Aspen Sparkling

by Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Director and Chief Curator

 

With one billion people in China, how does one sort and contextualize information, identity, and meaning? What should be recorded? Beijing-based artist Yan Lei utilizes a reductive method of painting in an effort to unify, translate, and synthesize. His paintings explore the possibility of authenticity within a culture where the very notion of individuality is continually in question.

There is little doubt that Chinese contemporary art is an emerging force in global art. The presence of Chinese artists at major international art events is significant, while more and more members of the international art world are visiting, and acting in, China.¹ What is the real impact of Chinese contemporary art in Chinese society, as well as the larger world, today? As is well documented through the international media, China is experiencing an explosive economic, consumptive, and urbanizing boom. Social democracy and justice are, however, evolving at a slower pace. Individual freedom, and creativity in particular, has not been encouraged. Artists are caught in an intense contradiction—a schizophrenic social context. Thus, contemporary art in China is highly diverse and complex.

On a trip to Beijing and Shanghai in October 2006– when I first met Yan Lei and saw his work–two themes emerged: duality and unity. The first is what curator and critic Hou Hanru terms “longing for paradise, negotiating the real.” He highlights the tension between cultural memory and cultural reality and posits how—and if—the two can be reconciled. The second theme, unity, refers to the contrast between Chinese and Western cultures, most prominently apparent in the contrary economic strategies of communism and capitalism. The resulting quest to resolve these and other dualities is most noticeable in the slogan for the 2007 Communist Party Congress. The longstanding slogan, “Long Live Mao,” has been replaced with the concept of the “Harmonious Society.”

Classical Chinese art, writing, and philosophies are extremely influential in contemporary Chinese art. Yan Lei was trained and has a degree in traditional printmaking. Xu Bing’s Book From the Sky (1987-1991) is comprised of four thousand nonsensical Chinese characters carved into wood panels in the style of the eleventh-century Song Dynasty. Cai Guo-Qiang creates magnificently abstract works with another ancient Chinese invention, gunpowder. Other artists such as Ai Wei Wei continue to live in China and yet have a significant impact outside the country. This past summer at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, Ai Wei Wei proposed to exhibit one thousand and one Chinese nationals imported for the duration of the exhibition. The people came instead in groups of two hundred at a time.²

Chinese contemporary art has made numerous headlines over the last eighteen months, as the infusion of artworks into the auction market has elicited vastly unanticipated financial results.³ While fiscal speculation accounts for much of the heightened interest in art and artists from China, a fascination with the country itself is also a factor.

The West’s fixation on China is mirrored by Chinese interest in the United States and, in particular, places such as Aspen that communicate the notion of American wealth. Sparkling-Aspen, Yan Lei’s exhibition at the Aspen Art Museum, seemingly takes Aspen as his subject, and yet is filled with images that are deeply personal.

The exhibition includes portraits of three male artists: Hong Hao, Andy Warhol, and a self-portrait of Yan Lei. Hong Hao is a frequent artistic collaborator of Yan Lei. In 1997, the date of the photograph on which the painting is based, Hong Hao and Yan Lei notoriously issued fake invitations to participate in the 1997 Documenta exhibition to a range of Chinese artists who did not know of the prank. A recent collaboration titled Taikang Project consists of a large oil painting—a revision of Van Gogh’s Ward in the Hospital in Arles (1889) with the artist’s images inserted, their heads wrapped in gauze—and original copies of insurance certificates for extremely highvalue policies adhered to the canvas.

Yan Lei chose a photograph of Andy Warhol in Aspen taken by Mark Sink in 1983 as the inspiration for Sparkling-Warhol (2007). Yan Lei fashions much of his practice, philosophically as well as productively, after Warhol. It was also significant for Yan Lei as he was planning the exhibition to learn that Warhol had spent time enjoying the splendors of Aspen. Yan Lei’s selfportrait is not glorified or self-aggrandizing despite the addition of the rays of light emanating from his head, which are comparable to those found in all of the paintings in the Sparkling-Aspen series. Instead, the image appears more as an enlarged passport photo or mugshot.

Originally known as a provocative performance artist—for one group exhibition he hung a banner at the exhibition entrance that read “Welcome Yan Lei to Shanghai,” angering the other participating artists— following the development of his Super Light series in 2004, Yan Lei has consistently made paintings that explore the relationship between art and culture, deconstruct appropriated images, and challenge the notion of painting itself. He has said, “Painting is after all a mindless re-presentation of an image you might see in a photograph. The process of making that painting has become superfluous.”⁴ He, like many well-known “painters” today, including Damien Hirst, does not actually paint his own paintings. Yan Lei does carry around a camera to capture images that will appear in future paintings. He also works with a factory in China to custom produce all of the paint colors that are used in his works.

When Yan Lei landed in Aspen for the first time in July 2007, he reportedly felt a sense of closure as well as of calm. Because the airport is located at an elevation of nearly 8,000 feet, landing seems sudden, as the plane is level with clouds and mountain peaks. Recognition of the magical nature of Aspen often initially occurs during this descent. The elevation also allows an unusual proximity to the sun and sky that causes everything to be a bit brighter and, sometimes, even to sparkle. An iconic element of the Western American landscape, the Maroon Bells is the most photographed peak in Colorado. Yan Lei employed Ansel Adams’s famous view of the Bells taken in 1951 in his painting Sparkling-Mountain (2007).

Sparkling-Aspen marries the gloriousness of Aspen light with the traditional rising sun imagery associated with Socialist Realism. Yan Lei evolves his own Pop version of a propaganda-infused style of painting found in China and the former Soviet Union, where it was the officially approved art for nearly sixty years. Socialist Realism promoted the typical, idealized, partisan, and proletarian. Yan Lei presents the artistic, mundane, personal, and pop cultural.

Yan Lei originally described the theme of the series that he was creating for the Aspen Art Museum as “landing” after a whirlwind year of exhibitions, including the prestigious Istanbul Biennial, curated by Hou Hanru, and Documenta 12, organized by Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack. Yan Lei chose an extremely lighthearted image of the Documenta curators to include here. She is shown engaged in an open mouthed laugh and he is caught in the middle of a playful gesticulation. The image, superimposed over pastel-colored sunshine, is a lighthearted counter to the serious minded exhibition they presented. The primary venue of Documenta, the 1708 Fridericianum, is also pictured emanating rays of hopeful, otherworldly light. The theme of landing is most explicitly present in two images associated with aviation: a stewardess with a beehive hairstyle and a propeller plane that still flies the Aspen-Denver route despite appearing to be a Cold War-era holdover.

The most elusive image in the exhibition, and the one that starts the series narrative, is a red-toned painting with a handwritten sign that reads, “for all castings please go to waiting room” with an arrow. It can be read as a reference to the heightened focus of the media on Chinese artists and their place in the escalating international art market. Who gets chosen to fill the role of the successful artist? Is there a particular type of art or artist more likely to be successful? If you want a part, the sign commands, then follow the arrow and have a seat. You and your work will be auditioned.

 

NOTES
1 In fact a very low percentage, in the single digits, of galleries in China are owned by Chinese nationals, foreigners own almost all of them.
2 It is unclear if more than the first group ever arrived.
3 In November 2006, a work by a Chinese contemporary artist realized a price of $2.7 million just four years after the first ever presence of a work of Chinese contemporary art at an evening auction.
4 http://www.hkac.org.hk/calendar_en.php?id=221, accessed January 28, 2008.