Mao Xuhui

signed in Chinese and dated 1992.6; each signed in Chinese and titled on the reverse, framed

Christie's, Hong Kong, 27 November, 2010, lot 1044
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

China, Guangzhou, Guangzhou Convention and Exhibition Center, The First 1990s' Biennial Art Fair Guangzhou (The Oil Painting Section), October 1992, p. 27

edited by Zhou Li and Yu Ding, Chinese Oil Painting Archive 1954-2000, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, China, December 2002, p. 1532

This work is generally in good condition. There are occasional series of craquelures visible on the red impasto and wear in handling marks around the edges. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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Deconstruction of Power: Mao Xuhui’s '92 Paternalism

As a key witness of the 1980s, Mao Xuhui’s name is indelibly associated with the ’85 New Wave and the Southwest Art Research Group. The pinnacle of Mao’s Parents series, the monumental triptych '92 Paternalism (Lot 1064) uses the three symbols of a key, a high-back chair, and a studded door to realise an expressive masterpiece infused with sociopolitical significance and an unavoidable touchstone of Chinese contemporary art of the 90s. At the same time, '92 Paternalism represents the artist’s first definitive use of a key as a symbol, which later developed into the Vocabulary of Power series and his famous Scissors series. This painting thus has immense academic and historical value.

Mao Xuhui was born in Yunnan in 1956. In 1977, he enrolled in the oil painting department of Yunnan Arts University, becoming a member of its first class after the suspension of university education during the Cultural Revolution. The Yunnan Arts University did not have a long history or any iron-clad traditions. In this environment, Mao was instinctively skeptical about social realism, but at the same time was pained by the difficulty of achieving formalism and tragedy together. But these two influences ultimately opened a creative path for him: between 1982 and 1983, he read a large number of modern Western fiction and philosophy, including works by Hemingway, Kafka, Elliott, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Bergson. Furthermore, he was profoundly affected by several exhibitions of Western art in China in the early 1980s, following a long period of cultural stagnation. In 1982, he travelled thousands of miles to Beijing to visit an exhibition of paintings in the collection of the American oil magnate Dr. Armand Hammer. Seeing original works by Duchamp, Modigliani, and Corot overturned Mao Xuhui’s impressions of them, which he had formed based on poor printed reproductions. He realised that these masters were very down to earth, and from then on adopted this as his own artistic ideal. In an exhibition of German Neo-Expressionism held in the same period, Mao found a way to fulfill his inner need for emotional expression: “I began to create in earnest after my Beijing trip. I was able to begin to confront creative issues, to paint my own life and experiences. It all began at that time.”¹ These two exhibitions had a profound influence on Mao. On the one hand, the poetic ambiguity of Corot’s landscapes entered his later series of paintings from life, the Guishan Ensemble. On the other, Modigliani’s distorted figures and the immediacy, unease, and bitterness of German expressionist paintings also stimulated his articulation of an aesthetic concept, directly leading to his expressionistic style of the mid- and late-1980s. The series Volume and Red Bodies were the earliest manifestations of this.

In university, Mao Xuhui came to become intimate friends with artists living in the southwest, such as Zhang Xiaogang, Pan Dehai, and Ye Yongqing. They regularly wrote letters to each other and created art and discussed literature and philosophy together. The Sixth National Art Exhibition made them aware of the bureaucratic conservatism of the official exhibition system, which disappointed them greatly. Under Mao Xuhui’s leadership, they organised their own New Figurative Paintings Exhibition in the Jing’an District Cultural Centre in Shanghai in June 1985. In 1986, the Southwest Art Research Group was founded in Mao’s home, with the stated goal of creating art that takes the fate and spiritual state of the individual as its foremost concern. With the critic Gao Minglu’s support, the group quickly entered and became a significant voice in the animated discourse of the ’85 New Wave.

In 1988, Mao Xuhui participated in the Southwest Modern Art Exhibition organised by critic Lü Peng and others with the oil painting Parents, which presaged a transition in his career. The artist himself explains, “Around the summer of 1988, I came across the theme of ‘parents.’ I had always had complicated feelings about it. Sometimes I thought of it in terms of our fathers or more distant forebears. Sometimes it felt like myself. Sometimes it felt like a stricter, more authoritative lone image. Sometimes it made me afraid and was something that could cast a long-term shadow on our spirits. Sometimes it was not a concrete object but still powerful, lurking in the dark to face a cruel reality. It gradually formed, expanded to, and opened other questions, and my will flourished because of it. I painted ‘parents’ endlessly (in 1989, I almost devoted my entire being to it), but have never felt completely satisfied. Even now I feel motivated to do much more. This is not voluntary. In this process I have come to know more about my own abilities and things that were unclear to me in the past.” ²

Beginning in 1988 and continuing even today, the Parents series is no doubt a milestone in Mao Xuhui’s artistic career. Gao Minglu summarises the decades-long evolution of the series as follows: “Looking at the works chronologically, we see that Parents began with the themes of self-portraits and family portraits, but later became completely abstract. Mao tries to revert ‘parent’ to its fundamental concept, so that it does not refer to concrete social manifestations like the nation, family structure, or the relationship between the sexes. He uses a series of pyramidal structures to ‘pictorialise’ the traditional Confucian hierarchies of ruler and ruled, father and son, and other familial relations, as well as the power structures of modern society. His compositions have become simpler, ultimately becoming geometric compositions of chairs and scissors.”³ In February 1989, when Mao Xuhui submitted a work in the Parents series to the National Modern Art Exhibition, traces of human portraiture (albeit distorted) could still be seen, but after the political incident of June that year, the series immediately underwent a transformation. In the new period, the symbolism of “parent” acquired a new significance, and Mao began to illustrate the power and authority of the state in everyday contexts: “After 1989, I was no longer concerned with individual issues. This is very important. On the one hand, I retreated into painting medium itself to study its texture, thickness, facture, process, formal nuances, the differences between broad and thin, strong and weak brushwork, and so on; these were what I cared about. On the other hand, the notion of ‘parent’ no longer referred to actual people. It became attached to deep spiritual needs, to ancient feelings towards authority, which has had a decisive influence on Chinese history and on the progress of society. It has a special significance on the development of Chinese history. Only from this perspective was I able to deepen the very pedestrian notion of ‘parent,’ progressively adjust its iconography, and allow it to manifest itself under various guises and in various forms.”⁴

These “various guises” and “various forms” are profoundly illustrated in '92 Paternalism of 1992. Whether in terms of dimensions or compositional relations, this work is one of the most representative and accomplished in the series. It participated in the Guangzhou First 1990s Biennial Art Fair, an important exhibition in the early 90s and an attempt by the art world to establish a Chinese art market. The event awarded prizes in different categories and attracted artists from around the country and many monumental and ensemble masterpieces, including such profoundly influential works as Zhang Xiaogang’s diptych Genesis and Zeng Fanzhi’s Hospital Triptych. At the Guangzhou Biennial, the judges, including Lü Peng, Pi Daojian, Yi Ying, and Huang Zhuan, gave '92 Paternalism an Award of Excellence and commented on it that “This expressionist work has a vividly idiosyncratic iconography. With its powerful brushwork and bold colours, it embodies the painter’s mature artistic perspective and motivation. The key and the studded door allude to issues that echo the symbol of ‘parents’ in the middle panel, generating a metaphorical potential that is rare among expressionist works. We grant this work an Award of Excellence to affirm this highly idiosyncratic symbolist expressionism.” ⁵

Devoid of figures and narrative, '92 Paternalism features instead three symbols: a key, a high-back chair, and a studded door. The pure and piercing red contrasts with the black, white, and grey. Mao Xuhui continues his expressionistic brushwork of the 80s to generate a rough texture on the painting surface, an aura of solemnity, and a powerful visual impact. The high-back chair, the classical symbol of the Parents series, originated in Mao’s reading of Kafka’s short story The Judgment. At the same time, symbols other than the high-back chair made their first appearances in '92 Paternalism. The key on the left would recur many times in Mao’s later works and directly affect the beginning and development of the Vocabulary of Power series, extending Mao’s consideration of parents to a broader consideration of power. Symbols other than the key include such instruments of voice as hand gestures, bookcases, and computers. Vocabulary of Power itself would later develop into Mao Xuhui’s renowned and immediately recognizable Scissors series.

In China, the culture of parenthood has at its core the centralisation of power within the family and in politics, which the high-back chair symbolises. The high-back chair also symbolises the posture and high vantage of the parent as judge. Even more than early works in the Parents series that feature figures, the empty chair here conveys a strong sense of unease and crisis. The key and the studded door on its two sides are a pair of mutually echoing symbols; they at once allow and deny passage. Which it does depends on the parent’s decision, which ultimately gives rise to the second metaphorical significance in Mao’s analysis of the power of the parent. By investing human emotional qualities in everyday objects, Mao Xuhui realises the effective interfusion of personal experience and historical consciousness. To reflect on China’s historical evolutions in a symbolist manner, and thus to summon and invite more people to search for the meaning of life and the world—herein lies the value of '92 Paternalism.

1 “Interview with Mao Xunhui,” Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong

2 Mao Xunhui, “Notes on an artistic journey (1986-2012),” Dianchi, December 2012, p. 84

3 Gao Minglu, “Damao’s Story,” Mao Xunhui 1976-2007, Hanart TZ Gallery, 2007, p. 46

4 Mao Xunhui, “Notes on an artistic journey (1986-2012),” Dianchi, December 2012, p. 84

5 Lü Peng and Pi Daojian, “Academic comments on the 27 award-winning works,” in Lü Peng (ed.), Anthology Commemorating the 20th Anniversary of the Guangzhou First 1990’s Biennial Art Fair (Oil Painting Division), Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, February 2013, p. 272