Both Wang Xingwei’s Ji Gong and Duan Jianyu’s The Muse has Awoken No.3 both offer conspicuous comical impressions, which on the one hand, articulate a kind of literary comedy from the narrations of the figures on canvas, their expressions, motion, theatricality and etc., while stylistically – be it Wang Xingwei’s compositional momentum and the exaggeration rendered through brushwork, or Duan Jianyu’s kitsch and crass emphasis – give shape to the comedy of mannerism, providing theatricality for the language of painting. Thirdly, they are comical on a cultural history level as they have adopted the Baroque style to portray the Mad Monk and placed the Goddess on Dunhuang murals into modern countryside context, this kind of casual yet poignant fusion has taken the “La Comédie Humaine” approach to respond to the rapidly evolving Chinese society and the unsettled dust of cultural order.
Wang Xingwei, Ji Gong, oil on canvas, 240×200cm, 2015
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Geng Jianyi, Eternal Rays of The Sun, Oil on canvas, 195×133cm×5, 1992
Eternal Rays of the Sun series were works Geng Jianyi has prepared specifically for the 1993 Venice Biennale. The work may seem to embody the “political pop” style, when in fact the artist’s emphasis was not to highlight the red, bright and glorious background of the Cultural Revolution and its representation of the farmers, worker, and soldiers class. Instead, it concealed a visual game where the center of each painting consists of the shifting foci of the group photograph on the backside of the 5 yuan bill. As if these paintings are five fixed frames of an animation, the radiant background could thus be taken out of the political myth and be restored to its initial impetus in visual design. In this sense, this work was meant to disenchant, rather than creating a myth to demystify, it confronted the experiences of a time through an individual’s everyday sentiments, this was the ingenuity Geng Jianyi has preserved throughout his lifetime.
Li Ran, Somewhat Abstract, Somewhat Realistic, 2019, Two-channel HD video, black and white & color, sound, 4’55”
Questions such as Abstract and Realistic, Realism and Classicism have always been part of the problem of self-presupposition in the Chinese art industry, and now this presupposition seems to bring us to a kind of thorny land. No matter it is our self-expression or the imagination of “the other”, this splitting and ambiguous face has become a new spokesperson. In the Cilm, I convinced the photographer who often works with me to play the roles of model and makeup artist together.
