Lot 123: Wang Xingwei , Untitled - Hotel Room oil on canvas

oil on canvas

33 1/3 by 62 1/8 in. 85 by 158 cm.

Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Executed in 2003.
Born in 1969 in Shenyang, Wang Xingwei spent ten years (1993-2002) living and working in Haicheng but is currently established in Shanghai. Wang's paintings, often suggestive of erotic desire, are set in a variety of milieus, both Western and Asian, and seem to take place in times past, perhaps the 1950's. There is a whimsical, rather eccentric sense of humor in Wang's paintings, which refer to common situations in peculiar ways while trading on the clichés of both art and life. Wang parleys his knowledge of Western figurative art into readings of Chinese culture; he doesn't merge cultures so much as he finds and emphasizes parallel banalities within them, commenting on the absurdity of modern life without offering any sort of remedy. Wang's comedy of manners has its dark side - Hitler, for example, has made cameo appearances - but Wang's humor finally connects with a love of satire in which anything goes. Strikingly, the artist paints in a wide diversity of styles, ranging from photorealism to broadly cartoon-like figuration. As such, and to his credit, he resists categorization.

Wang's painting of a hotel room with a Caucasian woman sitting on a bench, Untitled - Hotel Room (2003, Lot 123), seems an overt study of the banal. The twin beds are perfectly made, the phone and control panel poised between them; the obligatory television sits across the way, adjacent to a cushioned bench; a mirror with two lights is hung above a generic desk; a mini-bar fridge completes the dull ensemble. The most dynamic object in this unrelentingly generic setting is the large white orb with a green aura (a ceiling lamp) that bathes the far side of the motel room in a luminous glow, throwing an unilluminating light upon the purpose of this peculiar scene, one made all the more strange though a rigid, plunging perspectival construction. The weirdness here seems neither whimsical nor deliberately provocative; the room retains the haunted loneliness of similar spaces painted by Edward Hopper. Both here and elsewhere, Wang's practice can be aptly characterized as postmodern, consistently raising more questions than the artist himself is willing to answer.

-Jonathan Goodman