Geng Jianyi

ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Work is framed and is generally in very good condition. It was not examined under UV 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.
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Since his mid-1980s participation in the burgeoning New Wave avant-garde art movement, Geng Jianyi has proven to be one of China's most consistently thoughtful and innovative artists. While he has never settled on a signature style, he has created memorable works—notably The Second Condition series (1989), the first "big head" paintings of the Chinese avant-garde—that laid the ground for other artists. For Geng's oeuvre, the consistency lies in the concepts plumbed by the artist: he is interested in the discrepancy between reality and perception, particularly in regard to people's awareness of their state of being, ranging from the fact of their existence, to their relationship to society. In keeping with this theme, the three works shown here suggest the uncertainty of existence as a fixed and definable experience.

Geng Jianyi studied in the Oil Painting Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China National Academy of Fine Arts) in Hangzhou, graduating in 1985. Aside from brief sojourns in Beijing and New York State during the years 1995 and 1996, he has remained in Hangzhou: the pressure that exists in Beijing to conform, and to perform for the market, is absent in Hangzhou, affording the relaxed atmosphere for creative thinking on which he thrives. Although an accomplished painter, since graduation Geng Jianyi has not favored oil painting over other media: he takes it up when it is most suitable for expressing a particular concept. Those in the Light (Lot 38) is one of a small series of paintings executed in the late 1990s. These works assert the impossibility of fixing a figure in space: a dissolving and shifting outline hints at the presence of the figure as it moves through time and, inevitably, space. Even seated or formally posed figures such as appear in Those in the Light are not in stasis. Unlike Marcel Duchamp, who reduced the figure in his Nude Descending a Staircase to a group of three-dimensional solids progressing through space, Geng's paintings dissolve the figures to outlines and light, underscoring the function of visual perception and the transmission of light as a method for understanding the world.

When Geng Jianyi turned to photographic media in the early 2000s, it was to deploy them as a less predictable painterly medium than painting. He worked with light sensitive paper and photographic chemicals to produce unique images, some of which are abstract or near-abstract explorations of the beautiful tones possible with the medium. Others follow up on Geng's earlier interest in the reliability of photographs as documents, particularly I.D. photos, and suggest a loss of identity.

-Britta Erickson