Acrylic on canvas

200 × 250 cm. 78 3/4 × 98 3/8 in.

Titled and signed in Chinese, dated on the reverse

LITERATURE
2009, China: Renaissance of the Contemporary, 24 Hours Culture Publishing House, Milan, p.183
EXHIBITED
11 Dec 2009 - 7 Feb 2010, China: Renaissance of the Contemporary, Royal Palace of Milano, Milan

PROVENANCE
Star Gallery, Beijing
Acquired directly by present important private European collector from the above

Refusing Superficial, Integrating Classical to Bring the New
The Panda World of Gao Yu, the Pioneer of the Groundbreaking Chinese Original Pop Art

Gao Yu, an artist born in the 1980s and a graduate of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, started his career as a pioneer of original cartoon art even before this concept was fully developed in the contemporary Chinese art world. Influenced by worldwide popular Japanese manga during his childhood, Gao Yu often uses vivid and planar cartoon characters in his later works. Meanwhile, he has a profound knowledge base of Chinese classical literature because he has been obsessed with it since childhood and pays attention to social issues. He teases the established cognition and social state by using black humour with critical reflection behind those cartoon images, making people and generating more profound thinking after being amused. His “refusal to be superficial” attitude has made his works popular. In 2008 he became the first post-1980s artist to sell a single piece at auction for more than 1 million RMB. His works have been exhibited in Chongqing Long Museum, Royal Palace of Milano in Italy, Indonesia National Gallery in Jakarta and other places. Also, they have been collected by The Glenfiddich family in Scotland, Absolut Art Collection in Sweden, He Xiangning Art Museum in Shenzhen, Chongqing Long Museum and so on.

Breaking the Rules and Uniting the Opposites

The painting National Treasure is themed with Gao Yu's most representative panda. The painting features lush green hills under a blue sky, and cascading cascades ripple into a clear pool of water. Two pandas are sitting on the grass on the right. In the upper left corner, the Chinese character “National treasure” is deliberately drawn in a form imitating traditional Chinese calligraphy. It brings a sense of old Chinese calendar painting. The combination of imitated traditional calligraphy and the cartoon style generates a vivid charm of blurred time and the vague between real and unreal.

The work appears to be a lively and fresh natural scene with just a few strokes of simple colour combinations. In fact, it is the result of more than 20 repetitions of paintings by Gao Yu in reference to traditional Chinese lacquer painting techniques. To implement this technique for making a perfect, delicate and vivid work, he visited the Fuzhou lacquer factory several times to study. This work was exhibited at the Royal Palace of Milano in Italy in 2009. It represented the pioneering style of Chinese new talent and was widely recognized worldwide at that exhibition.

Gao Yu, who has been depicting his representational panda image since 2002, continues this practice in the work National Treasure. He added a pair of human-like ears to the two pandas, giving them an intriguing surreal look and revealing human characters and emotions. Growing up in Sichuan and Chongqing area, he has a unique view of the image of the panda. He thinks that as a representative of China's image, pandas have been tamed into a simple and docile inherent impression. However, pandas are multi-faceted. So he broke the rules and made the panda his actor, boldly showing all kinds of human desires, greed, anger and delusion.

In this work, the panda on the left appears growling, with bloodshot eyes and irritability. The panda on the right, with drooping eyelids and flushed cheeks, sprawls satiated on the ground. The two pandas display the desire, emotion and inertia that Taoism criticizes, in stark contrast to the tranquil natural background. Gao Yu brings depth to childlike fun and criticizes established images with a playful attitude, incorporating his own learned Chinese tradition, Pop art and personal expression. The artistic imagination of Gao Yu has crossed the superficial. It has raised his comic works to the level of philosophy, allowing him to eliminate many constraints and open up a new field of Chinese contemporary Pop art. In his works, the combination of animal nature and humanity, tranquillity and restlessness condense in the panda. These contradictions generate the dramatic sparks and finally form a unique new unity worthy of perusing!

Price estimate:
HKD: 400,000 - 600,000
USD: 51,000 - 76,400

Auction Result:
HKD: 912,000