Wang Jinsong

each signed in Pinyin and dated 1996

Schoeni Art Gallery, Hong Kong
Private Collection, USA

Hong Kong, Schoeni Art Gallery, 8+8+1: Selected Paintings by 15 Contemporary Artists, 1997, illustrated in colour in exhibition catalogue

Zhang Qunsheng, Chinese Artists from Today: Wang Jinsong- Watching from the Sidelines, Chengdu, 2007, pp. 114-115, illustrated in colour

There is some minor soiling along the extreme edges especially around the corners and both can benefit from a light cleaning. There is a minor spot of abrasion in the lower left extreme corner. Otherwise, there are no apparent condition problems with this work.
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Born in 1963, Beijing artist Wang Jinsong received his art education and training from the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou during the middle 1980s, graduating in 1987. Associated with the Cynical Realism movement in the 1990s, during that same decade he began what is surely one of Chinese art's best-known photography projects, Standard Family Series (1996). For that work, Wang assembled 200 photos of a one-child family: a small child flanked on either side by a parent. This image, in its repetitiveness, seems to sum up an entire generation, for whom Chinese authorities made it extremely difficult to have more than one child. Looking at the collection, one feels some sadness at so small a family unit - for many of these families, relatives will be in very short supply. Standard Family Series is one of those works of art that communicates the social changes of a generation, one profoundly influenced by overpopulation and overcrowding. A later project, Parents (1998), also works as a commentary on the generation that saw so much change: it begins with an image of Wang's own parents, and then moves on to randomly capture other couples nearby.

Again, the implications of the series is rather sad; this generation will have little support as they grow older, for in many cases their children have moved on to other places. There is also something compellingly uniform regarding the Chinese in Standard Family Series and Parents; the couples look nearly identical, as if they could be easily replaced by the pair following them. Implied is a humorous, or disturbing, view of the drive toward self-similarity that is part of Chinese mores. This view is also communicated in the painting series One Child Policy, which Wang promoted in the mid-1990s. In both works (Lot 734), a face or faces have been left featureless, perhaps to underscore the anonymity of the people involved in the project. In one painting a woman wearing glasses and a dark-blue sweater smiles for her audience; to her left is her husband, an engaging-looking man with noticeable eyebrows. But the small child placed between the couple has a blank face, perhaps emphasizing the ease with which people can be substituted in an overpopulated society. In the other painting, there is the usual image of two parents and a child; however, the couple's faces have no features, but the young boy between them does. Clearly, this is an illustration of missing identities, with troubling losses for both the persons without features and the viewers looking at them.

In the 1998 oil on canvas titled The Night in China (Lot 735), Wang Jinsong offers his audience a large panorama of the new China, complete with modern women singing karaoke or holding a cell phone. In some ways, the painting reminds us of Jorg Immendorf's Café Deutschland pictures, which send up the Zeitgeist and cultural state of Germany and are done on a grand and public scale. In The Night in China, there are hints that all is not so well in the state of China; no one seems to be genuinely content beyond the falsely promised pleasures of advertising. The young woman wearing a short blue dress is flanked on her right by a military official talking into telephone; one wonders what exactly these two icons of society might have in common. The woman in a smart red dress with black stockings seems to come from the new China; she is either singing or speaking into her microphone. At the top of the painting is a series of open halls with pagoda roofs; fireworks colorfully explode around them. Then on the right a happy couple seems to be making their way to an evening of fun. Beneath them, in the lower-right corner, we see a child clutching an olive-green bag; her face is emotionally neutral. On the left, in the middle of the painting, more pleasures of going out are promised by three women, alluring in their blue dresses and coiffed hairdos. Like a lot of Chinese art made during the 1990s, the painting seems content to register objectively the changes occurring in the nation. Wang Jinsong offers us the thrills of a consumer evening, and the Chinese revolution seems very far away.