Li Shan

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Hong Kong, Alisan Replica Handbags s, Li Shan - Building the "Rouge Empire," paintings from 1976 to 1992, October 13-21, 1994, p. 38, illustrated in color

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One of the seminal figures in China's Political Pop and Cynical Realism movements, Li Shan remains an impressive artist who continues to develop his painterly practice, one that has changed considerably since his rough, expressionistic works of the 1980's. Li is most widely known for his feminized versions of Mao - the iconic ready-made portraits enhanced with rouged cheeks, flowers, and other decorative elements, of which Lots 72 and 73 are exemplary.  But an emphasis on this period in the artist's oeuvre doesn't do justice to the dynamic abstractions of his earlier years - or to his most recent investigations.  After producing in the 1980's the stark oil series known as The Origin, which depicts simple figures and animals in dark colors as well as predominately abstract paintings sporting African mask-like forms, Li moved on to his Extension series, which displays bold, essentially abstract compositions.

One sees Li's forceful resolutions in the 1987 oil Continuation of Extension 1 (Lot 69). The painting's rough geometry consists of triangles supporting black circles, on both the top and bottom of a white, horizontally-aligned rectangle.  The rectangle contains a rough circle in its center, with short dash-like marks inside the circle and small rays extending away from its surface.  It is not clear what the image represents, but given their vaguely anthropomorphic features, one might see a sextet of geometric disciples worshiping at the table of aboriginal abstraction.  The expressiveness of the picture, forcefully painted against a high-contrast, bright red background, and the rawness of the central shape, seem drawn from the primitive imagination.  The work is an excellent example of Li's broad goals in the Extension series, in which individual works do not closely resemble each other but may be grouped together in view of their raw intuition and bold handling of paint.  With an almost shamanistic orientation, Li offers in his best works of this period an aggressive reinterpretation of abstract art, his language playing havoc with received notions of form at the t.mes .

Two years later in 1989, Li took up a wholly different imagery in his Rouge Empire series, which includes pictures of prostitutes with rouged cheeks or eunuchs whose placid expressions and simplified features ironically resemble the mien of the Buddha.  In Pre-Rouge Empire 1 (1989, Lot 71), an early work of this period, Li offers a busy compilation of imagery, in which four heads of women with rouged cheeks - though painted in grisaille - emanate from a blue circular form in the center of the painting.  Further from the center, another quartet of heads populates the corners of the picture, whose background is a brilliant light yellow.  One might read the overall image as that of a fanciful flower, whose gently arched stems support the corner faces and whose pinkish-brown leaves flank the central blue around which the innermost smiles congregate. Given the unusual multiple signatures and varying possible orientations of the picture, however, one might also read the work as inspired by Baroque ceiling frescoes in which flying figures look down upon spectators below from a tromp l'oeil blue sky that appears to lie beyond the supporting ceiling.  If such was the artist's inspiration, the delightfully loud colors and playful putti surrogates seem more resonant with the Rococo.  And in Li's painting, too, one senses the sensuality of nature and the hidden erotic life of humanity.

Whatever his source of inspiration, the secret symbolism of the Pre-Rouge painting remains known only to him.  One might say the same of the unusual cabinet he painted in 1993 - at the height of Political Pop - with the face of Marilyn Monroe on the body of an animal in an otherworldly garden replete with sexualized imagery (Lot 70).  Both before his classic Mao imagery and since, Li Shan is a wonderfully inventive artist.