- 171
Wang Xingwei
描述
- Wang Xingwei
- Nude Woman by the River
- oil on canvas
來源
Acquired directly from the artist
展覽
出版
Condition
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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."
拍品資料及來源
Yet another pictorial farce by the artist, Wang Xingwei's Nude Woman by the River targets the heavily commercialized system of replica painting rampant in mainland China. These works are copies of famous European or American masterpieces and have overtime gained tremendous currency locally and abroad, subsequently shaping foreign impressions of China. Dafen Village in Shenzhen, in particular, has become internationally famous. Wang Xingwei adopts one of the most popular genres—the nude—and goes on to manipulate the imagery in mischievous ways. Within the picture a naked woman is gracefully seated by the pond, unquestionably a Renoir formula, and she is bestowed with awkward proportions as well as gauche colours, features laughably consistent with said mainland replicas. In the midst of this lyrical setting, the artist inserts a drowning duck, a situation that seems
to have attracted the attention of the bathing lady. Upon the deconstruction of "the replica painting," Wang Xingwei renders it completely ridiculous and annuls any last shred of legitimacy.
Wang Xingwei was born in 1969 in Shenyang, Liaoning Province. He did not come from an artistic family; rather, as a natural-born lover of painting, he ended up in all sorts of interest groups and classes. He took an exam and wound up in the art department of Shenyang Normal University. Growing up in an environment devoid any connection to art, he became intrigued by foreign art books in bookstores. He purchased books of paintings by Theodore Gericault and Eugene Delacroix; not long afterward, his younger brother, Wang Xingjie, who would also later become a painter, bought him a book of Cezanne's paintings. The world revealed to Wang by these outwardly plain catalogues of Western artists was vastly different from urban life in northern China in the 1980's.
At the time, the '85 New Wave in Chinese art—what later would be dubbed the birth of the Chinese avant-garde—had already begun to emerge. Young people were fervently curious about novel, foreign lifestyles. They wishfully pursued an idealistic, individualistic liberation and spiritual freedom as a means to escape and avoid an extremely impoverished reality. From books to music and other aspects of cultural life and entertainment, and even including styles of dress and speech, everyone wanted to do things differently.
Wang Xingwei's innate disposition led him to an interest in the fragments of deeper spiritual content within the burgeoning new culture. He was not overly driven to external displays of individuality. He did for a time fancy high-end Western clothing, and once cut his hair to resemble an orange soccer ball, but for the most part he was not one to conform to popular trends. That he still wears hand-knit woolen long johns is widely known; Wang seeks his self-definition in the realms of intellect and spirit, not fashion.
The conclusion of the 1980's had an incalculable influence on Wang Xingwei's generation. This influence largely took forms imperceptible to the participants and onlookers. It drove him toward a pursuit that he remains entangled in today: painting. He disassembled and ruminated over the historical pillars of the art form, one by one, maintaining a skeptical attitude throughout. He evaluated knowledge and theory through personal experience and engaged in diligent self-analysis. Skepticism and a demand for authenticity became guiding components of his life and work. Later, Wang would say that one's existence intrinsically furnishes a paramount question that includes all primeval challenges and all invisible but omnipresent structures of thought, because normal life avoids contact with authenticity.
In 1993 and 1994, after leaving behind the topical art that had spread throughout art schools in the early 1990's, Wang Xingwei produced some autobiographical works, such as To Hurt and Dawn. These works exhibited normal qualities of composition, color, imagery and atmosphere, expressing the experience of ordinary, individual life with a sense of weight. They possessed the fresh, distinctive look of Wang's work, and more importantly, they marked the beginning of his exploration of a formal issue in the painting medium: the way in which the state and behavior of people and the supposition of a staged setting introduce performance and presumption into the reenacted reality of a painting.
In 1995, Wang Xingwei began to address art history in his work. Continuing to employ methods of presumption and postulation, speaking in today's terms, he traversed and parodied artwork from different time periods, including satirical treatments of "Post-1989" trends in Chinese art. His paintings from this period were still powerfully composed, richly colored and designed, and abundantly humorous and fun. Beginning in 1997, relatively veiled and equivocal content occasionally appeared in his work. The emergence of more ambiguous imagery, including penguins and pandas, marked his work at the turn of the millennium. The style of these paintings began to feature less rigorous composition as well as the visual characteristics of commercial painting. This period marked a transition to a new set of principles rooted in the search for means of casting off both the reliance on artistic styles and the consolidation of the value of "artist" status.
Wang Xingwei was questioning the use of color, style, and other fundamental elements of painting. It was as if he were abandoning his mature, individual style to return to square one in the study of painting. This proved to be the case, as his work progressed from stiff, bright and hasty to mature, consummate, harmonious, and exquisite over the course of the ensuing several years. Wang had truly changed his approach to being a painter.
But this later Wang Xingwei was not merely problematizing his own work; he was exploring new possibilities within the realm of painting. Facing the diversification of art media, Wang Xingwei decided to persist as a painter, and he sought to extend and expand the connotations of the medium. He started with watercolor propaganda posters, commercial painting, and pedagogical painting exercises, but he also riffed on Fontana and Courbet. His subject material skipped freely from revolutionary history paintings to ironic self-portraits. By 2003, Wang had relocated to Shanghai, where he began painting on roof tiles, utilizing the naturally curved surface of the material to create inverted reflections and wave effects. These effects were founded on the same reasoning that led the painter to begin portraying sailors, stewardesses, nurses and other similar characters in 2005. Portrayals can be either affirmative or subversive. The crooked line of a soccer field on a tile, a hunter firing his gun in a warped field, a character's betrayal of the status conferred by the uniform she wears: these were among Wang's subversive portrayals.
It was in this period that Wang Xingwei developed a parasitic theory of style, piggy-backing on Lempicka, Art Deco, and cartoon. This sort of parasitism is not simply borrowing. Rather, because the target of emulation possesses a distinct visual style and a symbolic identity and significance, Wang's approach provides a continued, resolute dislodging and deconstruction of customary significance within painting, exposing the inevitable implications that present themselves with each stroke of every painter's brush.
The contents of Wang Xingwei's paintings are merely target practice for his exploration of painting and reality. The content of his 2008 series of four paintings of Comrade Xiao He and his 2010 series of five Untitled (Old Lady) paintings is not intrinsically rich in significance, nor does each successive painting demonstrate an evolutionary process; rather, they present a lively, complex art form, the one we call "painting." The artist's own words most clearly express this idea:
I've always been very interested in commercial painting because in a different sense it strictly and completely avoids these issues. It achieves a sort of pure and perfect state, whereas nothing else creates a perfectly symmetrical dynamic. Commercial painting attains a maximally perfect space: complete deception. This sort of completion is very difficult to attain, and it forms a stable reference system for me. I think about whether it's possible to use a different method to reach this sort of completion. But as long as there is some significance to judge, then this sort of completion has not been attained. Thus, the things we make are all fragmented, incomplete things.
The significance of Wang Xingwei's work lies not in his paintings per se, but in their treatment of the great construction that is painting. His paintings do not express anything by themselves. Rather, their effect, like individual go pieces, is relational. They relate to a system constituted by all paintings, ancient and modern, foreign and Chinese.
His art has inevitably influenced his contemporaries in a variety of ways, not only in northern China, and not only in the field of painting. Nor is he the only artist to respond to the diversification of art media by expanding the formal capacities of painting (Yan Lei's paintings are another example). But to Wang Xingwei, painting is more than a medium. To him, painting has an a priori significance—this is what sets him apart. His pervasive influence can largely be attributed to his attitude toward art and his unceasing reconsiderations of form and technique. In the eyes of some young artists, his influence has transformed the concept of painting; this transformation has made it possible for young artists to participate in and contribute to contemporary Chinese culture.
Wang Xingwei and the artists with whom he is associated are facing a major question in contemporary Chinese culture: What is China? What has changed since Wang found Gericault in a bookstore thirty years ago? What is "contemporary," and why is it being paraded around so much? History is just a label assigned to previous generations by later generations; Wang and his ilk are arguing that to withdraw from the historical order is to be contemporary, and perhaps it is better yet to withdraw from the contemporary as well. To be fooled by the mirage of linear history and to seek oneself in the past leads only to the loss of freedom and reality. And freedom and reality are essential to living for oneself, and to making paintings for oneself and one's friends.
Excerpted from Zhang Li (Daniel Nieh, trans.), "Wang Xingwei: True or False?" in LEAP, 2011:9.