Yin Zhaoyang Art for Sale and Sold Prices

(b Hean Province, China,1970) Chinese Painter. Born in 1970 in Henan Province, Yin Zhaoyang is a painter associated with the generation that followed the performance- and installation-oriented works of such artists as Zhang Huan and Xu Bing. Studying at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, Yin developed an esthetic he calls a "collage of ideals"--a preference for powerful imagery based on such iconic presences as Mao, Tiananmen Square, and China's flag. Looking to such contemporary masters as Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol, Yin composes paintings that reference Mao's life and death, often in an atmosphere of nostalgia. The iconic possibilities involved in rendering Chairman Mao in death remain fertile for an artist such as Yin, who deliberately misrepresents history--sometimes inserting his own face in place of Mao's. Yet the implications are not so much subversive as they are descriptive; in a culture that has pretty thoroughly forsaken Mao's economic and political ideas, Yin's art reads as the acknowledgment of a pragmatism that has swept the country, almost by force. (Credit: Sotheby’s, New York, Contemporary Art Asia, September 17, 2008, lot 34)