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Lot Essay
The roots of the Chinese avant-garde that crystallized in the 1990s began in the domestic art movements that sprung up nearly overnight after Chairman Mao's death in 1976 and after Deng Xiaoping's tentative steps towards "opening up" from 1978 onwards. While artists in the 1980s were effectively free to experiment and invent new artistic idioms, they were nonetheless still reliant on the state and academies for their professional acceptance, postings, and exhibitions. To help mediate the uncertain life of an independent, professional artist, communities of like-minded artists relied on each other in formal and informal artist collectives to help solidify and reaffirm their own tentative impulses and intuitions. These groups contributed to the utopic and idealistic debates over the role of art and culture that were then sweeping the nation.
Wang Luyan was among the most active of early Chinese conceptual artists. Working alongside Gu Dexin in the New Measurement Group, or alongside Tang Pinggang, Li Shan and others in the so-called Apartment Art movement, Wang was instrumental in contributing to the emerging native movements of Chinese art in the 1980s before retreating from the art world entirely for over a decade, only to emerge again as a provocative installation artist. While his later works display his methodical approach to, quite literally, the potential violence inherent to the instruments and mechanisms of everyday life, the early paintings featured here demonstrate clearly the raw fervor of the avant-garde in the late 1980s. Later artists might steep themselves in images of history or of contemporary life, but here instead Wang produces powerfully expressionist abstract works, rooted simultaneously in the ink painting traditions of the East and the abstract expressionism of the west. Muscular, Zen-style calligraphic strokes dominates the compositions of both Untitled works (Lot 258 & Lot 257). Offset by a sketchy ground of white pigment or by a warm palette of contrasting greens, yellows, and reds, Wang's abstractions stand on par with his corollaries in the West, while infusing Chinese tradition with the aesthetic values of modernity.
Even as experimental new Chinese art in the 1980s found outlets in official, state-sanctioned venues of exhibition, many artists, and especially those working in abstract styles, remained outside of the mainstream, exhibiting and exchanging ideas in private spaces, in a phenomenon retrospectively described as "apartment art". In the two works from 1978 from Tang Pinggang featured here, we see an urge towards coloristic expression at once humble and revelatory (Lot 255 & Lot 256). Painted on cardboard on a diminutive, domestic scale, Tang's works demonstrate the earliest expression of an art liberated from the strictures of Socialist Realism, depicting highly personal vistas of daily life, and infusing them with the coloristic expressionism and reduced forms of the early European modernists. Similar impulses can be found in the oil on cardboard abstractions from Yin Guangzhong. With Lotus Flower (Lot 253) and Untitled (Lot 254), both from 1987, the artist tacks back and forth between form and full-blown abstraction, creating a ground of pigment and paint that is further manipulated by what appears to be a paint knife and other hard edges. In Lotus Flower, only the slight suggestion of a brick background remains, over which a thicket of dark, organic forms - presumably the lotuses of the title - languish, while the earthy palette and hard edges of Untitled suggest a desert landscape. Wang Youshen, working as an editor at the People's Youth Daily, first made his name with his Newspaper Series in the early 1990s, inspired by the limitations imposed on the human spirit by a media- and news-saturated culture. The two works featured here from 1987, Birdman Playing Qigong (Lot 251) and One Finger Zen (Lot 252), precede even that body of work, and demonstrate a playful interest in both the absurdities and simple pleasures of everyday life.
For many artists of this period, their experience of exploring the countryside and observing peasant life - either during the Cultural Revolution or, later, as art students - served as inspiration for a nativist, folk-informed art practice. This can be seen in Zhang Xiaogang's earliest Grassland paintings and it continues to inform the mournful spirit of works such as his Madonna and Child from 1989 featured in the Evening sale (Lot 37). This impulse can be found in the early works on paper shown here from Pan Dehai (Lot 273 & Lot 274). Executed in 1988, the two watercolours track the emergence of Pan's signature forms, rooted in the figures of tableaus of surrealistic figures whose stylized, corn-husk forms merge with those of the land and the earth. His figures are infused with a sympathetic spirituality, suggesting the optimism and sincerity of this burgeoning avant-garde.
Wang Luyan was among the most active of early Chinese conceptual artists. Working alongside Gu Dexin in the New Measurement Group, or alongside Tang Pinggang, Li Shan and others in the so-called Apartment Art movement, Wang was instrumental in contributing to the emerging native movements of Chinese art in the 1980s before retreating from the art world entirely for over a decade, only to emerge again as a provocative installation artist. While his later works display his methodical approach to, quite literally, the potential violence inherent to the instruments and mechanisms of everyday life, the early paintings featured here demonstrate clearly the raw fervor of the avant-garde in the late 1980s. Later artists might steep themselves in images of history or of contemporary life, but here instead Wang produces powerfully expressionist abstract works, rooted simultaneously in the ink painting traditions of the East and the abstract expressionism of the west. Muscular, Zen-style calligraphic strokes dominates the compositions of both Untitled works (Lot 258 & Lot 257). Offset by a sketchy ground of white pigment or by a warm palette of contrasting greens, yellows, and reds, Wang's abstractions stand on par with his corollaries in the West, while infusing Chinese tradition with the aesthetic values of modernity.
Even as experimental new Chinese art in the 1980s found outlets in official, state-sanctioned venues of exhibition, many artists, and especially those working in abstract styles, remained outside of the mainstream, exhibiting and exchanging ideas in private spaces, in a phenomenon retrospectively described as "apartment art". In the two works from 1978 from Tang Pinggang featured here, we see an urge towards coloristic expression at once humble and revelatory (Lot 255 & Lot 256). Painted on cardboard on a diminutive, domestic scale, Tang's works demonstrate the earliest expression of an art liberated from the strictures of Socialist Realism, depicting highly personal vistas of daily life, and infusing them with the coloristic expressionism and reduced forms of the early European modernists. Similar impulses can be found in the oil on cardboard abstractions from Yin Guangzhong. With Lotus Flower (Lot 253) and Untitled (Lot 254), both from 1987, the artist tacks back and forth between form and full-blown abstraction, creating a ground of pigment and paint that is further manipulated by what appears to be a paint knife and other hard edges. In Lotus Flower, only the slight suggestion of a brick background remains, over which a thicket of dark, organic forms - presumably the lotuses of the title - languish, while the earthy palette and hard edges of Untitled suggest a desert landscape. Wang Youshen, working as an editor at the People's Youth Daily, first made his name with his Newspaper Series in the early 1990s, inspired by the limitations imposed on the human spirit by a media- and news-saturated culture. The two works featured here from 1987, Birdman Playing Qigong (Lot 251) and One Finger Zen (Lot 252), precede even that body of work, and demonstrate a playful interest in both the absurdities and simple pleasures of everyday life.
For many artists of this period, their experience of exploring the countryside and observing peasant life - either during the Cultural Revolution or, later, as art students - served as inspiration for a nativist, folk-informed art practice. This can be seen in Zhang Xiaogang's earliest Grassland paintings and it continues to inform the mournful spirit of works such as his Madonna and Child from 1989 featured in the Evening sale (Lot 37). This impulse can be found in the early works on paper shown here from Pan Dehai (Lot 273 & Lot 274). Executed in 1988, the two watercolours track the emergence of Pan's signature forms, rooted in the figures of tableaus of surrealistic figures whose stylized, corn-husk forms merge with those of the land and the earth. His figures are infused with a sympathetic spirituality, suggesting the optimism and sincerity of this burgeoning avant-garde.