Lot 1620: BAI YILUO

BAI YILUO
(B. 1968)
Civilization
twelve ceramic busts with agricultural tools, installation, each with original stand
each with stand: approx. 160 cm. (63 in.) high (12)
Executed in 2007

London, UK, The Saatchi Gallery, The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art, 9 October 2008-18 January 2009.

Born and raised in the industrial city of Luoyang in China's Northeast, Chinese artist Bai Yiluo turned to experimental photography and sculpture to alleviate the mind-numbing grind of his factory job. Completely self-trained, Bai's works exhibit an inquisitive approach to materials that parallel the philosophical crux of his artworks: mixing materials high and low, juxtaposing classical and contemporary forms, Bai investigates the role of a Chinese artist and the nature of identity in an increasingly globalized and mass-media driven environment. His works present juxtapositions both visually brutal and philosophically elegant.
In Civilization (Lot 1620), Bai appropriates classical ceramic and terracotta busts of ancient Greek figures, displaying them on museum-style pedestals. Each figure's features are violently, bloodlessly pierced through with archaic agricultural tools which emerge from their cheeks, eye sockets and foreheads. The ceramic busts are symbolic not only of high art and Western civilization, but of its hegemony as the ideology underpinning globalization. These busts resemble less those which you might find in a museum, but instead those found in classrooms and art schools around the world. The rakes are symbolic of the monotony of manual labor, their violence suggesting an alternate reading of history, one that celebrates not the successive accomplishments of great men, but instead the collective anonymous achievements of those who constitute the backbone of society. In essence, Civilization can be read as a radical updating of Chinese communist materialism, reminiscent of the Rent Collection Courtyard or other didactic parables of the communist era. At the same time, the work can also be seen as embodying not just a philosophical disposition, but the spirit of Chinese contemporary art itself, its audacious willingness to confront, appropriate and re-define recognizable forms of contemporary art, injecting them with their own creative and subjective dispositions, and thereby discovering utterly new terrain in the contemporary art realm. Civilization is an extraordinary work of conceptual sophistication, displaying the historic collision of conflicting worldviews and revealing the fundamental tenets underlying the emergence of Chinese avant-garde art.