Lot 99: Su Xinping , B. 1960 Sea of Desire oil on canvas

signed in Chinese and dated 1997 oil on canvas

63 by 74 7/8 in. 160 by 190 cm.

Jakarta, Linda Gallery, China Heat - Paintings by Six Contemporary Chinese Artists, May 13-28, 2006

Private Collection, Asia

Su Xinping's deeply felt scenes almost always portray an apocalyptic allegory. His paintings tend to symbolize the experience of a Chinese Everyman, whose struggles and striving may be read as a comment on the momentous changes taking place in China today. Su depicts people at variance with the world in which they live, even when they appear cheerful. In Su's world, life is a fight for survival, an endless quest for an elusive purpose in a heavy atmosphere where alienation plays a leading role. In his banquets, interior genre scenes, and individual figures, the viewer senses that Su's rendition of modern Chinese life is essentially pessimistic?consisting of shallow experiences hidden behind feigned pleasures and the overwhelming drive toward happiness and success. Su doesn't look to the future with optimism or even dismay; instead, he concentrates on the present, in which men and women simply enact the roles assigned them by society. Within these narrowly defined public rituals, Su's figures appear forlorn, their unknown private lives mysteriously infecting the settings in which they find themselves.

In Sea of Desire (1997), the canvas is dominated by what looks like a middle-aged businessman, his arms and legs extended wide as he strides in haste across the composition from left to right. Painted in profile with a receding hair line, a tense brow, and almost bulbous features, the figure looks purposefully ahead, intent upon a goal and a future that remain unseen. Behind him is another man, similar in features and dress, who peers in the same direction; reclining against a stone in this uncomfortable, barren setting, the background figure brings to mind J.H.W. Tischbein's famous portrait of Goethe in the Roman Campagna (1786). In contrast to the bucolic setting of that quintessential image of early Romanticism, Su Xinping's men seem to have descended to hell, their figures lit by a reddish glow that rises from the terrain. Whether this hell can be tied to Buddhist iconography?as the title of Su's series might seem to suggest?matters less than the notion of people driven to obsession by their wants and yearnings. Despite the foreground figure's purposeful stride and the unity of the figures in their determined gaze, they seem doomed to a dark world in which their desire will not be sated.

Holiday No. 7 (2000), by contrast, takes what should be a cheery subject for its stated theme. But here again Su conjures the world of Sartre, Beckett, and Camus. A man sits cross-legged on a folding chair at left reading a newspaper that hides his jacketed torso. Behind him at center, a woman sits on the ledge of an open window, peering out to the bright, sky-blue exterior and the row of trees in the landscape. On the floor lies a boy in drab, brown jeans and a white tank top, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling, hands clasped behind his head. Above the man and boy, in the upper third of the painting, two paper airplanes float from right to left, curiously upside-down, their meaning mysterious, their launcher unseen. More like a jail cell than a holiday hotel room, this setting and its inhabitants are a one-child family's vacation in hell. Despite the lack of interaction among these self-absorbed figures, they are locked together in the triangular shape formed by the poses they've assumed, a clever compositional device that emphasizes rather than alleviates their alienation from one another.

Finally, in Banquet No. 2 (2005), we see Su Xinping's lighter side in a large oil depicting a sunset cocktail party for seven. Three men are seated at left, and four women (or so one infers) are lined up at right. The table is set with champagne flutes and forks, its distant centerpiece a bouquet of four red tulips in a narrow vase, its nearer dish a single cabbage on a prominent, round platter. The table recedes towards a brilliant red sun, whose illumination highlights the table setting and colors the sky a yellow-orange behind the whitish-yellow clouds that streak across the sky. With oversized heads and swollen features, the figures pose with toothy grins for their group portrait, which is rendered in a sun-tinted grisaille. The occasion for their celebratory gathering on what seems the edge of the earth is impossible to decipher, though their varied dress suggests they are from different walks of life. Yet even in this comparatively light-hearted painting, Su Xinping's darker side lingers in the figures' monochromatic tonality, the rigidity of their poses, the paucity of their provisions, and the inexplicability of the scenario, to which we as viewers are Su Xinping's last guests to arrive.