Lot 12: Li Tianbing , B. 1974 My Brother and I on the Bench oil on canvas

signed in Pinyin and dated 2007 oil on canvas

78 1/2 by 78 1/2 in. 199.5 by 199.5 cm.

Galerie Kashya Hildebrand, Zürich

Born in 1974 in Guilin, China, Li Tianbing first studied international relations in Beijing from 1992-96, only to turn to the pursuit of art the following year. He first studied at the Université de Paris and then at the École National Supérieure des Beaux-arts, from which he graduated with highest honors in 2002. Li now continues to live and work in Paris. One of his best-known series, Beizitou?One Hundred Children, depicts individual children as though reproducing weathered black and white photographs; this sequence recognizes the one child per family policy of Li's youth along with the hardships of Chinese society at that time.

In a striking portrait of Enfant de Guilin (2006, Lot 155), a young Chinese girl of perhaps six or seven stares back at the viewer with a cheerful, puckish smile. Wearing a pendant and a decorative blouse, her hands clasped before her, she communicates a focused energy, her face alive with interest in the viewer that stands before her. Her thick eyebrows and unkempt hair lend further dynamism to this delightful urchin's appearance. Splotches of paint spread at random across areas of the sitter's blouse, right hand, and in the background area at the right of the picture; these unusual marks assert the painterly surface and seem to suggest the deterioration of an original photographic source. It is an affecting painting in which the artist's technical skills capture the engagement and fascination of youth.

How different in character is the young sitter for Enfant No. 5 (2005, Lot 13). A close cropped image of only the youngster's face, with a high collared jacket just visible at lower right, this child's more reticent, almost tight-lipped expression suggests a cautious approach to the viewer. But here, the profusion of abstract elements, like liquid washes in some areas and scribbled nets in others, competes for the viewer's attention. Particularly at the left around the child's eye, the finely etched scribbles offer a warmer tonality than the grisaille in which the painting is otherwise rendered. Though idiosyncratic as a stylistic strategy, Li's intricate surface details are undeniably intriguing as they tend to work against the black-and-white photorealism upon which his work is principally based.

A third enfant, entitled Media Enfant No. 3 (2005, Lot 156) is a young boy of perhaps four or five, who steadily returns his viewer's gaze; one senses a tinge of disappointment in this little fellow's resolute stare. Li's doodles across the surface of this portrait are even more intricate and fascinating, as tiny bits of script are found in plentiful supply among them, particularly across the boy's brow. Here, too, are the ink-blot like splotches, particularly in the corners of the picture, which offer a strange sense of compositional balance and proportion for this primarily realist image. Clearly there is more to the relationship between figuration and abstraction in Li's work than initially meets the eye.

In My Brother and I on the Bench (2007, Lot 12), Li imagines himself as a youth the age of many of his portrait subjects, sitting with a brother he did not actually have. The two young boys, the one at left a few years older, stare at their audience with a blank, slightly surprised regard. The older child sitting on the bench wears the shirt and scarf of Mao's Young Pioneers, while the younger boy at right, his scarf untied, stands up as though just rising, his hands to the his sides and behind him. Again, Li adds splotches that nearly transform the shirts of the two children into abstract passages, or so it would be if the children did not seem so resolutely "in" the picture and the past and the splotches so directly attached to the picture's surface and our present. And as in Lot 156, one discovers across the picture's surface legible writing in Li's squiggly lines, as though the surface of the painting were itself a diary of some sort. Pink and red highlights punctuate the picture in the scarves, the lips of the children, and in seemingly random small daubs of red paint that rhythmically dot across the picture's center horizontally. In the background, the simplified characters of a public directive that is not wholly legible preside over the setting as they did over generations of children. In this way, the insouciance of childhood is cast into doubt, and the expectations of the world intrude. Li's portrait studies brilliantly capture the variety of children's attitudes and subtly point towards the complexities and even burdens of humanity at large.