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| Image | Sale date | Auction house | Location | Sale name | Lot No. | Estimate | Price Sold | Condition | Title |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Jun 3, 2019 | China Guardian | Beijing | 20th Century & Contemporary Art Evening Sale | 2081 | $****** - ****** | Private Space: Self-Imprisonment |
paintings
95 x 102 cm (37.4 x 40.16 in)
Oil on fiberboard
1988 Southwest Art Exhibition. Sichuan Exhibition Hall, Chengdu, October 1988;
Road: Mao Xuhui's Drawing Course 1976-2007, Red Bridge Gallery, Shanghai, Janaury 2008;
Farewell to Trend: The Art of Mao Xuhui, Yan-Huang Art Museum, Beijing, December 2010;
Mao Xuhui I'm Here, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, 19-26 July 2017.
A History of China Modern Art 1979-1989, P183, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, May 1992;
Chinese Contemporary Art Illustrated Handbook 1979-1999, P27, Hubei Education Press, September 2001;
History of Chinese Oil Painting, P298, Liu Chun, China Youth Publishing House, July 2005;
Mao Xuhui, P133, Xin Dong Cheng Publishing House, Hanart TZ Gallery, December 2005;
A History of Art In Twentieth—Century China,P814,Peking University Press,2006;
From New Figurative Image to New Painting, P151, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, April 2007;
Mao Xuhui, P22, Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, December 2007;
Road: Mao Xuhui's Drawing Course 1976-2007, P131, Shanghai People's Art Publishing House, January 2008;
Farewell to Trend: The Art of Mao Xuhui, P104, Culture and Art Publishing House, December 2010;
Mao Xuhui--The Eternity in Reflection, P169, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, September 2011;
Portray the Life Art Achieve of Mao Xuhui, P102, Lv Peng, China Youth Publishing House, March 2015;
Mao Xuhui I'm Here, P74-75, Soka, July 2017;
Art China, P17, Issue 8, 2017.
Signed in Chinese, dated in 1987(lower right)
LITERATURE:
A History of China Modern Art 1979-1989, P183, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, May 1992;
Chinese Contemporary Art Illustrated Handbook 1979-1999, P27, Hubei Education Press, September 2001;
History of Chinese Oil Painting, P298, Liu Chun, China Youth Publishing House, July 2005;
Mao Xuhui, P133, Xin Dong Cheng Publishing House, Hanart TZ Gallery, December 2005;
A History of Art In Twentieth—Century China,P814,Peking University Press,2006;
From New Figurative Image to New Painting, P151, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, April 2007;
Mao Xuhui, P22, Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, December 2007;
Road: Mao Xuhui's Drawing Course 1976-2007, P131, Shanghai People's Art Publishing House, January 2008;
Farewell to Trend: The Art of Mao Xuhui, P104, Culture and Art Publishing House, December 2010;
Mao Xuhui--The Eternity in Reflection, P169, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, September 2011;
Portray the Life Art Achieve of Mao Xuhui, P102, Lv Peng, China Youth Publishing House, March 2015;
Mao Xuhui I'm Here, P74-75, Soka, July 2017;
Art China, P17, Issue 8, 2017.
Signed in Chinese, dated in 1987(lower right)
EXHIBITED:
1988 Southwest Art Exhibition. Sichuan Exhibition Hall, Chengdu, October 1988;
Road: Mao Xuhui's Drawing Course 1976-2007, Red Bridge Gallery, Shanghai, Janaury 2008;
Farewell to Trend: The Art of Mao Xuhui, Yan-Huang Art Museum, Beijing, December 2010;
Mao Xuhui I'm Here, Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts, Taipei, 19-26 July 2017.
“When we exist as a person in the social meaning…we are split inside and live a fragmented life, and together with the conflicts between ideal and reality, the collision of the self and the superego, and the history our generation is born in, it is hard to indulge ourselves in the seemingly peaceful pastoral songs for a long time… We have to face life itself and everything we are unwilling to confront.”
——According to Mao Xuhui
In response to social changes in the past 30 years or so, Mao Xuhui's production varied in style, from impressionistic to new figurative and to abstract art. What hasn't changed, though, is Mao's faithful sticking to his instinct and poetry deep down. In his works, Mao highlights “the daily nature of power” and speaks out rebelliously against the era through “a dynamic harmony”.
As one of the leading figures of the 1980s New Figurative Art Movement and one of the founders of the Southwest Art Group, Mao has always depicted what he is familiar with in places he frequents. His early paintings were highly personal, and in this series, Private Space, Mao underwent a transformation of artistic language, featuring surrealistic and tragic works, in which he used somber colors to document heavy memories, faded images and daily-life absurdity. But it is exactly in this atmosphere of repression and silence that the power of humanity bursts out, revealing the impressive game between the ones in power and the society's mainstream ideas and elite cultures.
This piece, Private Space·Self-Imprisonment, was produced in 1987 and is one of the most important master works in the early or even the whole artistic career of the artist. It was not only published in numerous books on art history as well as the artist's individual albums of paintings, but, with its typical representative style, unique shapes and profound practical significance, showed itself in such momentous large-scale exhibitions as the 1988 Southwest Modern Art Exhibition, establishing itself as a heavyweight among Mao's works auctioned today.
In it, there are two figures with distinct images, clothes, and actions: one male, wearing a jeans jacket, a red sweater and black trousers, sits on the stairway of an apartment, with his bluish-gray skin and wizened body reflecting the alienated living condition of a certain social group; the other guy, totally naked, lies on his stomach on a concrete block, with his dissociative expression implying the fatigue caused by heavy burdens in life. However, the skin textures, the dull and indifferent expressions, and the juxtaposed space layout all indicate that these two figures are actually depictions of the same person in different conditions, which “demonstrate the artist's material and spiritual entities respectively.” In this way, Mao delivers the overlapping of art and real life on his canvas in a dramatic way, as if to shout out aloud that aspirations for freedom are made inferior and trivial in face of cruel reality, while pursuit of individual will is suppressed and resisted in the material society. To this end, Mao adopts lines that are as distorted as possible in this piece to project “the uncertainty of reality and the restlessness inside our heart” and uses misplaced space structures as well as multi-layered perspectives to reflect the fragmented contemporary environment, thus leading the audience into a cold yet realistic land of silence.
In his artworks, Mao uses historical memories and current experiences to construct a distinct schema, through which his lament for the past and fear of the future are fully exposed. He transfers turbulence and restlessness encountered in life into poem-like whispers and humming and renders all setbacks into “power and wind to drive his inspiration”.
