Not Just Child's Play

The building is cool and inviting against the midday sun. Inside, a monumental ascending space draws the eye upwards, passed rickety wooden stairs, red-lacquered giant pillars to an ornate balcony overhead. In a darkened corner on the ground floor, the face of a boy, resigned and weary, illuminates under spotlight. Behind him, in the further recesses of the darkness, a figure sits motionless, unnervingly still if real. Eyes adjusting to the light, more figures emerge from the darkness, pulling at the gaze like a Victorian carousel, further blurring the line between the fictitious and the real.

This is the Red Gate Gallery where Beijing artist Wang Yuping's one-man show "Who Can Play With Me?" runs from June 5 - July 4. 

Reanimating familiar characters from his 2002 one-man show, the artist brings back to life figures cast in a dramatic, sometimes harsh, up-lighting, that is reminiscent of the gas-lit footlights of the Western vaudeville stage of the 19th and early 20th century. Painted in oil on single canvas panels and hung in groups comprised of portraits of children and adults, the exhibition combines the practiced intimacy of the mirror gaze with the "hold it" performance of portrait photography.

This colourful and inventive work invites the spectator to think about the social codes for looking, those rules and mores that govern correct social spectatorship and that regulate what we look at, when and in what way and prompts the viewer to consider the true nature of the social "mask" often adopted and learnt as children.

The painter draws the adult face in expressions that are variously hard, gentle, defensive, indifferent, erotic, distracted, absorbed, intelligent, confused and lost while the child is more uniformly figured distraught, resigned, unfulfilled and demanding. These faces of girls and boys, and men and women explicitly remind the viewer that children do not wear the loss of innocence as adults do.

In the manner of a fairground-attraction, there is something playfully gothic and haunting in this exhibition's combination of light, context and subject, that jars with the brilliant sunshine the figures are shielded from outside.

These painted characters seek out eye contact with the spectator and hold their gaze, defying and questioning many social codes of looking. Here, there is satisfaction in an oddly familiar early passion where the child taught never to stare at strangers seems temporarily liberated from the social codes of looking.  Adults too governed by a myriad of rules of spectatorship find themselves drawn and temporarily unmasked. Evidence of the social mask is found in the manner of every conceivable personality colourfully exploited between the sexes.

This difference in the representation of men and women recalls what philosopher John Berger and his popular thesis "Ways of Seeing" said about spectatorship. The history of human representation, across all cultures, follows certain conventions that dictate, amongst other things, in whose eyes the subject is ideally cast and in what way that subject is drawn. Berger argues that women are invariably depicted as subject of the male gaze (in such a way as to flatter him too), while the man is depicted simply acting. It is a fact worth remembering that to look at any figurative representation is to recognise where that gaze might fall.

On another wall, a set of four panels form a group of quadruplet girls in identical outfits of different colours that evoke the ice cream and lips imagery of 1970's poster art and that are oddly mocking and recalcitrant figures set apart in their similar difference. Nearby, the boy, still unattended, continues to stare from the corner, his face partially hidden under a cloth cap upon which a red star rests. A large yellow tag hangs around his neck. On it, the symbol of an aeroplane (with Chinese characters) identifies him as an unaccompanied minor. He looks more like a lost piece of luggage.

And it's definitely to the faces that the spectator is drawn again and again, the zone of focus quickly blurring to blocks of colour about the body. This combination of light and colour recall Edward Hopper in the works staged, long-shadowed tones and Paula Rego in its surrealist, narrative quality. Regularly, a fish plays a cameo as a necktie in the work of Wang Yuping.

This is an immensely thought-provoking exhibition that works by turning its gaze back upon the spectator. Just as the act of looking in real life is never just a one-way process, while the spectator is observing, he too is being looked at. Addressing these social codes of looking, the work articulates the nature and range of the social mask by positioning it somewhere between a public and private stage-lit performance.

Outside, the day's bright light whitewashes the vision and the exhibition leaves an intriguing aftertaste of a slightly fitful hallucinogenic dream.

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Wang Yuping was born in 1962 and grew up in South Beijing's hutongs. After graduating from middle school, he began work in a printing factory. An unexpected chance let him take the Central Academy of Fine Arts entrance examination in 1983 and today he is a professor in the academy's Oil Painting Department.

He has had solo exhibitions in China, USA and Canada and was a recipient of the Freeman Foundation Award in 1996. In 1997 he exhibited at the 47th Venice Biennale. Since then he has exhibited worldwide.

He is married to the artist, Shen Ling.