拍品描述：
款识：《圭山之梦·迷彩》 毛旭辉 2006年 （画背）
A leading figure of the 1980s Southwestern Art Research Group and a central participant in the landmark art movement ’85 New Wave, Mao Xuhui has made a unique personal imprint on the history of Chinese avant-garde art. Based in Kunming, he has established himself in the style of ‘life painting’, posing existentialist inquiries about life and ways of living, set against the various conflicts and struggles during tremendous social change. Employing an Expressionist vocabulary, he repeatedly explores motifs of landscapes, everyday objects, and human bodies, both in their symbolism and formalism, to address the complexity of humanity as displaced and distorted by broader sociopolitical forces.
Highlighting Guishan as its central thematic concern, the current lot Guishan Dreams – Camouflage comes from one of the most important series in Mao Xuhui’s oeuvre, in which he gazes intensely at the vernacular landscape of Yunnan as a way of channelling metaphysical musings. The stunningly red land against the shiny blue sky depicted in the painting is the very trait of Guishan’s rustic landscape, so untouched by modernity. For the artist, the locale was bursting with vibrant energy, and remained a source of artistic creativity for him throughout his artistic career. In his earliest Guishan Series from the 1980s, Mao once found in the landscape a vast imaginative dimension to envision the origin of life. Portrayed with darkened brownish colours and bold outlines, Guishan is rendered into a prehistorical and mythical epic, through which Mao accommodated his artistic impulse fuelled by the opening up of society, culture and thoughts.
Mao Xuhui, Guishan from Nature, 1982
Image/Artwork: Courtesy Mao Xuhui Archive at Asia Art Archive
Revisiting the motif of Guishan in 2006, Mao Xuhui expresses in the current lot a renewed concern that probes into the precarious relationship between humanity and nature. Against the backdrop of the Guishan landscape, a gigantic pair of scissors intrude to the foreground of the composition. Another iconic subject that has characterised Mao’s work since the 1990s, the image of the scissors has particularly been explored by the artist as a metaphor for authority and control. More notably, Mao Xuhui here employs the motif of the scissors covered with camouflage patterns, which is appropriated from his serial works created in response to the Iraq War, shedding light on the violence and damaging consequences of contemporary society. In the current lot, the silvery and glossy presence of the scissors is juxtaposed in sharp contrast to the timeless pastoral scenes of Guishan. The exaggerated diagonal composition further sets off a tension between the two elements. These gestures further point to a deepened concern for the fate of Guishan threatened by the rapid modernisation in China during the 2000s. As Mao Xuhui reflects, ‘The market economy has developed for more than forty years. It is impossible that it does not affect these regions. That is why the development of civilisations is all very contradictory, bringing about changes and at the same time bringing about greater room for development, as well as wiping out a lot of things that we call primitive and quaint—a double-edged sword.’i
Mao Xuhui, Camouflage Pattern, Iraq, 2003
Image/Artwork: Courtesy Mao Xuhui Archive at Asia Art Archive
As art historian Gao Minglu has noted, ‘Damao [Mao Xuhui] paints “portraits” of objects instead of still life… These tales are not only of those ubiquitous objects, but also of Damao and of society, as those objects are both social and personal. Therefore, we see Damao’s own reflection through the many “objects” he paints.’ii Gathering two symbolic motifs from his oeuvre, the current lot can also be seen as a self-reflexive journey through which Mao Xuhui navigates his own painterly history from the 1980s to more recent times. The tilted composition places the viewer in an instable and surreal state, conjuring up a dreamscape leading us into the artist’s deeper inner reality.
i Mao Xuhui, quoted in Lin Ya-Wei, ‘Everything from yesterday has become who I am today: Mao Xuhui’s Life Lesson,’ ARTouch, 18 September 2017, online
ii Gao Minglu, ‘Tale of Damao,’ Guangdong Museum of Art, 1 March 2007, online
来源:
现藏者直接购自艺术家本人
油彩 画布
创作年代:
2006年作