Pan Dehai

Private Collection, Beijing

Beijing, Poly Art Museum, Pan Dehai Solo Exhibition, November, 2007

This work is in a very good general condition overall. There is a very light mark (approximately 4 cm long) along the top edge of the work in the top left corner, due to the stretcher behind. Otherwise, there are no visible condition problems. The work was not examined under UV light.
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Pan Dehai was born in Siping in Jilin province in 1956 and graduated from the Fine Art Department of Northeast Normal University in 1982.  He currently lives and works in Kunming, Yunnan province, which, aside from Beijing, has been the primary location for the development of his career.  Pan was early recognized as a leading exponent of "New Representationalism" in the Southwestern Arts Group of the 1985 New Wave movement, but his painting has often gone against the grain of popular trends in pursuit of his own independent voice.  His Corncob series of the late 1980's was his first signature expression, and one sees in the more recent Fatty series, begun in the late 90's and by which Pan is now best known, a development of his earlier practice of building up paintings through granular nodes.

"Particularly since the 1990s," says the artist, "the worship of money has thoroughly reigned people's thoughts and materialism completely occupied people's minds.  People's crazy desires grow sharply, with an endless desire to occupy everything: everybody wants to develop himself into the biggest person and the fattest person....  I wanted to put my own ideas into the subject of the paintings about the fatty, implying that the society has transformed all people into one face, without individual personality (not physiological likeness, but conceptual likeness), hence a splendid sight of collective unawareness."[1]  Pan's Fatty series therefore presents a biting social critique of contemporary society. 

The work on offer, May 4^th Movement (2007), features a vast group of Pan's anonymous fatty characters only a couple of which, at right, are in any way distinguishable from the others in dress; otherwise, the mass is clad in blue uniforms.  One prominent, enlarged figure with a megaphone emerges at center left to command the crowd that has assembled for demonstration in Tiananmen Square.  A red flag and banner wave in the air at the right, and similar banners are raised in the distance at left above this categorically corpulent, pink populace.  With its reductive color palette of blues, reds, grays and black, the image seems almost a cartoon graphic, as though the artist were critiquing the present's understanding of the past.  The work refers to an important moment in early modern Chinese history when thousands of student protestors assembled on May 4^th, 1919, to express their dissatisfaction over China's treatment at the Treaty of Versailles.  This marked the birth of the anti-imperialist May 4^th Movement that would ultimately result in the founding and rise to power of the communist party.

Although Pan's work could be based upon an historical photograph or a specific incident in that momentous day's demonstrations, his reductive color language and population of the scene with his fatty characters suggest the painting stems from his imagination—and that it represents mass demonstrations on this important site more generically.  The viewer is left to decide whether a more specific critique is embedded in this would-be history painting's obvious humor and if Pan's evaluation of contemporary society's "collective unawareness" applies equally to the China of the past.

[1] Cited in Lu Peng, "Permeating Particles—On Paintings by Pan Dehai," unpublished manuscript, 2007; the artist's statement is from an interview conducted in 2001.