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Lot Essay
In the post-1989 period, Chinese contemporary art consolidated around new, more pointed themes and practices. The loss of idealism, along with the loss of official domestic venues for exhibition and critical discourse, resulted in increasingly private expressions rich with personal symbolisms and indirect, ironic social commentary. At the same time, as the possibility to exhibit internationally became a new venue of validation, Chinese artists began to develop styles that could address their immediate circumstances with a powerfully accessible language. These seemingly paradoxical circumstances compelled Chinese contemporary art to a new level of maturity, sophistication and depth.
Central among the new movements of the 1990s were the Cynical Realists, a Beijing-based group of painters whose works were marked by their ironic, absurdist, and sardonic view of contemporary life. As the decade of cultural experimentation, idealism and public debate came to an end, it left in its wake a spiritual vacuum, one that was insufficiently filled with a consumerist culture and a race towards modernization. Painters like Fang Lijun portrayed a world of bland, grey droll amusement and existential drift, while others, like Yue Minjun, painted hysterical fantasias of grinning automatons, blind to the world around them. Foremost among this group was the painter Liu Wei. Contra the ironic social commentary of his contemporaries, Liu's mordant sensibilities can be ascertained not only in his critical appropriation of often mundane subject matter, but in the mesmerizing expressivity of his brushwork and style.
The two works featured here from the Guy & Myriam Ullens collection spectacularly exhibit Liu Wei's distinct mastery of his themes and material. Whereas artists like Zhang Xiaogang (Lot 38) found poetry and tragedy in his surrealist interpretation of historical imagery, Liu's work is firmly rooted in the philosophical and embodied contradictions of existence. His is a poetry that plums the grotesque to highlight the absurdities inherent to contemporary life. With Smoking No Smoking (Lot 39), Liu offers a monumental landscape that, in its vibrant palette, might at first gives the impression of a misty woods, luscious and fecund. A small grove of trees dominates the canvas, with the suggestion of a dense green brush between them. This initial lusciousness is undercut by the finer details of the composition, Liu's varied and emotive treatment of his materials, and the unexpected, graffiti-like details that appear throughout the composition.
Liu's treatment of the space thrusts the viewer deep into a swampy miasma with no clear sense of ground, horizon, or sky. What patch of sky is visible denies the viewer a sense of spatial depth and is instead a wash of murky grays, blacks, and whites, alternating in dry and wet washes that give the air itself a polluted, tactile quality. Liu's trees are knotted, spindly, and leafless forms, delineated by agitated charcoal greys and whites, like lifeless scorched carcasses, their limbs often disappearing under Liu's expressive smears and lingering washes. The darker tones of the forest are alleviated by three primary passages of pinks and reds, with varying representational and narrative implications. They appear at once like the remnants of a brushfire that has passed through the forest, but in other areas appear like impressionistic flower beds that morph into Liu's signature "carnal flows", flesh-like expositions of color and form that evoke unrecognizable organic forms, like animal organs or discarded butchered entrails. The washes of these deeper reds and pinks trickle down the surface of the canvas, staining and infecting the landscape. Throughout, Liu's varied technique, alternating wet and dry, carefully modeled and rapid, sketchy brushwork, which draws the viewer in and out of the representational realm into something more suggestive and elusive. It is in these passages that we become aware of Liu's thematic concerns. Passages of white wash take the shape of tree roots, from which the ghostly visages of three men appear in the lower left of the canvas, with thick, buffoonish grimaces and expressions. Liu further covers the canvas the distorted skulls and cross bones, and the graffiti scrawl of his childlike, plaintive assertions: "I like nature", "I like fire" and "TREES". These are countered by a steady flow of repeated admonitions: "No garbage", "No Pollution," "No Smoking", and "No Fire".
Liu Weis' earliest works - his Revolutionary Family and Swimmer paintings (Fig. 1 & 2) - were deliberately provocative, iconoclastic and irreverent. They depicted the values of the military family unit as derelict, physically and, by extension, spiritually corrupt. To that end, these extraordinary works were also those works of a young artist, figuratively rejecting the paternalism of the Chinese state and of the traditional family. As Liu evolved and expanded his repertoire, his technique and his themes become more expansive. For him, every brushstroke relates to an ephemeral spiritual and material reality, fraught with impulses and experiences both high and low.
Central among the new movements of the 1990s were the Cynical Realists, a Beijing-based group of painters whose works were marked by their ironic, absurdist, and sardonic view of contemporary life. As the decade of cultural experimentation, idealism and public debate came to an end, it left in its wake a spiritual vacuum, one that was insufficiently filled with a consumerist culture and a race towards modernization. Painters like Fang Lijun portrayed a world of bland, grey droll amusement and existential drift, while others, like Yue Minjun, painted hysterical fantasias of grinning automatons, blind to the world around them. Foremost among this group was the painter Liu Wei. Contra the ironic social commentary of his contemporaries, Liu's mordant sensibilities can be ascertained not only in his critical appropriation of often mundane subject matter, but in the mesmerizing expressivity of his brushwork and style.
The two works featured here from the Guy & Myriam Ullens collection spectacularly exhibit Liu Wei's distinct mastery of his themes and material. Whereas artists like Zhang Xiaogang (Lot 38) found poetry and tragedy in his surrealist interpretation of historical imagery, Liu's work is firmly rooted in the philosophical and embodied contradictions of existence. His is a poetry that plums the grotesque to highlight the absurdities inherent to contemporary life. With Smoking No Smoking (Lot 39), Liu offers a monumental landscape that, in its vibrant palette, might at first gives the impression of a misty woods, luscious and fecund. A small grove of trees dominates the canvas, with the suggestion of a dense green brush between them. This initial lusciousness is undercut by the finer details of the composition, Liu's varied and emotive treatment of his materials, and the unexpected, graffiti-like details that appear throughout the composition.
Liu's treatment of the space thrusts the viewer deep into a swampy miasma with no clear sense of ground, horizon, or sky. What patch of sky is visible denies the viewer a sense of spatial depth and is instead a wash of murky grays, blacks, and whites, alternating in dry and wet washes that give the air itself a polluted, tactile quality. Liu's trees are knotted, spindly, and leafless forms, delineated by agitated charcoal greys and whites, like lifeless scorched carcasses, their limbs often disappearing under Liu's expressive smears and lingering washes. The darker tones of the forest are alleviated by three primary passages of pinks and reds, with varying representational and narrative implications. They appear at once like the remnants of a brushfire that has passed through the forest, but in other areas appear like impressionistic flower beds that morph into Liu's signature "carnal flows", flesh-like expositions of color and form that evoke unrecognizable organic forms, like animal organs or discarded butchered entrails. The washes of these deeper reds and pinks trickle down the surface of the canvas, staining and infecting the landscape. Throughout, Liu's varied technique, alternating wet and dry, carefully modeled and rapid, sketchy brushwork, which draws the viewer in and out of the representational realm into something more suggestive and elusive. It is in these passages that we become aware of Liu's thematic concerns. Passages of white wash take the shape of tree roots, from which the ghostly visages of three men appear in the lower left of the canvas, with thick, buffoonish grimaces and expressions. Liu further covers the canvas the distorted skulls and cross bones, and the graffiti scrawl of his childlike, plaintive assertions: "I like nature", "I like fire" and "TREES". These are countered by a steady flow of repeated admonitions: "No garbage", "No Pollution," "No Smoking", and "No Fire".
Liu Weis' earliest works - his Revolutionary Family and Swimmer paintings (Fig. 1 & 2) - were deliberately provocative, iconoclastic and irreverent. They depicted the values of the military family unit as derelict, physically and, by extension, spiritually corrupt. To that end, these extraordinary works were also those works of a young artist, figuratively rejecting the paternalism of the Chinese state and of the traditional family. As Liu evolved and expanded his repertoire, his technique and his themes become more expansive. For him, every brushstroke relates to an ephemeral spiritual and material reality, fraught with impulses and experiences both high and low.