Wang Xingwei

initialed in Pinyin and dated 2007 on the reverse, framed

Urs Miele Gallery, Beijing
Acquired by the present owner from the above

China, Beijing, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Wang Xingwei, 18 May - 18 August, 2013, p. 130

This work is generally in good condition with minor wear in handling around the corners and edges and minor surface accretion. Whenexamined under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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Reflecting the Times
Wang Xingwei

Untitled (Lot 1074) is a rare piece from Wang Xingwei’s post-2000 period that possesses a specific social and humanitarian orientation. This painting stands out among the artist’s works, which tend to draw material from his own life and put the focus on experimental forms, painting style, and art itself. Untitled includes experiments in form and reflects the artist’s life experiences, but it also refers to the wealth gap caused by China’s trend of urbanisation. Humanitarian concern has a special position in Wang Xingwei’s creative career: he has produced a small quantity of very special works that possess a clear relevance to time and place.

Wang Xingwei’s artworks are multifaceted, and he continuously experiments with the medium of painting. In a creative career spanning more than twenty years, he has made more transformations in form and grammar than can be easily apprehended. Wang draws broadly on art history and impartially appropriates artistic vocabularies and techniques. He weaves history, society, and daily life into his paintings while also incorporating humour and experiments in painting language and method. He once said, “My attention is focused on how to maximally realise the value of form. The most essential, most central matter in oil painting, and painting in general, is how to endow the basic idea and logic of form. Other things are all added value for the individual work”.¹ Indeed, Wang has refused to align with any school of painting. His style has sometimes reminded people of Martin Kippenberger’s “bad painting”: it is at times extremely surrealistic, at times supremely vulgar. Wang moves freely between different idioms of painting, and has never settle on one. His work emphasises form and its unlimited permutations; his creative incision point is form itself, not what it signifies. In his own words, “All paintings are alike. The subject matter is not significant”.

Thus we see that Untitled is indeed an extremely important and special work from this artist’s career. The painting was created in 2008, and it is the last work Wang completed before relocating from Shanghai to Beijing. Untitled is undoubtedly a commentary on the highly commercialised metropolis of Shanghai. The background of the tableau appears to be a lightbox that spells out the characters 广告 (“advertisement”). The foreground features two paper-cut silhouettes: on the right, a beggar on his knees, and on the left, a benefactor with a briefcase. In front of the formidable background formed by the “advertisement” lightbox, the two silhouettes encapsulate the indifference and ruthlessness of the city. “If someone gives him money, he will keep on kneeling, like a statue, as if his soul is not present there but instead immersed in some distant place”, the artist said, recalling his original inspiration for this painting.

The forms of the figures in Untitled are recognisable from Wang’s earlier work. The painting is part of the artist’s Large Rowboat series, and the beggar figure on the right is the central character of the series, which Wang began in 2006. This beggar figure, who bears some resemblance to an American-style cartoon, has often appeared in Wang’s work, whether he’s beside a lake, beneath a tree, or sitting on grass. Sometimes he is on a date with a member of the opposite sex, while other times he seeks refuge in the shade of a tree. Late at night, he might even recline on a giant mushroom. He is the most important motif of this period of the artist’s career. The benefactor character on the left side of the painting, with his square head and curvaceous body, has also appeared in multiple Wang Xingwei paintings from 2007 and 2008. In some works, he appears on his own; in others, he shares the spotlight with other characters, manifesting the artist’s obsessive experimentation with form. The style of Untitled is a simplified, flat image. “I simplified the images, and also simplified the colours to white, brown, and yellow. I use ‘advertisement’, this word, to as a substitute for the specific image that might appear in a lightbox advertisement”, the artist explains.

In this painting, we can perceive Wang Xingwei’s challenge to rigid and stereotypical mind-sets regarding the concept of progress. The reductive artistry of his unadorned and essential technique is a bold and intense tribute to classical masters that does not lack a certain sense of humour. Wang Xingwei explicates the medium of painting from a position of profound understanding. He conducts profound experiments in painting expression, endowing language of the medium with its own initiative and independent value. Rather than seeking to achieve “bad painting”, he expands the boundaries of “good painting”. Positioning Wang Xingwei within the scope of “conceptual painting” would be a clumsy attempt to box the artist into a rigid stylistic category. Wang engages in nimble and clever juxtapositions and disruptions of form and object, event and presentation. He repackages the distinctive vocabularies of different systems in order to upset the apple cart of consolidated, unitary formal classifications. His paintings portray a reality of artificial elements, performances, hypotheticals, creating a multi-layered, self-referential, and polyvalent perspective on his subject. Indeed, this distinctive complexity reflects contemporary society and culture. In breaking down and reconstructing different styles, Wang strives to achieve his own unique aesthetics.

Among Wang Xingwei’s play between various styles, some elegant, some vulgar, Untitled is an extremely rare work. The artist recalls his most basic training and returns to the Chinese artistic tradition of social realism. The result is a highly representative painting that possesses uncommon timeliness but also bears the hallmarks of Wang Xingwei’s persistent aesthetic evolution.

¹ Xiao Ling and Wang Xingwei, informal interview for the 2011 exhibition Wang Xingwei, website of Galerie Urs Meile