Oil on canvas

80 × 220 cm. 31 1/2 × 86 5/8 in.

Titled and signed in Chinese, dated on the reverse

LITERATURE
2019, At First the Weather Was Fine e-catalogue, ShanghART Gallery, Beijing, p. 7
EXHIBITED
14 Sep–10 Nov 2019, At First the Weather Was Fine, ShanghART Gallery, Beijing

PROVENANCE
ShanghART Gallery, Beijing
Acquired directly by present important private Asian collector from the above

The Immortal Gaze of Vast Life
Yan Bing’s Landscape Poems

After graduating from the Oil Painting Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2007, Yan Bing was first introduced to the artist Liu Xiaodong, who helped him curate his first solo exhibition, Yan Bing/Temperature, held in 2009 at the UCCA in Beijing, which made him a celebrated figure. Yan Bing’s Potato, Cowhide, Mushroom, and Pear Blossom series, with their enlarged theatrical perspective and delicate life force full of classical symbolism, have been highly acclaimed in the art world, and have attracted much attention with solo exhibitions at Beijing’s Taikang Space, Shanghai’s Minsheng Art Museum, and Guangdong Museum of Fine Arts.

Born in the small mountain village of Xingshuwan in Tianshui, Gansu Province, Yan Bing’s world simply followed the cycle of the seasons before he went to Beijing at the age of 19. On the land where his ancestors had lived for generations, he had followed every step of the oxen and horses to work hard and gain the solidity and comfort of ploughing. Even though he moved to Beijing after graduation to create his work, Yan Bing realised that "one has to see oneself to be sure of one’s completeness". This means looking back. By connecting the seasons and emotions of his youth in his memories, he shapes the subtle and realistic potatoes and cowhides in his paintings. Midnight, created over the course of three years from 2016 to 2018, uses such gazing brushstrokes to interpret Yan Bing’s monumental expression of life transcending time and space.

Flame-like Life Shaping
Illuminating the Light of Life under a Cow’s Skin

"Everything came naturally, almost instinctively, to describe my experience of the world I live in and to reshape the projections of life in my mind. I use cowhide to make quilts, and then I paint the cowhide again and again, facing the depths of the world in as simple a way as possible."
——Yan Bing

Yan Bing’s Cowhide series, developed from his 2009 installation Cowhide Quilt, is a key motif of his art just as the Potato series. Although both series feature a single, exaggerated and magnified object as the main character, the Cowhide series eschews any contextualization of the narrative, leaving the "skin" as the sole landscape, an object to be examined and gazed at. Since the series’ inception in 2011, Yan Bing has gradually used a sculptural brushstroke to apply paint to the canvas like clay sculpture. The fur, which appears almost deceptively real from afar, with its faintly shimmering luster, gradual changes in layers, and dots and bumps, appears to be dancing flames when viewed up close, frozen before the viewer’s eyes by the vibrant brushstrokes. Thus, rather than being painted, Yan Bing’s cowhides are like moulded, directly connected to the power of his hands.

Completed between 2016 and 2018, Midnight builds on the realism of the earlier Cowhide series, and further rethinks it in abstract form. Yan Bing chose a 2.2-metre-long canvas to allow him to fully express the range and breadth of his brush, and he also spent three years to capture the cowhide. Perhaps it is the midnight hours, when he has gazed at the work so many times, that have given it its name. The choice of browns and blacks in the work creates the luminosity of a classical oil painting with its overlapping light and dark. The long strip of the painting invites the viewer to take a tour of the fur with their eyes and stroke it inch by inch, to feel the soft touch, the tips of the hairs that slightly prickle the palm of the hand, and the breath of life that remains in it. When our eyes roam over the cowhide, if we can look down with a light from top to bottom, we can penetrate it and see the blood and bone veins flowing underneath the realistic fur.

Eternal Wonders in the Spiritual Wilderness

With such a gaze, the four spots that appear from left to right also gain a wider perspective in an otherwise limited field of view. They are like relics in a desert or a silent crater, or like whirlpools in the Yellow River or black holes in the Milky Way, all of which together piece together a complete cow body and a more complete universe.

For Yan Bing, the spots represent the traces of the years of farming left on the cattle, the warmth of the land, and the spirit of labour. They resemble the grottoes on the Loess Plateau, each of which contains countless treasures of scripture, as well as the multitudes of us. They represent the history of human civilization throughout the ages, and with the warmth within reach and the tenderness of memory, in the silence of the middle of the night, they sing the echoes of a distant time and space. With the infinite power of their own silence, the objects gazed upon by Yan Bing are now gazing back at us outside the painting, and slowly trickles down to us over the course of our years.

Price estimate:
HKD: 700,000 – 1,000,000
USD: 89,400 - 127,700

Auction Result:
HKD: 840,000