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Lot Essay
Yun Gee received traditional home tutoring as a child and was also a pupil of two painters of the Lingnan School of painting, Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng; his boldness in adopting Western styles likely also derives from the influence of the Lingnan School's blend of Eastern and Western styles. In 1921, at the age of only 15, Yun Gee left China and emigrated to San Francisco with his father. During a period of studies at the California School of Fine Arts, he encountered European modernist styles and moved quickly through the dominant styles of the time before adopting his own distinct vision. He was initially influenced by Cubism but proceeded to produce work influenced by Synchromism, French Realism, and Surrealism. In the process he created a highly individual painterly vocabulary, and by the age of 30 had already become an established figure in major art centers, from San Francisco to New York, Paris, and beyond.
In 1927, under the patronage of the Prince and Princess Achille Murat, Yun Gee traveled to France to further advance his artistic career. He later recalled his sojourn in Paris, saying "I came to understand that the East and the West are extremely similar in certain ways, and the distance between them is really not so great. After my stay in Paris, my goal of a fusion of Eastern and Western culture was set." Though the two cultures of East and West developed under highly divergent historical circumstances, leading sometimes to great differences between them, Yun Gee's contact with Western culture nevertheless inspired him to re-examine his own traditional culture and to look for ways of uniting what he saw as the fundamental points of similarity in the art of East and West. This period in France would be an exceptionally important transitional period in his art. At the time, Yun Gee was focusing primarily on landscapes, historical themes, and portraits, in which colour and composition served the needs of his subjects, but which were also informed by the artist's emotional responses, cultural origins, and original conceptions. Yun Gee's Hundred Bathing Beauties (Lot 1016), however, shows the artist indulging a rare flight of fancy. Beyond a subjective handling of visual elements in which he displays his mastery of both Eastern and Western forms, the artist's departures from realism convey feelings about aspects of underlying meaning in the subject matter of his painting.
The Surrealist movement was in full flower in France during the 1920s and '30s, its creativity springing out of dreamlike, hallucinatory scenes at odds with reality or reason, based on the idea that only exploring the world of the subconscious could the artist free himself of all constraints and present the "true" face behind objectively perceived realities.
Yun Gee's Hundred Bathing Beauties partakes of the Surrealist ethos, insofar as the scene it depicts does not derive from the real world; the landscape of some non-specified place forms a background, while Yun Gee's cavalier perspective places his subjects in an S-shaped composition, following a winding river that stretches toward the sky an distant mountains, moving from the smaller figures of the background to the larger ones in the foreground. Touches of white tones between regions of warm and cool colours create the effect of wandering mists amid the landscape. The vivid yellows of the nudes and the yellow-green of the slopes hint at the fact that these figures belong to this landscape, but definitely not to a landscape of realistic fact; the unreal proportions of the trees, the nude figures, and the lotus at the lower left make this clearly a projection of the artist's inner fantasy, one whose visual elements reflect a distinctly Freudian awareness and influence. Yun Gee here foregoes depiction of real images based on reasoned, systematically ordered memory, in favor of a mixture of realist concepts with the instinctual, subconscious, and dreamlike aspects of experience, conveying an idealistic vision of the world from a deeper level of the psyche.
Yun Gee's interest in Taoist thought, especially during the 1927-28 period, is shown by his paintings on the themes of Chinese philosophers Laozi and Chuangzi and by a free verse poem he wrote about Laozi. The easy relaxation of the nudes in Yun Gee's Hundred Bathing Beauties conveys a different feeling than the methodically arranged models in Western painting studios; here, they are paddling in rowboats, bathing, and reclining on the grass. Their playfulness strikes a far different note than the idea of the painted nude as we usually define it, and, like the trees and grass, these nudes are fully at home as part of this natural environment. The Chinese philosopher Li Zehou has argued that, "If we hold that what Confucius advocated was 'the humanization of nature,' then what Zhuangzi was after was 'the naturalization of the human being.' The former argues that a human's natural aspect must conform to and inform the societal aspect before humanity is truly achieved; the latter, that humans must abandon their societal selves and maintain their natural selves in an unsullied state, which must then be expanded and united with the structure of the cosmos in order for them to become truly human." This is where Yun Gee's Hundred Bathing Beauties begins: his nudes, freed from the constraints of social decorum and correctness, wander through the landscape at their leisure, as if to illustrate Zhuangzi's observation that "Heaven and Earth, and I myself, were born together; all other things exist together with me as one." In the Taoist, Eastern view of the world, what the artist seeks is the truth and simplicity of human nature after liberation.
Yun Gee once explained the reason why he usually did not paint landscapes or bird-and-flower paintings: because he was "living in a modern industrial society instead of meditating about nature on a mountaintop." The artist was dedicated throughout his life to presenting the spirit of the era through his work, and while the surrealist construction of Hundred Bathing Beauties may have been inspired by Western modernism, its nudes and landscapes, and the links between them, reflect Yun Gee's subconscious attraction to Taoist ideas. The fusion of Eastern and Western art here takes place less at the level of form and technique and more through the artist's joining of Western modernist theories with traditional Eastern philosophy, based on his inner sense of their similarities. Yun Gee's Hundred Bathing Beauties also moves from inner to outer, in an ideal joining of theory and form that makes it an important milestone in Yun Gee's continuous quest for a stylistic fusion of Eastern and Western art.
In 1927, under the patronage of the Prince and Princess Achille Murat, Yun Gee traveled to France to further advance his artistic career. He later recalled his sojourn in Paris, saying "I came to understand that the East and the West are extremely similar in certain ways, and the distance between them is really not so great. After my stay in Paris, my goal of a fusion of Eastern and Western culture was set." Though the two cultures of East and West developed under highly divergent historical circumstances, leading sometimes to great differences between them, Yun Gee's contact with Western culture nevertheless inspired him to re-examine his own traditional culture and to look for ways of uniting what he saw as the fundamental points of similarity in the art of East and West. This period in France would be an exceptionally important transitional period in his art. At the time, Yun Gee was focusing primarily on landscapes, historical themes, and portraits, in which colour and composition served the needs of his subjects, but which were also informed by the artist's emotional responses, cultural origins, and original conceptions. Yun Gee's Hundred Bathing Beauties (Lot 1016), however, shows the artist indulging a rare flight of fancy. Beyond a subjective handling of visual elements in which he displays his mastery of both Eastern and Western forms, the artist's departures from realism convey feelings about aspects of underlying meaning in the subject matter of his painting.
The Surrealist movement was in full flower in France during the 1920s and '30s, its creativity springing out of dreamlike, hallucinatory scenes at odds with reality or reason, based on the idea that only exploring the world of the subconscious could the artist free himself of all constraints and present the "true" face behind objectively perceived realities.
Yun Gee's Hundred Bathing Beauties partakes of the Surrealist ethos, insofar as the scene it depicts does not derive from the real world; the landscape of some non-specified place forms a background, while Yun Gee's cavalier perspective places his subjects in an S-shaped composition, following a winding river that stretches toward the sky an distant mountains, moving from the smaller figures of the background to the larger ones in the foreground. Touches of white tones between regions of warm and cool colours create the effect of wandering mists amid the landscape. The vivid yellows of the nudes and the yellow-green of the slopes hint at the fact that these figures belong to this landscape, but definitely not to a landscape of realistic fact; the unreal proportions of the trees, the nude figures, and the lotus at the lower left make this clearly a projection of the artist's inner fantasy, one whose visual elements reflect a distinctly Freudian awareness and influence. Yun Gee here foregoes depiction of real images based on reasoned, systematically ordered memory, in favor of a mixture of realist concepts with the instinctual, subconscious, and dreamlike aspects of experience, conveying an idealistic vision of the world from a deeper level of the psyche.
Yun Gee's interest in Taoist thought, especially during the 1927-28 period, is shown by his paintings on the themes of Chinese philosophers Laozi and Chuangzi and by a free verse poem he wrote about Laozi. The easy relaxation of the nudes in Yun Gee's Hundred Bathing Beauties conveys a different feeling than the methodically arranged models in Western painting studios; here, they are paddling in rowboats, bathing, and reclining on the grass. Their playfulness strikes a far different note than the idea of the painted nude as we usually define it, and, like the trees and grass, these nudes are fully at home as part of this natural environment. The Chinese philosopher Li Zehou has argued that, "If we hold that what Confucius advocated was 'the humanization of nature,' then what Zhuangzi was after was 'the naturalization of the human being.' The former argues that a human's natural aspect must conform to and inform the societal aspect before humanity is truly achieved; the latter, that humans must abandon their societal selves and maintain their natural selves in an unsullied state, which must then be expanded and united with the structure of the cosmos in order for them to become truly human." This is where Yun Gee's Hundred Bathing Beauties begins: his nudes, freed from the constraints of social decorum and correctness, wander through the landscape at their leisure, as if to illustrate Zhuangzi's observation that "Heaven and Earth, and I myself, were born together; all other things exist together with me as one." In the Taoist, Eastern view of the world, what the artist seeks is the truth and simplicity of human nature after liberation.
Yun Gee once explained the reason why he usually did not paint landscapes or bird-and-flower paintings: because he was "living in a modern industrial society instead of meditating about nature on a mountaintop." The artist was dedicated throughout his life to presenting the spirit of the era through his work, and while the surrealist construction of Hundred Bathing Beauties may have been inspired by Western modernism, its nudes and landscapes, and the links between them, reflect Yun Gee's subconscious attraction to Taoist ideas. The fusion of Eastern and Western art here takes place less at the level of form and technique and more through the artist's joining of Western modernist theories with traditional Eastern philosophy, based on his inner sense of their similarities. Yun Gee's Hundred Bathing Beauties also moves from inner to outer, in an ideal joining of theory and form that makes it an important milestone in Yun Gee's continuous quest for a stylistic fusion of Eastern and Western art.