Wang Xingwei

signed in Pinyin and dated 06

Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing
Acquired by the present owner from the above

China, Beijing; Switzerland, Lucerne, Galerie Urs Meile, Large Rowboat, 3 February – 31 March 2007; 12 May – 30 June 2007, unpaginated

Claudia Albertini, Avatars and Antiheroes: A Guide to Contemporary Chinese Artists, Kodansha International, Tokyo, Japan, 2008, p. 10

This work is generally in good condition. Upon close inspection, there are minor craquelures on the left area near the figure's right arm. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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An Experimentalist of Contemporary Chinese Painting

Wang Xingwei graduated from Shenyang Normal University in 1990, when the previous decade’s grand narratives about the Chinese soul were firmly a thing of the past. The art world then was in a state of hibernation and anticipation. A student of Gong Lilong, Wang Xingwei did not enter the official art system after graduation and instead pursued his own unique voice. Unlike other Chinese artists, he did not pander to Western audiences with Chinese cultural images and ideologies in the form of Political Pop or Cynical Realism. Instead he delved into artistic language itself to uncover its multiplicity and possibilities, combining academic Socialist Realism with Western contemporary art to forge his unique aesthetics and style, which became very influential among artists of his generation. Wang Xingwei’s persistent experimentation with artistic language embodied an age of shifting values and has earned him widespread recognition. His works have been exhibited frequently in China and beyond. In 2012, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing hosted Wang Xingwei’s largest solo retrospective exhibition, which summarised his career of over two decades. In the present sale, we are proud to off er Untitled (Nurse Playing Badminton) (Lot 814) of 2006, a representative example of his thematic explorations and shifts of the mid- 2000’s.

Wang Xingwei’s early works often feature a fi gure in yellow clothes, doubtlessly the artist himself. Among his outstanding early works are My Beautiful Life (1993-1995), Dawn (1994), Road to the East: Going Down to Anyuan (1995), and Blindness (1996). Around this time, Wang also began to imitate famous works in Chinese and Western painting history. Road to the East: Going Down to Anyuan, for example, borrows the image of Mao Zedong directly from Liu Chunhua’s famous Chairman Mao Goes to Anyuan, although Wang merges it with his own likeness. The original depicts Mao in the 1920’s. Wearing a long suit and holding a paper fan, he embarks for Anyuan, full of hope as in other standard images of political figures of the Communist Party. Wang Xingwei, in his rendition, reorients the protagonist to face the painting surface and dresses him in a modern Western-style shirt and trousers. Holding a modern umbrella, he begins a journey towards a misty mountain range—an abstract portrait of the modern Chinese individual. Blindness likewise features a man in yellow, but because of his blindness his umbrella becomes his guide. The sun, rising distantly in the east, here seems insignificant; this symbol of Socialism has been replaced by an umbrella, a modern industrial product. Again featuring a figure in yellow clothing, Suspicious Person is both strongly autobiographical and influenced by Western art. Here the protagonist attempts to break open a wooden door to reveal the world behind, and next to him are Andy Warhol and Joseph Beuys dressed as policemen. In Not a Hundred Percent (1998), a father dressed in yellow expresses dissatisfaction towards the examination results of his son, who is wearing a red scarf. The interior decoration includes furniture in the shape of female bodies by the British artist Allen Jones perhaps a satire of China’s rapid economic development.

Wang Xingfei refuses the West’s exoticizing and reductionist interpretations. His playful, darkly humorous early works opened a space for his subsequent explorations of formal expression. In fact, some of Wang’s humour encourages and inheres in his stylistic and formal variations. He sometimes paints the same subject in vastly diff erent brushwork, unsettling the traditional notion that a painter’s personal language is of utmost importance. Another example is his imitations of images on merchandise and commercial reproduction paintings, erasing his own established style with technical immaturity and awkwardness.

In 2001, Wang Xingwei created the identity of “Wang Xingwei the Second” and began to sign his paintings with the same. This signalled an abandonment of his previous style in search for absolute freedom in painting, and inaugurated his experimentation with diff erent languages of painting. From 2001 to 2004, he shifted from one style to the next in arbitrary, non-consecutive manner: Blackmail was in the style of the American commercial painter Thomas Kinkade, Deep Lake in that of reproduction paintings, and Untitled (Three Figures) in Chinese realism, etc. These disparate works were all part of an experiment with painting language. In 2005, Wang began to tackle a few major subjects repeatedly in order to explore and fully unfold their formal possibilities. Works from this period cement Wang Xingwei’s important and unique status in the history of Chinese art. The nurses, stewardesses, naval officers, and other uniformed figures that appear therein conceptually anticipate the old ladies, bonsai, pandas, and other subjects of his later works—all are repeated to evacuate non-visual significance and exhaust their formal possibilities. Untitled (Nurse Playing Badminton), painted in 2006, depicts a nurse holding a badminton racquet. Nurses have appeared frequently in Wang Xingwei’s paintings, including Untitled (Nurse and Tree) (2005), Untitled (Nurse and Stewardess in a Raft) (2005), and Untitled (Nurse Hugging a Tree) (2006).

The first and last of these works are in a realist style, whereas Untitled (Nurse Playing Badminton) is closer to Wang’s later American comic-book style and documents his stylistic shift. On the other hand, the background in Untitled (Nurse Playing Badminton), rendered in straight and flat strokes, appear in many of Wang’s earlier paintings, such as Untitled (Stewardess and Trolley) (2005) and the comic-style Heart-Shape Dance (2006). The figural representation of the nurse also changes over time: if we juxtapose Untitled (Nurse and Tree) with the lot on offer, we may not find it hard to believe they are by the same painter. The visual form of the nurse becomes a means for Wang Xingwei to explore different painting techniques and to decompose and reconstitute conventional visual elements. He attaches himself, but only temporarily and ironically, to different painting styles. He has even taken to painting on corrugated roof tiles used in construction work, indicating that the choice of subject matter relates to the choice of medium also. As the critic Zhang Li puts it, “By 2003, Wang had relocated to Shanghai, where he began painting on roof tiles, utilizing the naturally curved surface of the material to create inverted reflections and wave effects. These effects were founded on the same reasoning that led the painter to begin portraying sailors, stewardesses, nurses and other similar characters in 2005. Portrayals can be either affirmative or subversive.

Wang Xingwei thoroughly unsettles his own identity as an artist, transgressing its boundaries and hovering between fiction and reality. In this anti-style and non-style that has become his “style,” the nurse is an important and frequently exploited icon. Wang Xingwei’s contribution to contemporary Chinese art is in unsettling its very nature and in tackling the chaos and destruction in contemporary Chinese culture.