Lot 198: Zhong Biao , B. 1968 Flying acrylic on canvas

signed in Chinese and Pinyin, titled in English and Chinese, and dated 2001 on the reverse acrylic on canvas

93 3/4 by 39 3/8 in. 238 by 100 cm.

Pi Li, Zhong Biao: Ubiquity, Art Scene China, Shanghai, 2004, p. 76, illustrated in color

Private Collection, Florida

Born in Chongqing in 1968, Zhong Biao is of a younger generation than artists and intellectuals such as Xu Bing, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Huang Yong Ping, who escaped the troubled history of their country's Cultural Revolution and repressed democracy movement by relocating to America and Europe. Zhong, who turns forty this year, belongs to a group of artists who have turned their back on politics and traditional Chinese culture, celebrating the pleasures of the present and taking delight in money and sex. Zhong captures a period that continues in its breezy acceptance of materialism, which even in recent memory was treated as psychic treason against the communist state. If we think of Zhong as only eight years old when the Cultural Revolution ended, we can hardly blame him for his celebration of a comfortable lifestyle and embrace of an erotic world where everything is for sale in one way or another. Indeed, much of the effectiveness of Zhong's realism lies in his frank treatment of commercial and sexualized themes. The embodiment of desire through the female nude is central to Western art history, a legacy that Zhong has borrowed for his urban portraits of Chinese and Caucasian women. Yet, as with similar works in the history of Western art, Zhong's figures are not so much portraits as manifestations of a type. Sometimes Zhong's women wear historical dress, but more often they sport the casual clothing of contemporary life, if they wear anything at all. In the large painting titled Marksman (2001), the central figure, rendered in black and white, is a shapely Caucasian woman wearing little else but unusually sexy lingerie; we see her from behind, although her front is reflected in a full-length mirror, a slinky orange garment wrapped around her legs at the top of her garter hose. Next to her, on the right half of the canvas, is the cityscape of Hong Kong, with the triangular forms of The Bank of China tower's faceted façade most prominently visible in a sky of rich twilight blue. Prominently positioned in the foreground of the image are a woman's hands; the right hand pulls the thumb of the left back as though it were the trigger of a revolver whose barrel the left hand's index figure represents; hence the title of the painting. Peculiarly postmodern in its eloquent pasting together of imagery and grisaille with color, the painting suggests the scantily-clad central protagonist may indeed be readying herself for the evening's hunt in the city that lies beyond her high-rise window. A deeply whimsical choice of imagery runs throughout Zhong's paintings. In Flying (2001), a young woman dressed in an orange t-shirt, gray pants, and black shoes bends over in a stretching position; her left hand touches her left shoe, while her right is raised above her. The figure seems to be exercising on top of a building near a low, expressively-rendered protective wall that bifurcates the composition diagonally. From this wall, a nude woman with outstretched arms appears to be diving into the cityscape beyond. She dives into a broad avenue in a modern, if anonymous, section of the city. The only touch of color in this grisaille painting is the orange shirt worn by the clothed young woman. The overall effect of the composition suggests both discipline and freedom: the clothed, exercising figure is perhaps dreaming of her peer's naked liberation and independence. Although Zhong's paintings of women are shot through with sexual undertones and, in others, overt eroticism, the effect is often offset by the autonomy of their poses. The women in Fly Away and other paintings are neither shy nor submissive; they occupy a self-enclosed psychic space, oblivious to their viewers. Their self-assurance suggests their equal participation in China's brave new world of economic (and sexual) freedom. The third painting on offer, Fountain (2000), presents an enigmatic tableau in which a young Caucasian girl, painted in grisaille, uses her hands to cup water flowing from a red pipe at the upper left of the image. The white stream of water falls diagonally through the work and frames the activity of another figure, a young Chinese woman, also rendered in black and white, who bends sideways towards the viewer while extending both hands away from her body. Both figures stand on what must be the top of a city building; in the middle distance is a full-color, twilight view of a modern city. Above the cityscape is blue sky through which cirrus clouds gently pass. The painting suggests a fable or a dream, in which the composition makes intuitive sense but the subject matter is so peculiar as to defy narrative logic. Indeed, the framing device around the edges of the painting reiterates the literal fact that we peer into the strange world of Zhong's paintings at close range from the vantage of our own. Zhong is a painter of strong, enigmatic scenarios that reference life in the fast lane of the present. His seemingly symbolic allusions might be allegories of life's more transient pleasures, which he records with obvious energy and delight. He is an artist for whom temporal happiness tends to crowd out a more objective view of desire; in Zhong's intriguing world, all is transformed by the glow of youth and the spectacle of constant change. -Jonathan Goodman