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The Star Online: Lifestyle: Arts & Fashion

Posted: 25 Nov 2012 04:42 AM PST

A Chinese artist's figures may look funny, but their stretched smiles belie tragedy and reality.

THE painted grins are stretched so wide they seem to hurt. And that is pretty much what Yue Minjun intended, the Chinese artist explained at the Paris opening of his first major show in Europe.

A former electrician turned contemporary artist, Yue shot to international attention in 1999 when his signature laughing-man self-portraits made a much-noted eruption at the Art Biennale in Venice.

"If I paint laughter it is because I feel pain towards human life," the 50-year-old, one of China's most bankable art figures, said through an interpreter. "I found a comical way to express something tragic."

Where does this sense of tragedy come from?

"It's first and foremost a perception of human life. But it's also a feeling towards the world we live in."

Clothed in black, his head smooth, Yue confessed to feeling "a little anxious and shy" at the sight of the four dozen paintings and 100-odd sketches that went on show on Nov 14 at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, where they will remain till March 17, 2013.

"It's the first time I've seen so many of my works displayed at the same time. It's also the first time I get to examine myself.

"I spotted quite a few clumsy touches in my paintings," he quipped. "I said to myself I must be one of those painters who does not know how to hide. I say things in a direct and simple way."

Yue's cartoon-like characters are cast in contorted poses, or scenes that reference China's cultural revolution, like the 2000 Memory 4, where a crowd of people inside a man's skull tout what looks like Mao Zedong's Little Red Book.

Sunrise, painted in 1998, features a crowd of laughing faces lifted towards the rising sun.

"A lot of visual memories stem from my childhood," Yue explained. "It was the socialist experience. When I was a child, a great many works used to depict happy people, full of confidence, living an ideal life."

Other works reference the European art canon, such as The Execution (1995), inspired by Goya and Manet, in which both the half-naked victims and gunmen are bent with laughter in front of what look like the walls of Beijing's Forbidden City.

Seen as one of his most political works, The Execution fetched US$4.76mil (RM14.57mil) at auction at Sotheby's in London in 2007.

But the artist does not like to be described as "political". His critique is about culture, he says, namely the way that "in traditional Chinese civilisation the individual is not important."

Born in Daqing in northeastern China, Yue grew up under the cultural revolution, working first as an oil field electrician before enrolling to study art in 1985 in Hebei province. In 1991, he joined an artist community in a village near Beijing.

Still reeling from the fallout of the Tiananmen Square massacre two years earlier, he and other artists founded a current known as "cynical realism", now one of the most influential contemporary art movements in China.

Fondation Cartier director Herve Chandes said mounting the show was a challenge, since Yue's works are spread out across Asia, Europe and the United States – and the artist kept little trace of their whereabouts.

For the Paris show, Yue loaned around 100 preparatory sketches, which had never before been shown outside the studio he shares with a handful of assistants near Beijing.

The exhibit also features snaps of him, taken by his brother, which he used to paint his emblematic alter-egos. A slideshow reveals the artist dressed only in underpants, laughing and pulling faces as he lunges out at the camera lens.

Today Yue is still painting laughing men – but is also exploring new avenues, for instance a series of portraits obtained by rubbing one canvas up against another.

"Usually paintings are passive. Here I want to make them active, I want them to do something."

But whatever he does, Yue is not out to comfort the viewer.

"There are artists who paint calm things to bring you tranquillity. I try to stimulate people with my paintings to help them find strength." – AFP

Fly-by art?

Posted: 24 Nov 2012 10:47 PM PST

IN a globalised art market, what better place for a gallery than an airport? Thus reasoned US art mogul Larry Gagosian, who has opened a cavernous new art space right inside Paris' main private air hub.

Designed by star French architect Jean Nouvel in a 1950s warehouse in Le Bourget north of Paris, Gagosian's new gallery is his 12th worldwide and second in Paris. The German artist Anselm Kiefer, who confesses a fascination for airplanes, created a purpose-made installation for the white, hangar-like space: a sculpture of a golden wheat field inside a giant steel cage.

"It's going to be a place for travellers," said Jean-Olivier Despres, co-director of Gagosian's Paris galleries. "It's a new proposition, a new way of viewing art."

Gagosian is the second international gallery to move into the Paris suburbs recently, after the Austrian Thaddaeus Ropac unveiled a giant new space in nearby Pantin – also, by quirky coincidence, with an inaugural show by Kiefer.

The US art mogul's main stated aim is to showcase monumental works too big to house in an inner city Paris or London location, with 1,650sqm of floor space, and volumes up to 15m high. But it breaks new ground in other ways, as the first major gallery to be set up inside airport grounds.

Is Gagosian gunning for corporate clients, jetting in on the 30,000 flights that land annually in Le Bourget, Europe's top private aviation hub?

"Yes and no," said Despres. "We are hoping to attract clients among people travelling to Paris. And we do have clients who come from the business world, but not all of them do."

While Le Bourget's landing strip is "right on our doorstep", he points out Paris' main international airport at Roissy is just 10 minutes away, carrying a much wider cross-section of potential buyers to and from the city.

"It's not a duty free zone," Larry Gagosian joked in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. "It's a place of transition."

Nouvel, a Pritzker-prize winning architect, said the space was designed essentially as a shell for each artist to take over.

"We found this place that was raw, 150m from a landing strip, and we worked to develop its character.

"Kiefer didn't change the walls, he created a structure in the centre of the space, but he could have painted the walls pink, or covered them in stars. It's a place where anything goes."

Known for his taste for the monumental – including a series of large-scale lead sculpture airplanes created in the 80s and early 90s – Kiefer was a natural choice for the gallery. The 67-year-old artist, whose own studio in the Paris region lies beneath a flight path, sees a form of poetry in airports.

"It's a fascination, yes. People come, people go. It's a place of transition. When I arrived in Paris I wanted to buy a hangar in Le Bourget. But I'm an artist, it was too expensive!" he quipped.

Kiefer named his inaugural work for the gallery Morgenthau Plan, after an abortive US scheme hatched during World War II that aimed to turn Germany into an agrarian society.

"I wanted to show the danger of transforming a nation brutally into another state," he explained.

Why this particular theme?

"Well it was for an American gallery, and the Morgenthau plan was American. I like the plan because it didn't happen. I like all these ideas that don't happen."

The Bourget gallery is to host three to four exhibits per year, with a focus on monumental works.

Despres expects the market for giant-scale works to grow in the coming years, fed by demand from new museums in emerging markets, notably China, and philanthropic buyers who donate art to them.

As a cherry on the cake, Le Bourget also has a symbolic resonance for an American gallery, Despres said, as the place Charles Lindbergh landed after completing his first solitary trans-Atlantic flight in 1927. – AFP

Kredit: www.thestar.com.my

Ahad, 25 November 2012