Notes
Private Collection, Asia
Mao Xuhui's artistic evolvement over the past two decades shows a dramatic shift in style, subject matter, composition and color application. Both life experiences and internal dialogues as well as a deep interest in emotional, psychological and social structures find expression in his diverse oeuvre and subject matters.
Mao's work not only depicts the primitive aspect of village life, but also reveals the attitudes of urban cultures, sub-consciousness and the pain of spiritual confinement. These elements find expression in his Parents series. Painted with impulsive and unrestrained brushstrokes, using glaring, sharp and sad colors, Inverted Bell (Lot 906) (1991) shows unique compositional structures. Hanging up side down, the bell recalls a traditional chair standing by itself in the center of an all-encompassing dark, framed by a toxic greenish-yellow, abstracted door frame. Both color and composition created a great sense of space and atmosphere, despite the initial impression of the painting's simplicity. The abandoned house with traditional objects stands as a parental symbol for a lost history and culture as well as the pressure from the environment and the experience of emotional and physical survival.
In the early 80s, the portrayal of nature as his soul's escape from the city has been a recurring and stylistically ever-changing subject matter in Mao's artistic path. He ones wrote: "All the Kunming artists are fond of painting landscapes, displaying a common interest in Impressionism. This is probably due to the warm, spring-like climate." -Mao Xuhui. The influence of natural scenery as well as impressionistic elements are displayed in Dianchi Lake, Yuanan No.1&2 (Lot 812) (1980). The overwhelming beauty of nature is caught with an impressionistic approach that uses visible brush strokes, an open composition and puts an emphasis on light in its changing qualities. The inclusion of an ordinary subject matter and of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience as well as unusual visual angles are vital characteristics of this style.
During his college years, Mao became more and more influenced by Western art theories, philosophers and artists who lend him the tools to find his very own, unique artistic expression and inspired him to communicate personal experiences and emotions in a newly found stylistic manner. Combined with autobiographical elements of Mao's childhood experiences and living environment, these influences find a vivid expression in his Guishan series. Living in nature with the Sani people of Guishan, left the artist with a deep and indelible love of nature. March 1986 (Lot 808) (1986) shows a composition of childlike simplification, dream-like qualities and two-dimensional, distorted forms without perspective. In his bright, complementary, non-representational and expressionistic colors, nature is represented in its simplest form - a lyrical picture with its basic symbols of earth, trees, animals and sky to express the artist's view of life in the purest and forthright manner and to reveal a sense of eternity of nature and humans in natural environment.
An early example of these stylistic characteristics is evident in Mao's Portraits (Lot 811) (1982). Five abstracted portraits of women display his expressionistic approach to distort reality in order to reveal emotional and psychological depths. With an impressive commitment to this style, Mao manages to lend every face its own unique distinctiveness and expressions. For each of the portraits he uses a different color palette and background details. While using striking colors with edged, black frames and distorted proportions, a sense of harmony and sophisticated composition is maintained. Surprisingly, one of the six portraits differs from the rest. It shows the highly abstracted figure of a peasant woman, whose image is mirrored by a smaller figure in the back. The painting is composed of monochrome color fields in different sizes and shapes with a black frame around each of them. The resulting image is a flat, depthless composition, devoid of emotion and reduced to the pure existence of color and shape.
From 1987 onwards, we see a great change in Mao's style. Psychological and spiritual complexity and intense self-study build the basis for his Private Space series.
A more representational, elaborate, yet introverted style, along with a reserved and elusive color composition, echo the artist's personal development and his relation to the outside world. The loss of ideals, motivations and hopes are replaced with a sense of disillusion and disappointment. A reflection of these feelings, Mao's Private Space - Woman Figure with Mosquito Net (Lot 809) (1988), depicts an abstracted room with dimmed light. In this room, lonely and unattainable, a young woman lies on her bed. Floating in the center of the room, as if lifted by ghost hands, a wrinkly mosquito net reveals her naked body. She calmly accepts her sensual nakedness and remains in her laying, motionless position. Elaborately painted with indiscernible brushstroke and pale colors, the lifeless image is broken by the dynamic movements of the mosquito net. Painted in a faint yellowish-white with shadowy grays and blacks, it animates the scene and suggests an element of fantasy and spookiness.
Mao's Scissors series that followed his creations of the 1980s shows a significant transformation, which, in the first instance, is a transformation of the inner self. Over time, Mao gradually gives up the emotional engagement in his work and eliminates his previous habits of expression using heavy colors and dense textures. His current use of softer, subtler colors and finer techniques creates a sense of calmed detachment, while giving his recurring subject matter a strong presence. Mao utilizes his scissors in a variety of ways, ranging from a meticulous study of symmetry, shape and color, like in Scissors Rouge (Lot 907) (1998), 1/4 Gary Black Scissors (Lot 813) (2002) and White Western Scissors in Cross Shape (Lot Lot 908) (2005), to highly metaphorical imagery, like in Red Scissors and Chair (Lot 810)( 1995). Mao puts his scissors into a new and different context, liberating them from their traditional purpose and allowing them to become a symbol within the realm of the painting. Being an unexpected object in a dramatic setting, or an abstracted, contrasting background makes the scissors interchangeable: they could be any other object, animal or human being. It does not matter, because the literal significance of the object is purposefully eliminated in favor of the overall feeling that the artist seeks to convey. By choosing an object that has a clearly defined image and universal validity, complex ideas and ambiguous feelings can be generated when this object is placed in an unusual context; and thus meaningless scissors can become meaningful - even to a level of religious significance: Just as religious icons attain potency from our concentration on their forms, but are worshipped beyond their material functions, the ordinary household scissors become, in the art of Mao, a symbol of iconic transcendence that goes far beyond their habitual function.
The roots of the scissors' spiritual significance can perhaps be traced back to the time that Mao has spent with the Sani of Guishan. Their animist belief that souls inhabit all objects as well as their worship of nature and the significance of magic in daily life, have left a deep impression on Mao. Thus his recent scissors series refers to the belief that scissors can word off evil spirits. An important aspect of Mao's work is finding the balance between turbulent emotion, evoked by elemental nature, loneliness, superstition and religion on the one hand, and orderly rationality, resembled by an ordinary object like a pair of scissors on the other hand. It is this search for balance that is found in found his Scissors series and can be traced back all along his artistic creations.
