PIASA is organising a sale of contemporary African art on Wednesday 19 May. This sale will feature the work of Kehinde Wiley, a rising figure in the American painting scene who has, among other things, painted the portrait of American President Barack Obama.
Kehinde Wiley’s World stage: China series is the first in a project that would take the acclaimed American artist to Dakar and Lagos, Jamaica, Israel, India and Sri Lanka, France... Concurrently to setting up a studio in Beijing, where he has spent several months a year since 2006, Wiley, who speaks Mandarin fluently, found himself expanding his re-examinations on the history of portraiture to include the vocabulary of political propaganda, which he first encountered travelling as a child on an art camp to Saint-Petersburg, Russia. “While interested in working in China, Wiley felt it was important for the paintings to embody a specific reference to Chinese culture. In his discovery of historic propaganda posters from China’s Cultural Revolution, Wiley found a correlation between the ways in which African American identity has and continues to be manufactured and manipulated by both the media and society, and how Chinese national identity was distorted during the Maoist era. (...) These posters, and the ideas they generated, provided Wiley with the contextual basis for his series. As in his earlier pieces (wherein he recast masterworks by such artists as Titian and Tiepolo), Wiley positions contemporary young black men in historical stances, but now uses the propaganda posters as a departure point.
Transforming these ordinary men into figures of heroic stature, Wiley’s models (whom he recruited from neighborhoods around United States and photographed) are represented in everyday clothing and surrounded with painterly patterns now inspired by Chinese landscape painting, antique textiles, and ceramic designs.” Jennifer Jankauskas , Associate curator of exhibitions, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, from J. Jankauskas, G. Tate, P. Miller, Kehinde Wiley, the world stage: China, New York, 2007. An African American man, with a Nigerian father, revisiting Eurocentric tropes in art history out of multiple studios in Beijing, New York and Dakar: Kehinde Wiley the artist, much like the work, bridges worlds and draws us to reconsider preconceived notions of identity, class and gender roles. In Encourage good manners and politeness, Brighten up your surroundings with plants (文明礼貌绿化美化), 2007, the Chinese girl holding a young plant in the original poster is replaced by a young Black man. They are caught in the same gesture, and yet they are different: while the young girl’s eyes are lowered to the burgeon in her hands, the young man stares directly at the viewer, implying multiple layers of meaning reminiscent of masters of Flemish painting such as Peter Brueghel.
The work employs the same chrysanthemum background as our painting, pointing to the meaning of this specific flower in Chinese culture, tied to purity and nobility of character. Chrysanthemum is the flower that elegantly blooms in autumn, leaving other flowers to vie for attention in the spring. To see this motif repeated on red background in our portrait of a young man, introduced to us by way of his first name: Ivelaw, invites the viewer to bestow the same qualities to the young Black man depicted, an effect further emphasized by the figure’s pointed chin and calm, confident gaze. We may not know Ivelaw, but we know of him. A little research leads us to find him again, in a tender drawing, part of the collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University. Here and there, present but out of reach, the overall impression of calm affirmation is further reinforced by the dimensions of the present work, intimate in scale, inviting contemplation and a subtle affirmation of character, in contrast to the monumental scale usually favoured by the artist - a certain embodiment of coolness as a moral quality, as described by Robert Farris Thompson in his seminal book Flash of the spirit: African and Afro American Art and Philosophy.
Kehinde Wiley (Born in 1977, United States)
Ivelaw I (From the world stage: China), 2007
Estimation : 100 000 / 150 000 €
