Zhang Enli

(i) signed in Chinese and dated 02
(ii) signed in Chinese and dated 04

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner

(i) Zhang Enli: Human, Too Human, ShanghART Gallery, Shanghai, China, 2004, p. 40

These works are generally in good condition with minor wear and handling at the edges. Please note that they were not examined under ultraviolet light.
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Zhang Enli
Pleasurable Things

Zhang Enli's paintings will be refreshing to anyone accustomed to the sociopolitical commentary and conceptual baggage in much Chinese contemporary art. Although often monumental in size, they feel distinctively personal, like casual conversations with the painter himself. The rise of Zhang's popularity—with six solo shows in Europe, the US, and China in just the past three years—no doubt reflects a yearning for a new voice and sensibility in the scene. Not only are his still-life's hermetically sealed from the outside world as the genre demands, in their attention to detritus and ephemera they also seem to ignore the fledging consumer society so strongly present in the rest of contemporary Chinese art, and certainly in Shanghai, where Zhang lives and works. The curator and critic Monica Dematté has described Zhang as a kind of Zen master and latter-day Cezanne, not given to needless socializing and devoted instead to "reflection" and "observing in silence , apparently without seeking any particular result."1

Zhang Enli comes closest to social commentary in his paintings of human figures, especially those from the 1990's. Painted in rough and garish combinations of black and primary colours, they are often labeled "expressionistic" and present alienated views of urban spectacles. In an early work from 1993, a butcher at his block, with a knife and a chunk of meat on it, is depicted with bloody arms, making a V sign with one hand, and with his own shoulders gashed and shooting blood (2nd painting in Human, Too Human). A monumental quadriptych from 2000-1, entitled simply Eating, shows tumbles of people with grossly distorted physiognomies eating, drinking, smoking, and socializing around dining tables. One critic has suggested that these paintings register the shock that the painter, who was born and raised in a small city in the northeastern Jilin Province, experienced in the metropolis of Shanghai and more generally during China's rapid urbanization in the 80's and 90's. 2

From around 2001 onwards, however, Zhang Enli begins to focus on the quieter genre of still lifes—inanimate, immobile objects in nondescript interior settings, often his own studio. The objects range from scissors and wire nets to balls and electric outlets on a wall, but the painter is most drawn to rongqi, or "containers". These are most typically the cardboard packing boxes and glass flasks seen in the two lots on offer, Container (Lot 823) and Glass (Lot 824) but also include suitcases, cigarette boxes, ashtrays, even toilet bowls. Even when Zhang does not use rongqi as a title, the idea of it still motivates his paintings in a fundamental way. The hanging rubber tubes, empty chairs and sofas, bare mattresses, bookcases, and hallways and storerooms in the recent works are all also obviously "containers" of sorts, whether of things or bodies. More importantly, despite their inanimate subject matters and exclusion of humans, Zhang's still-life's are all infused with a warm feeling of suggestiveness and invitation.

This is above all because they convey, vividly and viscerally, the elemental pleasures of painting: the translation of three dimensions into two, the rendition of colour and light and their interactions, the evocation of volume and substance. Consider the two canvases on offer depicting the same glass flask, which Zhang paints elsewhere as well, both as an individual motif and in ensembles. Combining a spherical shape with circular openings and requiring a complex interplay of reflection and refraction, the flask is attractive as a technical challenge to any painter. (Indeed, transparent vessels were a common vehicle for European old masters to display their virtuosity.) Here Zhang pictures it from slightly different angles and under different lighting conditions, paying particular attention to the specular highlights. The same can be said the pair of paintings of cardboard boxes, which Zhang Enli has elsewhere painted many times in different poses. Often crumpled and weathered and usually with an opening, these boxes again satisfy basic painterly interests in foreshortening and rendition of volume and texture. The third lot on offer, Standard Room (Lot 825) from 2009, interprets an interior scene as a kind of expanded still-life and incorporates into a single composition the earlier series' interest in the spatial and textural variations of abstract forms. Three identical doors are seen from different angles, variously reflecting the spotlights on top and receiving the shadows cast by their frames. The square patterns on the floor, perhaps carpeted, likewise avail themselves to planar skewing at intervals.

To be sure, this is not to suggest that Zhang Enli's works are exercises in academic illusionism by any means. They are indeed quite the opposite. Standard Room could well turn out an analytical study of geometry, but instead pulsates with energy. Characteristically, Zhang does not bother to make his straight lines completely straight or his foreshortening completely precise. His oil pigments are so diluted and thinly applied as to resemble watercolours and Chinese ink, and he allows them to drip on and smear his canvases, intermixing and exceeding linear boundaries. Zhang Enli's still-life's impress—and endear— not by virtuosic verisimilitude or scientific objectivity but by their evocative economy, lighthearted tone, and indelible and approachable personal voice. Their informal quality has proved an appealing alternative to the 1990's mainstreams of Political Pop and Cynical Realism, and reflects the lighter temperament of the Shanghai art scene as well as Zhang's training at the Wuxi Technical University, away from China's major art academies. (Even his Shanghai studio is in a residential suburb.) On the other hand, in his thoughtful mediation between figuration and abstraction, he puts himself in an illustrious company of Western painters, from Bruegel and Rembrandt to Cézanne and Whistler and Picasso, as well as spiritually close to the Chinese literati painting tradition, which axiomatically privileged amateurism and disparaged slavish adherence to visible reality in favor of capturing the "essence" of things. Indeed, Zhang counts among his favorite artists the Qing-dynasty literatus Jin Nong (1687-ca. 1764).3

In truth, Zhang Enli has been developing his idiosyncratic art for a long time, before he achieved his current renown. His sensitivity to abstract forms within everyday objects and to their musical arrangement continues from early works like the two earlier lots on offer to his more recent still-life's: a hula-hoop hung and casting its shadow on a wall, fields of empty bottles and paint cans, and piles of balls and tubes of different sizes. Even his earlier human figures and social scenes tend towards abstraction: witness the studies of bald and balding heads seen from different angles and set in roundels, and the banquets with diners seated around a round table and eating from round plates and bowls, all flattened by an unrealistic top-down perspective. (in Human, Too Human). The grids that often accompany Zhang's paintings from 2010 onwards may suggest transfers from photographs (Zhang does carry around a camera and take snapshots of scenes to his liking),4 but are more importantly a formal device to create tension between surface and depth and to set the pictorial elements in rhythmic relations, like the meter of a song. This is especially clear in the paintings of interiors and rectilinear containers like bookshelves, whose intrinsic grids by turns rhyme and jar with the one imposed. (2008 Catalogue Zhang Enli, p. 59)

Still, what is it about containers specifically that attracts Zhang Enli again and again? Referring to Zhang's paintings of trees, a review from June 2011 suggests that although Zhang "does not himself believe that his works possess metaphor, viewers will without fail attempt to excavate symbolic meanings from his works."5 In an interview published in 2008, however, the artist explicitly offers his containers as "symbolic of a generation without inheritance. [...] When we were young, many of our families did not own much aside from possessions that fit into several boxes." He also discusses the possibility of portraying a city through the things and people in it and describes cultural tradition as "kind of like a garbage dump with countless people inside, searching for treasure."6 All this would seem to bring history and society back into his pictures of everyday things. But in the next breath Zhang also claims to be allergic to symbolism and to have settled on cardboard boxes after finding the suitcases of his parents' generation "too traditional" in always calling "stories" to mind. We have no reason to expect from an artist a fully coherent and articulate selfinterpretation, but to cast Zhang as a high-minded modernist interested only in the interplay of form and colour on canvas is not entirely right. At the same time, even if Zhang is not aware of the famous precedent of Van Gogh's painting of work boots, which inspired Martin Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art", his choice to paint containers and mundane things cannot be seen as a naive attempt to avoid ideas or meaning.

Consider Titled Container (in Human, Too Human) from 2002. Here a dark-brown glass bottle with an illegible label is placed in an ill-defined black space. On the blank canvas above, Zhang has scribbled the titles of some twenty-four of his works from 1992 and carefully separated them by colour—a kind of career summary. The liquid pigments call to mind the bottle's emptied contents, and the juxtaposition between the unnamed bottle and the written titles invites us to relate the whole notion of the "container" to Zhang's art itself. Indeed, as his "containers" become less literal over time as discussed above, Zhang Enli becomes increasingly drawn to stained white walls, pinned-up photographs, and soft materials like paper and cloth—things that approach the material and visual properties of paintings. It is hardly surprising that he has recently taken to producing exquisite renditions of patterned fabrics and tiles and of foliage rustling against blue skies, subjects already pictorial from the start. Whether flasks or boxes or entire rooms, "containers" are metaphors in a way, not for any kind of social critique or aesthetic philosophy, but rather for the receptiveness of all of Zhang Enli's paintings to the everyday beauties of the world as well as their welcoming embrace of the viewer.

1 Zhang Enli: Human, Too Human, ShanghART, 2004
2 Refer to 1
3 Zhang Enli, Shanghai ArtMuseum
4 Refer to 3
5 Art Leap, December, 2011
6 Refer to 3