A description of the paintings exhibited this Friday:
My Work is Not My Own
I relocated to China to witness the accelerated transformation of a country hurdling itself through industrial, developmental and technological progress in a quasi-communist, quasi-open market economy creating a disparity between urban rich and rural poor on an unprecedented scale. I came as a witness: as an artist but primarily as a human.
Voraciously hunting any news and information on China’s growth, complexity, and conflicts, I simultaneously developed a fascination with the Chinese contemporary art market phenomena.
As a layman understandably misguided through press and market representation abroad, I came to understand Chinese contemporary art to be typified by Cynical Realism and Political Pop painting. An unedited tour of Chinese galleries further substantiates the generalization that large scale, propaganda-referencing paintings represent a current, pervasive movement.
Yue Minjun is an archetypal example of a profit driven replicated regurgitation of work whose challenge has expired. There are myriad vendors selling replicas of Yue Minjun’s obnoxiously smiling self-portraits. Directing a studio of assistants producing pieces for him; aside from his endorsement and conceptual process, there is little difference in a piece from his studio and a piece from an anonymous artisan. Obviously the selling price and determined value provides the exception. The copies become conceptually interesting because his signature motif, the iconic self-portrait, often displays scores of selves. When reproduced my many individuals, the painters become implicated into the smiling army of multiplying selves.
At what point in an artist’s career are they no longer expected to paint their own work? As an “emerging” artist, is it requisite to endure becoming “established” before delegating creation? What is Chinese contemporary art and as a “Western” art-maker residing in China am I allowed to participate?
I hired painters to reproduce a series of photographs. The photographs are of reproductions of Chinese propaganda posters. Though the photographs are digital, the abstraction through blurring and distortion is merely an affect of the angles in which they were taken. The photographs are borrowed from other images; these reproductions of images that are then reproduced. The distortion is illustrative of perceptions of Chinese contemporary painting from both Westerner and Chinese observers. I have created a commodity.
This series is an exploration and exercise into the excesses of appropriation art. My contribution to the image making was as a photographer of images that had previously been replicated several times: the original painting was replicated into widely, nationally dispersed posters and again reproduced for broader international distribution when printed in a book. I made a distorted photograph of the print, which was then painted, returning the image, now through several cycles, to its original medium and it’s country of origin.
The significance of the work for me is derived from the process. Dialogues with the painters, including students, were valuable in illuminating perceptive limitations. The cultural faux pas of my pirating images of Mao, exemplified the cult of Mao, a Westerner speculatively attempting to define a culture formerly “closed,” and multiple generations of Chinese addressing their own historical vacancies and the limitations of continued cultural appropriation.
