Wang Jianwei

signed in Pinyin on the stretcher of the reverse

Court Yard Gallery, Beijing
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is generally in good condition. There are minor indentations on the top and bottom of the work and hairline craquelures throughout with the most obvious being in the center between two figures which is only visible upon close inspection and under raking light. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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Untitled was painted towards the end of the first phase of Wang Jianwei’s career when his focus was still on oil painting. Born in 1958 in Sichuan province, China, Wang was sent to the countryside in 1975 just as the Cultural Revolution was coming to an end. The eighteen months he spent living among peasants in rural China was followed by six years in the People’s Liberation Army, far removed from any of the artistic movements such as Stars that were beginning to emerge at the end of the decade. Even then it was not immediately apparent that he was to become an artist as his first occupation after leaving the army was as a security and information at the Chengdu Painting Institute in Sichuan Province in 1983. It was not until 1987 that he graduated from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, certainly one of the best places to be for absorbing the wealth of information on developments in contemporary Western culture entering China during this period.

The paintings that Wang painted in the five years following his graduation and the decision to stop painting are certainly among the most haunting works dating from the period at the end of the 1980s when many artists were still struggling to find their way. Wang was unique, perhaps, in his ability to transform the realist style he had mastered at the Institute into a potent method of investigating the deeper meanings of which oil painting is possible. Prior to painting Untitled in 1992, Wang had absorbed a great deal from a wide range of artists, Salvador Dali to some degree but above all Francis Bacon whose influence is immediately apparent in the work under discussion. The crouching figures silhouetted against a neutral background, the space-frame and the upward-facing white arrow are evidence of his admiration for the great British painter who died in the same year Untitled was painted.

Everything is subtly transformed, however, as the figures are seated peasants based on memories of  Wang’s long apprenticeship in the countryside, conveyed in a fluid, painterly manner that distinguishes him from the painters who were to be associated with Cynical Realism and Political Pop, the two movements that were beginning to coalesce at the same time.   Much later when Wang was at the height of his career as a multi-media artist keenly interested in its theoretical basis, Wang noted that “I am very careful that my work doesn’t become part of a codified system of thinking. That’s why I am interested in the in-between, in what I call the ‘grey zone.’” ¹ It is this slippery quality in his oeuvre, the ability to function on many levels at the same time, that distinguishes Wang’s oeuvre, his early works such as Untitled (1992) as much as the multi-media installation Time Temple at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2014-15.  Among the most accomplished oil paintings to have been produced in the late 1980s, early 1990s, Wang’s fascinating oeuvre is notable for the way in which the multiple intellectual and artistic influences to which he was exposed early in his career were rapidly absorbed to become the foundation of a uniquely personal style. 

¹ Hostage: Wang Jianwei Solo Exhibition, Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, 2008, exh. cat., p.7