Wang Xingwei

initialled in Pinyin and dated 2005

Palazzoli Collection, Italy
Private European Collection

China, Beijing, China Art Archives and Warehouse, Show Me...Catch Me...Sight Unseen. Xie Nanxing and Wang Xingwei, 12 November - 12 December, 2005

Wang Xingwei Collection, Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing, China, 2005, unpaginated

This work is generally in good condition. Upon very close inspection, there appears to be a small cluster of hairline craquelures near the centre of the painting, on the white streaks in the river. There are two pinpoint specks of paint loss near the left side edge of the work. There is no sign of restoration under UV light.
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The Intentional Modification of Logic and Language

Based on appearances, the person in Untitled (Sailor in a Pond) (Lot 38) seems to be the same person who appears in two other paintings Wang Xingwei also completed in 2005, Untitled (Air Hostess and Seaman) and Untitled (Golfer and Watermelons no. 1), as well as a prior work, The Night in Shanghai. Their expressions, actions, and aura are similar—the circumstances are the only difference. Another connection to Wang's other paintings is that this work includes the same body of water as Untitled (Nude Woman by a River). The nude woman on the stone and her counterpart, a partially submerged white goose, have disappeared, replaced by a sailor who stands up to his knees in the water, holding a life-preserver around his waist. The pond (or river) in these two scenes comes from a cheap landscape painting that Wang chose to adopt and riff upon. Beyond this, the tableau seems to convey no further information. The shallow pond stands in for the ocean where this seaman belongs; this is the awkward circumstance that Wang has created for his actor.

Untitled (Seaman) is part of the "Uniform" series that includes several other of Wang Xingwei's paintings from 2005. Wang's use of substitution explains the function of the sailor character. Wang's work since 2001 has often featured certain expressions, postures, animals (e.g. penguins and pandas), and archetypal characters, including nurses, nude women, flight attendants, and so on. These images have become recurring motifs in his paintings in a practice related to role-playing. In Wang's earlier work, the artist himself appeared in a variety of guises, times, and places. Later, penguins and pandas took his place as stand-ins. The natural development of this exploration eventually led Wang to begin using real, ready-made role-players from the world around him in his "Uniform" series: flight attendants, seamen, nurses, golfers, and so on.

Wang Xingwei first featured a flight attendant in Hello How Much (2001), paving the way for the "Uniform" series, which began to take shape in 2004. In this series, uniforms provide automatic identities for the characters in the paintings. Indeed, the societal characteristics associated with the uniforms conceal the identities of the characters as individuals. Wang uses this concealment and substitution, first of all, to avoid having to explain exactly who the people are in his paintings. However, he does not particularly care about symbolic connotations of the various uniforms. It is enough for the uniform to provide a character with a distinguishing characteristic. The uniform identities become the primary way in which different roles in Wang's paintings are discerned and recognised: in other words, they become names. Beyond being names, these roles are not important. The uniform-roles are substitutions in which the individual and the role are decoupled; the same person can assume different identities. This method allows the artist to avoid becoming entangled in the specific characteristics of the roles themselves. Instead, he can focus his energies on creating awkward circumstances. Within the dark humour of these circumstances, we focus on elements such as action, expression, posture, and identity, which Wang uses to subvert conventional significance and distort the constructions of the systems of societal life. These changes resemble the process in theatre of revising and refining scripts during rehearsal. However, Wang's paintings are not serious, straightforward dramas of cause and effect. Indeed, we see something more tantalising within them: the implications produced by the transformation of logical relationships and by the language structure itself. In these scripts, the actors are always caught in awkward moments, entering late and forgetting their lines. Thus the paintings are all "untitled", and their parenthetical annotations serve only to distinguish between them. The techniques of depiction in the painting are appropriated from the practices of cheap commercial painting. From a technical perspective, this style exempts the painting from excessive interpretation while also appending a number of aesthetic connotations that go beyond the value systems of fine art painting. The artist utilizes this style from a standpoint of neutrality, and he also tends to express the charm and intentions of the earliest eras of painting—aspects that correspond to the richly humorous tableaus he recreates.