styled academic system of which the artist himself is a part, nor entirely at ease with the colonization of the mind by ill-fitting ideological prototypes from afar, Sui's position seems to be that of an authoritative witness to the complexity of his era.  

 

But if the selective absorption of Western prototypes characterized the flow of ideas and information for 20^th century China, the 21^st century is already shaping up to be one of Chinese exports of all kinds.  Sui's Made in China series, begun in 1999, directly addresses this radical economic transformation, monumentalizing the commercial objects of China's high-octane economy.  The toy dinosaur embossed with the 'Made in China' logo on its belly is the artist's icon for the present era.  Made in China (Gold Dinosaur) (Lot 1127) is an unusually swanky example with its bumpy surface of brilliant gold.  But appearances can again be deceiving; this impressive Tyrannosaurus standing two meters high is actually fabricated in fiberglass and covered with gold leaf.  In other works from the series, Sui gives marble the shiny surface appearance of industrial fiberglass and paints small bronzes so as to appear of cheap plastic.  Sui's deceptions may suggest a critique of the export economy, but they may also be interpreted as a comment on the art economy itself.  That one of China's finest artists—one deeply engaged with cultural history, its present manifestations, and the global sculptural legacy—puts forth a series of monumental commercial toys with an unmistakable 'Made in China' logo speaks volumes about the global addiction to Chinese products and the growing worldwide fascination with Chinese contemporary art.  Made in China is, in essence, a sardonic conceptual maneuver, a seeming foreclosure of artistic originality—though that is hardly the case—in the face of an insatiable worldwide demand for the Chinese readymade.   

 

With that in mind, the foreign importation of Sui's sculptural forms and their use in overtly commercial contexts is an amusing and revealing addendum.  In a striking addition to the Zhongshan jacket's transnational history, the January 2008 spring fashion shows in Paris featured not a Mao jacket, but rather a Sui jacket knocked-off and monumentalized by Karl Lagerfeld and the house of Chanel as a 75-foot architectural edifice at the center of the Grand Palais!  Of course, Coco Chanel's monumental contribution to contemporary fashion with the cardigan jacket is the represented icon, but in this palimpsest of forms, who familiar with the work of Sui Jianguo could fail to see the Legacy Mantle as the source of inspiration for this overtly kitsch décor.  A monument to French fashion history, this avatar of the commercialization of culture is an unwitting embodiment of Sui's critique.  In the temple of commerce that is our present cultural landscape, a once-unthinkable Mao-Chanel hybrid becomes an iconic altarpiece for the ritual of global consumption.  Ours is a peculiar historical legacy, and Sui Jianguo is among its most incisive commentators.

[1] Indeed, Sui's New Discobolus, Self-portrait (2003) shows the artist himself in Myron's famous pose; Sui's likeness, clothed in contemporary dress, is fabricated in fiberglass and painted in life-like detail.