As a painter, Wang Huaiqing has always been firmly rooted in China's long cultural tradition, eagerly absorbing its essence and plumbing its depths for inspiration. Living in Beijing, a capital steeped in history where one used to virtually stumble across folk art, handicrafts and cultural remains at every step, Wang is painfully aware of, and deeply regrets, how much of this precious heritage is currently disappearing as a result of China's fast-paced transformation. Wang has been reaching back to history to buck this trend ever since he first established his reputation with the oil painting Bo Le Choosing a Horse in 1980, the title being an allusion to a famous story from the Warring States period. This piece is currently in the collection of the National Art Museum of China.
Later, Wang drew his inspiration from a wide range of sources, including Jiangnan residential architecture, Ming dynasty furniture, and the encyclopedic late Ming work on science and technology, "Traces of Nature". Being a graduate of the Central Academy of Craft Art (now The Central Academy of Arts and Design of Tsinghua University), Wang has a keen eye for, and profound understanding of, China's exquisite traditional handicraft and manufacturing techniques, and one of his paramount objectives has always been to rescue this fine tradition from oblivion.
Wang Huaiqing began work on the series of paintings titled "Han Xizai's Night Revels" in 1996. These pieces can be seen as an homage to the renowned 10th-century scroll painting of the same title by Southern Tang dynasty court painter Gu Hongzhong. The original of Gu's painting, much praised and admired in historical writings, is lost, and all we have today is a Song dynasty copy, which is part of the collection at the Palace Museum in Beijing. Other copies were made, but the general consensus is that the one on display at the Palace Museum probably best captures the spirit of the original, which occupies a principal place in the history of Chinese painting and aesthetics. Often cited as an epitome of classical beauty, the painting is permeated with, and representative of, the dominant values in many areas of Chinese art and society, including painting, drama, dance, fashion, design, and even politics and economics.
The painting was commissioned by the last emperor of the Southern Tang dynasty, Li Yu (reigning from 961-975), who sent his court painter to Han Xizai's mansion under a pretext, ordering him to produce a detailed picture of Han's life and environment. Han was up for the post of prime minister, and the emperor wished to learn more about the man before appointing him to such an important position. Gu did not fall short of the task: relying on his astounding memory, he recorded faithfully and in consummate detail the scenes of excessive merriment and deliberate debauchery he witnessed at Han's dinner party. The composition, which consists of five sections, is brimming with vivid depictions of people engaging in a variety of activities, such as eating and drinking, dancing and playing instruments, talking and listening to music, or strolling about the mansion. Gu shows that he is particularly expert at portraying postures, gestures, and facial expressions. Through the scenes of merrymaking, however, speaks Han Xizai's disappointment with Li Yu, and the whole banquet serves as a symbolic expression of the host's disinterest in a career at court. To this day, Han Xizai's Night Revels remains one of the most celebrated large scroll paintings of Chinese history, ingenious in its lifelike representation of setting, furniture and human figures.
Taking his cue from this classical subject matter, Wang Huaiqing set out to impart new meaning to traditional themes and motifs. Employing an expressionistic, deconstructionist approach, he began to reinterpret "Han Xizai's Night Revels" from a modern perspective. In 1998, Shen Kuiyi, American-based curator of Chinese descent, organized an exhibition titled "China 5000 Years" at the Guggenheim Museum New York, an event that is widely considered to have served as a catalyst for the "China Fever" in the arts market. One of the exhibits was "Night Revels - Han Xizai's Night Revels 1", which was on display right next to the Beijing Palace Museum's copy of Gu Hongzhong's Han "Xizai's Night Revels", allowing audiences to appreciate classical beauty in direct contrast with modern art and thinking. This also marked Wang's first appearance in New York art circles, and his debut on this prestigious stage met with an enthusiastic response.
Reinterpreting classical paintings is by no means an easy undertaking, but by infusing the canvas with a very personal style, marked by monochromatic patterns in black, white, and red, Wang Huaiqing managed to firmly establish and define the abstract mode of painting as a fixture of modern Chinese art. As of today, Wang's "Night Revels" series consists of four paintings, completed in 1996, 1998, 2002 and 2006, respectively. The first two of the series are kept in plain black and white tones, one of them a double horizontal scroll, the other a simple vertical stroll painting. The latter two pieces replace the liubai ("blank space") background with intense Chinese red. Again, one of them is a double horizontal scroll, the other a simple vertical stroll painting.
This lot, House in a "House - Bed of Han Xizai", is the third piece in the series, a 200x300cm double horizontal scroll painting. The bright vermilion background with its strong ethnic connotations ("China red") sets off the bold, thick strokes of the black structure that represents the bed of the banquet's host, Han Xizai. The painting's immense visual impact takes no backseat to that of Wang's 1998 triptych masterpiece "Golden Stone", and its compositional structure and organic abstraction are reminiscent of Chinese calligraphy: cool and rational, sweeping yet economical. In 2003, House in a "House - Bed of Han Xizai" was shown at the National Art Museum of China's 40th anniversary exhibition called "An Open Era," and received many positive critiques for its expansive and forceful style.
The first and second piece of the "Night Revels" series employ black and white shades to depict an assortment of musical instruments suspended above historical remains, and both pictures somehow convey the impression of a theatrical space, a stage that has long since been deserted by the actors. We are left with abstracted images of lute tables, furniture, gloves and canes that have taken the place of the human figures in the classical painting by Gu. One might say that Wang Huaiqing is bemoaning, in an emlematic manner, the fact that "things are more important than people" in our times of rapid change, that materialism is conquering everything. Even so, one also senses that in spite of all the inevitable change and constant evolution, certain cultural values and aesthetical ideals breathe the spirit of eternity. Throughout the march of history, these values and ideals need to be passed on from generation to generation by artists and idealists like Wang. These two pieces require a bit of "deconstructive" work from the viewer to recognize that the geometric shapes floating across the canvas are mostly musical instruments.
The extreme chromatic simplicity and compositional succinctness of the first two pieces in the "Night Revels" series generate a delightfully snappy appeal not unlike that of a modern symphony. Meanwhile, the third piece, "House in a House - Bed of Han Xizai", takes a different approach. Here, the artist chooses elements that are even plainer and more basic to construct the bed's shape. The few simple but bold lines give the painting a powerful energy, making it vibrate with all the festiveness and gaiety of a popular traditional holiday, while at the same time overwhelming the observer with its ruthless impetus - a quality that is rather rarely found in the paintings of this series, or even Wang Huaiqing's entire oeuvre.
The type of bed, or couch, Han Xizai slept in and sat on, was a so-called "house in a house," an elegant piece of traditional Chinese furniture made entirely of wood and usually considerably larger than your average modern bed. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, these beds became even larger and were furnished with a canopy, giving them the appearance of a separate room or small house - hence the term "house in a house," although they are more commonly referred to as "babu bed," a play either on the fact that you have to "climb" onto to them, or just on their sheer size. Up to the Han dynasty, the Chinese generally sat on the ground, and much of domestic life revolved around people's sleeping places. At some point, it became custom to also receive one's visitors in the immediate vicinity of, or even on the host's bed/couch. In the old days, the highest honor one could bestow upon one's guests was to invite them to sit on the bed or, especially in northern China, kang (a brick bed or platform warmed by a fire underneath). Therefore, it was perfectly natural for Han Xizai to sit with his guests on elevated beds to drink, talk and have a good time. While the beds and couches at that time did not feature a canopy, they did have the wooden beam structures and "walling" typical of traditional Chinese architecture. Another common feature were balustrades or railings at the sides. These beds could be installed in studies, pavilions, garden houses and patios, serving either as visitor reception areas or a place where the master of the house could rest, or both. In other words, they were more than just "beds": they provided a space for social intercourse and were the setting for much of a household's everyday life. During the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, one of which was the Southern Tang, beds were kept in a plain but handsome style without excessive trimmings or decorations, very much in the manner of the Tang dynasty. We can be certain that Wang Huaiqing is not only aware of such important details, but positively enjoys delving into these cultural and social specifics.
In terms of technique and approach, "House in a House - Bed of Han Xizai" echoes Wang's early painting The Great Ming Manner, which depicted a Ming-style taishi wooden armchair. In both works, pieces of traditional furniture function as conveyors and archetypes of cultural heritage. Chinese painting often tends to favor a reductionist or two-dimensional approach, and this is reflected in the bed with its aesthetically pleasing abstract design. Even its color, a uniform hue of black instead of a natural shade of wood, supports this process of sublimation, as does its size: filling the entire canvas (reaching beyond it in fact), the bed is larger than life, is more of a metaphysical object than an actual piece of furniture. The loud China red of the background strikes one as emanating both classical elegance and avant-garde daring. Together with the patches of vermilion, the thick black lines, flat and concise, merge into a larger structure of abstract, calligraphic design and sublime meaning, quite befitting of a painter firmly grounded in the Chinese tradition. Wang Huaiqing's intersecting black beams and lines create a decidedly Oriental feel and flair, not altogether alien to the formal aesthetics of French abstract painter Pierre Soulages.
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