Lot 231: Zhang Peili , Yellow, Blue and Red (three panels) oil on canvas

oil on canvas

blue and yellow panels: 59 by 43 3/8 in. 150 by 110 cm.; red panel: 57 7/8 by 43 3/8 in. 147 by 110 cm.

Italy, Fondazione Orestiadi di Gibellina, Orestiadi di Gibellina , 1993

Acquired by the present owner directly from the artist

Executed in 1993.
A graduate of the Oil Painting Department of the China Art Academy in Hangzhou and a veteran of the Chinese avant-garde, Zhang Peili (b. 1957) began his artistic career at the time of the so called '1985 Movement', a title coined by critic Gao Minglu to define the proliferation of experimental activities and the phenomenal emergence of art groups throughout China during the reform period of the second half of the 1980's. Since this early period Zhang Peili has been a constant and charismatic presence on the Chinese experimental art scene - first through the media of painting, performance and installation, and from the early 1990's, exclusively through the medium of video for which he is internationally known today.

In 1988 his '30 x '30 was the first work of video art produced in China. His work quickly reached audiences through prestigious international venues such as the Venice Biennale, where he appeared three times (in 1993, 1999 and 2003); the Sidney Biennale (1998); the Asia-Pacific Triennial in Brisbane (1999); the Shanghai Biennale (2004), among others. His work was also exhibited in many of the landmark exhibitions of contemporary Chinese art of the past decades, including the seminal Chinese Avant-garde exhibition in Beijing (1989), Chinese Art post-1989 in Hong Kong (1993), Inside/Out at the Asia Society in New York (1998), and Alors, la Chine? at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2003). Zhang is also one of the few Chinese artists to be granted a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1998). In 2003 the artist founded the New Media Department at the China Art Academy, of which he is now chair and active promoter.

Zhang Peili's production is normally associated with video and photography, and little is known internationally of his previous career as an accomplished and influential painter since he completely abandoned the medium in 1993. Yet he was equally accomplished in his first medium, as demonstrated by his photo-realistic tour-de-force No Jazz Tonight (1987), a painstakingly detailed black-and white description of a saxophone lying on its case, or the series X, also dating to the late 1980's, in which he precisely depicts empty rubber gloves on a larger-than-life scale.

Yellow, Blue and Red is a rare example of Zhang Peili's late oil painting production, executed for an exhibition organized in 1993 in Sicily by Achille Bonito Oliva, then chief curator of the 45υth edition of the Venice Biennale. Comprised of three panels -a structural form adopted by Zhang in the early 1990's and clearly anticipatory of his subsequent shift to the moving image - the triptych depicts with Zhang's trademark neutrality the faceless forms of three male body-builders flexing their muscles. As seen also in Continuous Reproduction (also of 1993), the grey figures heavily reference the medium of photography, a strategy related to Zhang's method of appropriating and manipulating ready-made images found in his immediate surroundings in order to undermine their primary messages. Trained and raised in an age when little if anything was what it appeared to be, Zhang's work to the present day focuses upon debunking popular forms of communication, from official rhetoric to commercial advertising and film.

Whereas in Continuous Reproduction Zhang repeatedly re-photographs a Cultural Revolution image of a peasant woman to the point of its visual disintegration, in Red, Yellow and Blue he cuts off the faces of his three gray, male body-builder figures, who seem to fade towards illegibility against the brighter backgrounds. The body-builders, including both male and female characters, were the last series the artist painted. Works on the same subject were exhibited at the 45υth Venice Biennale, at the China Avant-garde exhibition in Berlin, and in the Chinese Art post-1989 exhibition in Hong Kong and Sidney - all in 1993. Body-building was at the time a widely popular form of spectacle in China. By focusing on the perfectly, if excessively built bodies of these athletes, Zhang critiques the hypocritical attitude of centrally regulated forms of popular entertainment where, given the official ban on pornography, shiny and scantily-clad bodies could become the objects of praise and popular reverence under the politically acceptable category of 'sport.' The means by which Zhang paints these 'heroes' is also an indirect indictment of the not too distant past, when muscular bodies, both male and female, were celebrated as revolutionary testimonials. While workers and peasants were painted in bright and triumphant colors during the previous political period, in the period of post-1989 disillusionment, Zhang paints faceless, grey figures whose bodies are reduced to objects of sensual desire, demystified of their would-be grand significations and vilified as pure materiality.

While his work has evolved substantially since these important early paintings, Zhang Peili continues to bring a critical engagement to his influential artistic practice that befits his central position in the earliest stages of the Chinese avant-garde.