Wang Guangyi

initialled W.G.Y. and dated 87, framed

Chinese Century Gallery, Paris
Acquired by the present owner from the above

China, Beijing, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, '85 NewWave. The Birth of Chinese Contemporary Art, November, 2007 - February, 2008, p. 41

Fine Art, 31 March 1988, p.53
Demetrio Paparoni, Wang Guangyi: Words and Thoughts 1985-2012, Skira, Milan, Italy, 2013, p. 62

(This work has been professionally relined to a high standard.) This work is generally in good condition. There are minor abrasions on the bottom right corner and the lower half of the work, mainly visible to the red paint. There are minor wear in handling marks around the edges. Having examined the work under ultraviolet light, there appears to be no evidence of restoration.
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Wang Guangyi of the “Red Rationality” Period


Within the various Chinese art movements of the 1980s, Wang Guangyi was an important representative of Rationalism. Influenced by Western philosophy, he organised the Northern Artists Group, which became a leading artistic movement and school of aesthetics in the 1980s. He advocated the evacuation of humanistic passion, which was in stark contrast to the sentimentalist aesthetics of the south. Wang Guangyi painted Red Rationality: An Analysis of the Reasons for Decline of Cultural Renaissance (Lot 1063) in 1987, at a crucial transitional moment between his 1985 Frozen Northern Wastelands series and 1989 Mao Zedong series.

In 1988, in the third issue of Meishu magazine—one of the most influential media channel during the ’85 New Wave—Wang Guangyi published an article entitled “Answers to Three Questions” along with three of his oil paintings. The Post Classical, Red Rationality, and Black Rationality series not only covered the range of Wang Guangyi’s practice in 1986-7, but also had a direct stylistic impact on the Mao Zedong series, which marked his high point in the 1980s. In the essay, Wang Guangyi explained the three works. Among them, Red Rationality: An Analysis of the Reasons for Decline of Cultural Renaissance is “a correction of the figure of St. Anne in Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks. [Its] intellectual references: passages from Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirt and Toynbee’s Philosophy of History on the movements of the spirit.” ¹

Wang Guangyi’s self-analysis reveals the intimate relationship between his artistic creations and reading. After graduating from the oil painting department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, he, Shu Qun, and others formed the influential Northern Artists Group. As an intellectual leader of the group, Wang read many works of classical philosophy such as those by Kant, Nietzsche, and Hegel, which infused his creative vision with philosophical thinking and analytical rationalism from the very beginning. For him, true art is metaphysical, and artistic creation is a manifestation of the will to live. This “Übermensch”-like ("Over-Man” or "Superman", coined by Nietzsche) sense of mission propelled Wang to complete the Frozen Northern Wastelands series in 1985. This has always been regarded as the beginning of Wang’s philosophical inquiry and a prelude to his later representative series. Frozen Northern Wastelands is cold and solemn in tone, featuring a cold palette and blob-like, faceless figures that gave the whole series a sense of burden. Wang attempted to “present a lofty conceptual beauty that includes the eternal harmony and healthy emotions of humanism.” ² In the following few years, Wang Guangyi continued to pursue his creative vision, and the gray palette; weighty, statue-like figures; and especially the orderly compositions would persist in his works from the 1980s.

In 1986, Wang Guangyi was sent to work at a painting academy in Zhuhai, Guangdong, where he began the Post Classical series. As he writes, “After I left the north, I began to think calmly about the true reasons for cultural change and ordinary cultural realities, and to critique and analyse Hegel’s notion of the Spirit and Nietzsche’s theories. I felt that art is always traditional from a cultural perspective, but as a cultural fact, it necessarily constitutes some residual questions, which can precisely be starting points for today. So I decided on the creative path of correcting ‘classical art.’ In this period I created the Post Classical series. Only then did I truly participate in contemporary art as a contemporary artist, rather than simply being a lover of art painting.”³

Wang Guangyi’s self-conscious adjustment of his creative vision at this time was closely related to his reading. As a theory of cultural continuity, Ernst Gombrich’s model of schema and correction inspired him. The Post Classical series addresses many classical works of art, including Death of Marat by David, Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt, and Mona Lisa by Leonardo. Wang Guangyi’s method of “correction” was to use the aforementioned visual idiom of Frozen Northern Wastelands to transform these masterpieces into something more faithful to solemn and lofty classical aesthetic ideals.

If the Post Classical series can be seen as a continuation of the Frozen Northern Wastelands series, then Red Rationality inherited the visual vocabularies of both even as it further developed the strategy of cultural correction in Post Classical. Red Rationality: An Analysis of the Reasons for Decline of Cultural Renaissance features rare non-abstract human figures: here Wang Guangyi magnifies a detail from Leonardo’s masterpiece Madonna of the Rocks and carefully renders a face. On the other hand, however, this move also alienates Wang’s work from the original and removes all details both historical and pictorial. The deliberate compositional balance in Post Classical is replaced in Red Rationality with red grids, which contrast greatly with the gray and drab background. Departing from the careful experiments with images in Post Classical, Wang Guangyi during the Red Rationality period emphasised individuality and contemporaneity more strongly. Using the “non-representative” imagistic layer of the red grids, he generated a new dialogue, or even tension and conflict, between classical and contemporary imageries. Wang himself summarizes Red Rationality as a product of both historical logic and real-life logic because it is inextricably bound to life.

Following Red Rationality and Black Rationality, Wang Guangyi turned his aggressively invasive grids into a means to correct images of Mao Zedong. If we remember his advocacy of “evacuation of humanistic passion” and the abandonment of the hyperbolic humanism of artistic creation since the ’85 New Wave, then we can easily grasp that Wang’s realist logic in Red Rationality gradually turned into his critique of reality in the late 1980s. Surveying Wang Guangyi’s works of the 1980s, which were thoroughly embedded in their historical period, we cannot deny that Red Rationality marked a crucial point in Wang Guangyi’s transition into postmodernism and cemented his status as a pioneer in the entire New Wave movement.

1 Wang Guangyi, “Answers to three questions,” Meishu, no. 3, 1988, p. 57
2 Wang Guangyi, “What kind of paintings does our era need?,” Jiangsu huakan, no. 3, 1986, p. 33
3 Yan Shanchun, Lü Peng, et al, Wang Guangyi in Contemporary Art Trends, Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, October 1992, pp. 82-83