Ye Yongqing

titled in Chinese on the reverse, executed in 1991, framed

Acquired directly by the present owner from the artist

This work is generally in good condition. There is a 6 cm. vertical and 3 cm. horizontal tear in the upper right.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Life Philosophy: From New Figuration to the Southwest Art Research Group

When we consider the formation and development of the Southwest Art Group and its representative artists, we must take into account the post-Cultural Revolution context and the state of arts at the time. In Mainland China in the eighties, young artists often formed regional groups and used collective manifestos as a way to gain discursive power and opportunities to exhibit their works. Within a short period, young artist groups sprung up around the country. They would go on not only to constitute the driving force behind the ’85 New Wave but also to set the basic configuration of contemporary Chinese art as it exists today. Aside from issuing various manifestos, these artists also expressed themselves by organizing their own exhibitions. In this process, artists played a variety of roles and developed a common set of values and a shared identity. Many art groups were thus formed as a result of group exhibitions. Established in 1986, the Southwest Art Research Group is a typical example. It would later be one of the most influential voices in the ’85 New Wave.

According to the recollections of the artist Mao Xuhui, as early as 1982, he, Zhang Xiaogang, Pan Dehai, and other artists in Kunming, Yunnan often gathered to “talk crazy things about the unsolvable mysteries of life and the universe” and “read Kakfa novels […] paint chaos, paint lust, paint expanding vital forces and depressed emotions.”¹ In 1985, when Zhang Long, a friend of Mao then studying in Shanghai, returned to Kunming on holiday and saw the works of Mao, Zhang Xiaogang, and Pan Dehai, he felt “very moved. I thought the paintings in Shanghai were too weak, saccharine, lifeless.”² Zhang Long then proposed that they organize an exhibit in Shanghai. After many setbacks, they successfully mounted the “New Figuration Exhibition” at the Jing’an District Cultural Center in Shanghai in June, 1985. Aside from the three aforementioned Kunming artists, three Shanghai artists also participated, and indeed the epithet of “New Figuration” was proposed by the Shanghai artist Hou Wenyi. In their preface to the exhibition, the artists argued that “the most important thing is to touch the soul, not to please the eye or play games with colors and compositions.” Their thinking was in stark contrast with the fervent pan-culturalism of the contemporaneous Northern Art Group, represented by such artists as Shu Qun and Wang Guangyi.

The “New Figuration Exhibition” attracted the attention of Gao Minglu, an influential critic of the ’85 New Wave, who maintained a steady correspondence with Mao Xuhui and also introduced him in a series of articles on the ’85 New Wave. In May, 1986, Mao Xuhui participated in the ’85 Youth Art Movement Large-scale Slide Show and Academic Symposium (hereafter “Zhuhai Conference”) organized by Gao Minglu, Wang Guangyi, Shu Qi, and others. Here the two critical groups of the ’85 New Wave—representatives of the young artist groups and art critics from across the country—met in person for the first time. The occasion not only provided an overview of contemporary Chinese art but also cemented the crucial status of the New Wave in art history. As Mao Xuhui put it, “That was my first time coming into contact with Chinese academia. Before that I had felt like I was engaged in guerilla warfare in the margins, and now I suddenly was in ‘Yan’an.” It was like being in a big family. I was very excited.”³ Buoyed by the experience, Mao Xuhui upon returning to Kunming immediately discussed organizing an exhibition in Yunnan with Zhang Xiaogang, Zhang Long, Ye Yongqing, Pan Dehai, and others, and decided to reuse the title of “New Figuration.” They also formed the Southwest Art Research Group.

It is clear that the members of the Southwest Art Group had a sound theoretical foundation from the beginning. In the published academic articles and private notes of Mao Xuhui, Ye Yongqing, and their peers, we can definitely sense a consistency between their reading, writing, and art practice. Although the Southwest artists’ works tended to have a certain regional flavor, the questions they raised were always about absolutes and always had universal relevance. “I have never thought of the ‘New Figuration Exhibition’ as a regional phenomenon… From the beginning it was not aimed at regional issues, but issues of humanity and life.”⁴ Mao Xuhui believed that “the foremost mission of the Southwest Art Group is to abandon the stereotypical representations of ‘local color’ and ‘folk customs.’ In form and content, art must be in touch with realities experienced by the soul, as well as with the artist’s own destiny and spiritual condition. This is what is meant by ‘New Figuration.’” The Southwest artists conducted their creative explorations with this goal in mind. In Zhang Xiaogang’s early works, for example, unsettled iconographies manifested flourishing vitality as well as a fear of death, and scenes of nature were infused with mysticism and religiosity. Pan Dehai’s paintings likewise expressed an extremely strong sense of motion and force.

From the 1980’s onwards, Mao Xuhui was preoccupied with thinking about life and solitude. “Life belongs to oneself and is lived only once. Its meaning comes from doing what one wants to do, and so-called society is opposed to individual life.” “When society cannot provide us with a healthy reference, we can only look within ourselves for things that are true and truly felt. We can only approach them through our own paths, to grasp the experiences given by life, whatever the attendant pains and pressures, chaos and insanity. These bitter experiences almost became a source of inspiration for my creative work during those years.”⁵ As the organizer and foundational theorist of the Southwest Art Group, Mao Xuhui comprehensively reflects the group’s collective pursuit in his works of the 1980’s. His rich output during the ’85 New Wave demonstrates a great stylistic variety, including pastiches reflecting urban culture with echoes of Pop Art; the primitivist Mother of Red Earth and Guishan series; as well as the Volume series, which recalls abstraction expressionism.

The Parents series begun in 1989 should be regarded as another monument in Mao’s career. Here he has turned from the sentimentalism of his works from the early phase of the ’85 New Wave towards a kind of analytical rationality, thereby achieving a fusion of individual experience and historical consciousness and a deconstruction of images of power from the level of everyday language. This redirection would directly inspired his later Vocabulary of Power and Daily Epics series. The chair, a symbol of power, recurs consistently in the Parents series, which much like Zhang Xiaogang’s Big Family series thematizes self-portraiture and family portraiture. Unlike Zhang, however, Mao enters total abstraction. “Mao attempted to reduce the concept of ‘parent’ into its most fundamental state, such that it no longer refers to parents in any of the social senses of political authority, family structure, or gender relations. He used a series of compositions featuring pyramids at the center to ‘iconographize’ the traditional hierarches of ruler-official and father-son relations and the power relations of modern society. His compositions thus became more and more minimalistic, ultimately transforming into chairs and geometric compositions.”⁶ Yet, due to his parents’ deaths, Mao Xuhui’s paintings have expressed an increasingly strong sense of belonging since 2007. In the series Toppled Chair, the chair loses its symbolic association with power, and the composition is endowed with sentimentalism rather than the violence and anger of expressionism. Just as Van Gogh expressed his longing for Gauguin in a chair that the latter had sat in, Mao Xuhui expresses his mourning and longing for his parents in Toppled Chair. “I was only expressing an inevitable reality—a reality about death. If there is a metaphor, it is only a metaphor about the most fundamental philosophical issue of the cycle of life and death.”⁷ In Topped Chair with Golden Sunset of 2012 (Lot 816), the chair is rendered in a radically new palette and composition. The chair is topped towards the left, and the seatback extends beneath the ground, unlike the high-contrast red and black backgrounds of the earlier versions. Well into his middle age, Mao in recently years has used more harmonious colors, generating spaces and mysterious chiaroscuro with small and delicate color blocks, which recall the Pointillism in late-19th-century French painting. The image of the chair aside, the romanticism of Mao’s recent works can be seen also in his representation of memories and moments in his personal experience, as in his Guishan Group Painting and Kunming Group Painting, which recollect his memories of Guishan and Kunming respectively, using natural sceneries to mitigate the cruelty and alienation of abstraction.

Ye Yongqing was a relatively late member of New Figuration and the Southwest Art Group. He did not write as much as Mao Xuhui, but his essay on “Consciousness of Nature in the Southwest Art Group” demonstrated a high level of theoretical sophistication. Gao Minglu refers to him as “a painter in the group who is both meditative and instinctive”⁸. During the ’85 New Wave, Ye Yongqing had graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine art and was teaching there. Finding the pathetic nativist style popular in the academy stifling and incompatible with the carefreeness of the art scene in his native Kunming, he searched urgently for a mode of creative practice that would distance himself from the mainstream and bring him closer to his inner emotions throughout the 80’s. Although, like Mao Xuhui, Ye Yongqing did life-sketching in the minority areas of Guishan, what he was looking for there was an inchoate and poetic subjective truth, rather than the folkic plainness of Mao’s Guishan series. Ye’s search resulted in a radical breakthrough during the 1988-1990 period. As he himself puts it, “I was very concerned with the structural issues and subject matter of my work. I felt that my over-rich compositions needed a kind of restraint and control. I needed to transcend the emotional level and enter the structural level, thereby achieving a generalized set of ‘original symbols.’”⁹ He began to mix the media and methods of ink, acrylic, and woodblock printing, and distilled a “framework” vocabulary from medieval European altar paintings and Indian, Persian, and Chinese traditional prints. Within the frames of the serial works from the late 1980’s and early 90’s—Love story under the Chimney, Escape, Forbidden Fruit, Big Chimney, Distorted (Lots 808, 809, 810, 811, 813)—Ye Yongqing depicts twisted people, repressed sexuality, and delicate fantasies, but outside the frames are highly ornamental geometric patterns. During this time, he was concerned with interpersonal relations and the relationship between the individual and urban life, and his compositions were endowed with Chagall-esque lightness and absurdism as well as Ye’s own inner poetry. “These paintings have to be ‘read.’ This was true from the beginning to the end.”¹⁰

As a whole, the sui genesis Southwest Art Group critiqued the excessive sentimentalism of the post-Cultural Revolution currents of “Stream of Life” and “Scar Art,” and became a unique and powerful voice amidst the entire ’85 New Wave because of their intellectual and artistic insistence on the fundamental issues of life. “Artists of this group were not stylists of nativism, but rather expressionists of life philosophy.”¹¹ For this reason, the Southwest Art Group has been regarded as the most important among the various Stream of Life groups and left an indelible mark in the ’85 New Wave, a glorious episode in Chinese art history.

1 Cited in Lü Peng and Yi Dan, Chinese Art History Since 1979, Zhongguo qingnian chuban she, September 2011, p. 109.

2 Refer to 1

3 Interview with Mao Xunhui, “Monumentally Tragic Things Always Inspire Me,” Yishu shijie¸ issue 3, 2006.

4 Mao Xunhui, “Remembering ‘New Figuration,’” artist’s personal notes from 1994.

5 Refer to 4

6 Gao Minglu, Story of Damao: Mao Xunhui, 1976-2006, Han Art Gallery, Hong Kong, 2007, p. 46.

7 Lü Peng and Zhang Guanghua, Mao Xunhui: Forever in Refraction, Hunan meishu chuban she, 2011, p. 33.

8 See note 4, p. 269.

9 Ye Yongqing, “On my basic thinking in my creative stages,” in Wu Hung, Ye Yongqing—The Disjuncture of Flow, Zhongguo huanqiu wenhua chuban she, July 2011, p. 49.

10 Wu Hong, “The Flow of Fractures: Ye Yongqing and Ye Yongqing’s Paintings,” in ibid., p. 8.

11 Refer to 4, p. 314.