Strauss & co - 15 February 2020, Cape Town

91 VARIOUS PROPERTIES 75  FENG ZHENGJIE CHINESE 1968– Chinese Portrait Series No. 53 signed, dated 2008 and numbered 132/200 screenprint 80 by 107cm R40 000 – 60 000 Feng Zhengjie signature imagery, “huge, flat close-ups of smooth- skinned and flawlessly coiffed young women, rendered in unearthly shades of green and pink – are one of the guilty pleasures of contemporary Chinese art. Skeptics will claim to intellectually disdain these high- fashion images, yet almost no one can resist looking at them. The compositional forms are at once so sweeping and strong, the facial features so alluring, the eyes so intensely fixed, that resistance seems futile. This is the artist’s conceptual coup. To have triggered that unwilled viewer response, to have uncovered that public hypocrisy, would in itself be enough to alert fair-minded observers to Feng’s dexterity and cunning, and to secure his critical standing. But in fact the pictures do much more than simply arrest our gaze, much more than play bait-and- switch with perceptions. In their very process of deception, they lay bare much about the history of figurative art in modern China, the innate dynamics of iconography, and the universalization of a visual code in today’s global culture.” 1 1. Richard Vine (2012) Facing Up to Feng Zhengjie . [Online] Available: https:// fengzhengjie.artron.net/news_detail_215654 [19 December 2019]