Zhang Enli

signed in Pinyin and dated 06; signed and titled in Chinese and dated 06 on the reverse

ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is generally in good condition with minor wear in handling around the extreme edges. When examined under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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Red Container, painted in 2006, is one of the few works in the Container series dominated by the colour red. It is also one of the earlier paintings of buckets, and predates the three Bucket paintings, all painted in 2007, featured on permanent display at England's Tate Modern Museum. Unlike the greens, browns, and yellows that appear more commonly in Zhang Enli's paintings, this rare, dazzling use of red lends this piece an uncommon intensity. Indeed, red is the only pigment used in the painting, and the sedulously unpainted white portion of the canvas represents the liquid contents of the bucket. This technique of using negative space to depict and highlight a subject can also be found in the artist's famous Sky series. Containers are a subject that have played a crucial role in Zhang Enli's creative history, and might even be called his signature motif. The containers are psychologically suggestive; as the artist sees it, they represent a generation of Chinese people without heritage. "This generation, we have no inheritance", Zhang Enli explains. "When we were young, our families never had any possessions. All of our things could fit in a few boxes".¹ A turning point in Zhang Enli's career came in the year 2000, when he began painting a series of inanimate objects. He expressed themes of isolation and emptiness in his widely popular Container series, in which boxes, bowls, buckets and other empty containers are all painted against lacklustre backdrops, and for the artist these objects are containers that bear the weight of everyday life. Containers are an extension of the body, and became his most important theme in the 2000s. Zhang says, "Departing from the simple notion of transforming the body into a container, you can imagine the body as a box, a sink, a tree, an empty room, right down to an ashtray and a packet of cigarettes. From the tiny details you can discover an object's essence or core, and this becomes the symbol of a 'container'."

¹ Hans Ulrich Obrist: The China Interviews, Office for Discourse Engineering