Notes
Executed in 1989.
Geng Jianyi's painting The Second Conditionυ[1] (1987) is an iconic image of the Chinese avant-garde art movement. It was exhibited under that title with two similar paintings by the artist in the most important exhibition of the '85 Art Movement, the China/Avant-Garde exhibition (also known as the Contemporary Chinese Art Exhibition) held at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing in February 1989. Two years later the smaller version offered here, painted in 1989, was shown in one of the first important overseas exhibitions of post-Cultural Revolution art, "I Don't Want to Play Cards with Cézanne" and Other Works: Selections from the Chinese "New Wave" and "Avant-Garde" Art of the Eighties, held at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena.υ[2] Both exhibitions included works by the major avant-garde artists of the 1980's, many of whom have gone on to achieve international acclaim.
Geng Jianyi is one of China's leading conceptual artists, notable for his investigations into the discrepancies between perception and reality, particularly regarding social relationships. From the beginning of his career, he has been consistently innovative to a degree that few have matched. Soon after graduating from the Oil Painting Department of the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now the China National Academy of Fine Arts) in Hangzhou in 1985, he joined with fellow graduates Zhang Peili, Wang Qiang, Song Ling and Bao Jianfei to form the Pool Society. This artists' group produced some of the earliest post-Cultural Revolution outdoor installations and performance works, notably Work No. 1?Yang's Taiji Series (1986) and Work No. 2?Walkers in a Green Space (1986). Their expectations for their outdoor installations were definitely ahead of the times: they had hoped to provoke a reaction, but passers-by had no idea how to react and therefore ignored the installations. Having experienced years of painful social conditioning during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and its aftermath, people were nonplussed when confronted with unfamiliar public situations.
As a painter, Geng Jianyi similarly has confronted viewers with images beyond their realms of experience. This is particularly true of the 1980's Chinese viewer, long accustomed to didactic figurative paintings of communist heroes, martyrs and villains, or uplifting images of workers, peasants and soldiers rendered in the Socialist Realist manner. Figures painted in this style displayed a limited repertoire of approved emotions, ranging from extreme joy over the progress of the revolution to extreme approbation directed at counter-revolutionaries, and their actions were most often contextualized via the setting. During his student years, and against such a background of long-sanctioned imagery, Geng Jianyi painted utterly unemotional figures in blank, undefined spaces?social nonentities in social limbo, a status unimaginable in a socialist state where everyone's position and purpose were clearly defined and closely monitored by the individual's danwei, or unit.
While the face depicted in The Second Condition is as utterly devoid of context as the figures in Geng's student-era paintings, the emotional state has swung in the opposite direction, from flat to extreme, and yet is still difficult to define. Is the expression one of extreme joy or agony: when emotions are so exaggerated, do they become indistinguishable? The image suggests a total purging of all social constraints, allowing the release of long pent-up emotional turmoil and frustration in a giant uncontrollable burst that propels the subject beyond all reaches of sanity. It is a negation of the past, a negation of authority, and an expression of the times?a perfect frozen moment out of bounds.
Born in 1962, Geng Jianyi came of age during the Cultural Revolution, when there were expectations of particular, proscribed reactions to events and situations. While social controls loosened up following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, this process was gradual. Furthermore, except within the revolutionary political context, expression of extreme emotion is not encouraged by Chinese society in general. Thus, Geng's generation had bottled up a wealth of feeling. As China gradually opened up to the rest of the globe, great changes occurred in the art world. Young artists rapidly assimilated the wealth of information flowing in, resulting in an enormous surge of innovation and energy that fueled the avant-garde movement. It was as if a dam had broken and all that ensued was inevitable.
The Second Condition arises from and expresses this situation of repressed emotion giving way to surging excitement. The avant-garde movement swelled to the point where there were more than eighty unofficial art groups; it became known as the New Wave or the '85 Art Movement. The China/Avant-Garde exhibition in which The Second Condition was exhibited represents the high point and the culmination of this activity: many of the artists included in the show had never exhibited in an official art gallery, let alone China's National Art Gallery. A rapid denouement ensued: just two weeks after opening, the exhibition was forced to close under a cloud, and a few months later the events of June 4υth in Tiananmen Square quashed the young intelligentsia's optimism regarding freedom of expression. While in retrospect we might view The Second Condition as a cri du coeur, in its own moment of conception, it was a roar of release.
The Second Condition conveys its message not only through the image of a face in the throes of emotional release, but also through the use of color and light, which play important roles, both descriptive and symbolic. Socialist Realist paintings relied upon a formula wherein positive images should be "red, bright, and shining." The Second Condition is none of these. The face in the original work is tinted an unnatural yellow, tinged with green (the color complementary to red), and its dramatic effect is intensified by the dark setting and extreme chiaroscuro. Thus, in both technique and subject matter, The Second Condition negates all the tenets of Socialist Realism. By contrast, the major comparative example of a large-scale painting of a face against a blank ground is the often-replicated portrait of Mao Zedong such as hangs over Tiananmen: Mao is invariably calm, well-lit, and with a touch of rosiness in the cheeks, a sedate and dignified variant of the "red, bright, and shining" formula.
Geng Jianyi's paintings represent just one facet of his career as a conceptual artist. As an expression of emotion, The Second Condition is unique, and yet even it projects an air of detachment, as if the artist were an observer?as he is in other works of this period. During the late 1980's, when he painted The Second Condition, Geng was also continuing his investigation of social conditioning through other media. In 1988 he tested people's response to authority via an official-looking questionnaire (Investigative Forms): would people complete it as a reflex reaction to the appearance of authority? (Many people did.) He later became interested in the reliability of photographs as documents, particularly I.D. photos (Identity Cards, 2000). In 1995 and 1996 he spent some time in Beijing and then at an artists' residency in New York; realizing that he could maintain his purity of motivations as an artist only if he avoided such high pressure art centers, he returned to Hangzhou where he has continued his far-ranging experiments in diverse media. It is perhaps instructive to note that while a number of Beijing artists have subsequently become known for their signature "big head" paintings, Geng Jianyi, creator of the original post-Mao "big head" paintings?the Second Condition paintings?moved on to confront fresh issues long ago.
-Britta Erickson
[1] The Second Condition has been published numerous times, sometimes with the title translated as The Second State.
[2] Editor's note: According to the Geng Jianyi, he created a total of seven face paintings (personal communication, February 8, 2008). Two large-scale paintings each feature a pair of faces, and four medium size canvases feature different facial expressions; these works were painted in 1986-87. All of these works are currently in private collections. One of the four single-face paintings served as the prototype for the final work that is offered here, which is unique in size and was painted for the Pasadena exhibition.
