Beijing

Spanning across nearly nine feet wide, Damien Hirst's Beijing is at once monumental and strikingly captivating. It is one of the seventeen paintings Hirst created for his limited Black Scalpel Cityscapes series between 2013 and 2014. Using surgical instruments rather than his trademark living materials like butterflies, insects, and sharks, the painting depicts cities that are either undergoing conflicts or are epicentres of political, religious, and economic significance in a composition of a bird's-eye view that brings to mind virtual data like Google Earth and its association with the inevitable surveillance aspect of modern life. Setting against the black background, Hirst maps out the cityscape of Beijing—the capital of China where the Imperial Palace and Tiananmen Square are located. It is also the largest city among the four that the artist chose from Asia for this series. In particular, the historical site, formerly named ‘The Forbidden City’ and consisting of 980 surviving buildings, is captured at the bottom left of the present work. In his own manner of 'surgical mapping’, Hirst uses countless scalpels, razor blades, hooks, iron filings, and safety pins to meticulously trace the urban contours and delineate both manmade features and natural elements. For Hirst, landscape is no less than a different type of body that one would want to represent and possess, ‘“universal trigger” that inspires profound and ambivalent emotion in people regardless of place, race, gender, class, and history' (D. Hirst, quoted in Damien Hirst: Black Scalpel Cityscapes, exh. cat. Sao Paulo, 2014, p. 9). In Beijing, the vessels and routes of the modern metropolis are not unlike veins in plants and human bodies, stretched out in front of the vigilant, clinical eye of the artist—an artistic inquiry that threads through Hirst’s oeuvre over the past three decades.

Similar to Hirst’s celebrated series, including Spot Paintings, Entomology Cabinets, or Kaleidoscope Paintings, the present work bears witness to Hirst’s emblematic technique of systematic repetition and obsessive patterning—a reminder that order and control are abstract ideas that remain unattainable in real life. Steel scalpels, as a subject or tool that has recurred in Hirst’s works since the early 1990s, was, in the artist's words, ‘dark but at the same time light’ for its highly reflective property as a precision-tooled metal, as well as its evocative of the universal fear of the surgeon's knife. Likewise, Hirst’s scalpel cityscapes series manipulates the wordplay around 'surgical strike’, a military procedure that widely uses modern warfare that carefully targets precise areas for eradication, to explore not only personal anxiety towards mortality but also the automation of warfare and perhaps the feeling of a distant Orwellian system that imposes itself on all of us. ‘Hirst alerts us the stark beauty of the cities we inhabit, but sliced through the implication of the digital age, who photo-real imagery we know to serve non-disclosed commercial and political purpose.’, art historian Jerry Brotton observed, ‘Hirst has always had the artistic acumen to put his finger on the zeitgeist’ (J. Brotton, Damien Hirst: Black Scalpel Cityscapes, exh. cat. Sao Paulo, 2014, p. 11).