Sabotage
Wang Yin. Painting ( de )

Alexander Ochs Galleries Berlin|Beijing, 2006

“Painting can become cheap and intentionally court failure. Clearly, the ultimate goal of such tactics is the enrichment of the provocative nature of painting.”
(Wang Yin)

Wang Yin (born 1964) studied painting at the Beijing Central Institute for Theatre’s Stage Design Department. His portraits, still lives, studies of clouds and landscapes, often carried out in a rough, pointillist style, are frequently designed to be viewed from a distance and are indeed reminiscent of stage scenery. Wang’s painting does not focus on technical finesse, a detailed depiction of a particular scene or the illusion of the real. Works such as How Charming the Mountain is in my Eyes (2001 – 2006) seem crude, even amateur. The weak, low-contrast colour palette leaves no doubt that the representation of a plump nude posing facing away from the viewer in a romantic waterfall idyll, constitutes a persiflage. In Nr. 7 (2000), the male figure in a patchwork locus amoenus ambiance is painted in blotchy greys. The viewer’s annoyance at such a presentation is part of the overall artistic concept. The allegation that aspects of his work are kitsch does not conflict with Wang’s perception of art. “Intentional failure” would be a more accurate description. Wang’s paintings aim to sabotage an art market focused purely on commerce.

Wang Yin rejects the myth of the autonomous artist. Cooperation with traditional work-to-commission artists is one of the conceptual consequences of his critique. And so works such as Nr. 7 or the Flower series (2001-2005) are painted in part or in their entirety by anonymous commercial artists specialised in folk art or landscape painting. Wang’s works constitute a review of the various genres of painting without differentiating between Chinese and Western traditions. By defacing typical themes through his overtly reckless reception, the artist demands a new appraisal of the medium. The times when artists produced representative portraits, meditative still lifes or Arcadian landscapes; the times when they served clichés such as that of the artist’s affinity with nature – as in Nr. 4 (2000) or were saddled with propaganda agendas are part of art history, but not of the present day.

The artist appears as a commentator and an unsettling presence at the point of external functioning; the viewer is denied the possibility of meditatively diving into a conflict-free environment far-removed from reality. The aim is to unsettle effective aesthetic habits. In addition to provocative defacement, Wang employs technical alteration techniques on photographs to this end. Scanned and then printed in sizes of up to two square metres, he applies black, grey and white shades of oil paint. without title (1974/2003) and Workroom (2006) are particularly good examples of this process. Both works depict the same view of a work table with painting utensils in front of a window range. The differing formats, the indication of the date on which the photograph was taken, the differing methods of reworking and the artist’s annotation on the earlier version draw attention to the scope for artistic intervention. The atmospheric intensity of the painting, rather than a photorealistic reproduction of reality, are paramount in the similarly-worked paintings Taking a Rest (2003-2005), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich II (2004) – which refers to Alexander Solzhenitsin’s eponymous novel about life in a gulag – and Home (2006).

First published: Alexander Ochs Galleries Berlin | Beijing