Lot 38: Geng Jianyi , b. 1962 Those in the Light oil on canvas

signed and dated 1997 in Chinese oil on canvas

54 3/4 by 39 1/2 in. 139 by 100 cm.

ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Since his mid-1980s participation in the burgeoning New Wave avant-garde art movement, Geng Jianyi has proven to be one of China's most consistently thoughtful and innovative artists. While he has never settled on a signature style, he has created memorable works--notably The Second Condition series (1989), the first "big head" paintings of the Chinese avant-garde--that laid the ground for other artists. For Geng's oeuvre, the consistency lies in the concepts plumbed by the artist: he is interested in the discrepancy between reality and perception, particularly in regard to people's awareness of their state of being, ranging from the fact of their existence, to their relationship to society. In keeping with this theme, the three works shown here suggest the uncertainty of existence as a fixed and definable experience. Geng Jianyi studied in the Oil Painting Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now China National Academy of Fine Arts) in Hangzhou, graduating in 1985. Aside from brief sojourns in Beijing and New York State during the years 1995 and 1996, he has remained in Hangzhou: the pressure that exists in Beijing to conform, and to perform for the market, is absent in Hangzhou, affording the relaxed atmosphere for creative thinking on which he thrives. Although an accomplished painter, since graduation Geng Jianyi has not favored oil painting over other media: he takes it up when it is most suitable for expressing a particular concept. Those in the Light (Lot 38) is one of a small series of paintings executed in the late 1990s. These works assert the impossibility of fixing a figure in space: a dissolving and shifting outline hints at the presence of the figure as it moves through time and, inevitably, space. Even seated or formally posed figures such as appear in Those in the Light are not in stasis. Unlike Marcel Duchamp, who reduced the figure in his Nude Descending a Staircase to a group of three-dimensional solids progressing through space, Geng's paintings dissolve the figures to outlines and light, underscoring the function of visual perception and the transmission of light as a method for understanding the world. When Geng Jianyi turned to photographic media in the early 2000s, it was to deploy them as a less predictable painterly medium than painting. He worked with light sensitive paper and photographic chemicals to produce unique images, some of which are abstract or near-abstract explorations of the beautiful tones possible with the medium. Others follow up on Geng's earlier interest in the reliability of photographs as documents, particularly I.D. photos, and suggest a loss of identity. -Britta Erickson