Andy Warhol - Warhol in China Hong Kong Saturday, May 27, 2017 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc., New York
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Exhibited

    Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria; Pittsburgh, The Andy Warhol Museum, Andy Warhol / Ai Weiwei, 11 December 2015 – 11 September 2016

  • Literature

    Nicholas Chambers, Michael Frahm and Tony Godfrey, eds., Warhol in China, Germany, 2014, pp. 202, 303 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    In late February 1972, President Richard Nixon and the First Lady Pat Nixon travelled to Beijing, thus ending a 25 year period of diplomatic disconnection between the two nations. Nixon dubbed these pivotal seven days “the week that changed the world”. The meeting between the President and Chairman Mao Zedong, and the Nixons’ visit to the Great Wall were covered extensively by Western media, and were immortalised on the covers of Life Magazine and TIME.

    In the same year, and shortly after this momentous occasion, Andy Warhol’s oeuvre took on a radical new shift, and he began to paint sequences of Mao portraits. Enlarging a photograph of Mao from the “Little Red Book”, the artist transferred the Chairman’s image onto a huge variety of canvases, and injected the portraits with lively colours and brushwork. Mao’s image became a vital fixture of Warhol’s oeuvre, and remains amongst the artist’s most important depictions, alongside Marilyn, Elvis, and Jackie (Kennedy).

    “…I painted Mao about four hundred times. I used to see how many I could do in a day.”
    Andy Warhol, quoted in Christopher Makos, Andy Warhol China 1982, China, 2007, p. 63

    Exactly ten years later, Warhol’s fixation with Mao materialised into a chance excursion to China’s capital, where he would come vis-à-vis the subject of countless of his works. When considered against the artist’s philosophy of reproduction and repetition, his photographs of modern China take on another meaning, evoking at once the country’s economic development thanks to its mass manufacture. Moreover, Mao’s immense influence on the country, his philosophies on the masses, and the country’s veneration for him as depicted in endless posters produced during the Cultural Revolution, can all be counted within the very lexicon of Warhol’s artistic language of duplication and mass-distribution.

    In many ways, that Mao is as ubiquitous to China as he is to Warhol’s oeuvre is extremely fitting, and it is unsurprising that many have juxtaposed the two while referring to the artist’s works. Referencing Christopher Makos’ photograph of Warhol posing in front of the Chairman, Xu Bing states, “If you look at the Andy Warhol photo where he is standing in front of the big portrait of Mao in Tiananmen Square, then you can understand how Andy Warhol’s art works with Mao’s ideas about the masses, the people, and pop culture.” (Xu Bing, quoted in ‘IN CONVERSATION: Xu Bing with Ellen Pearlman’, Brooklyn Rail, 4 September 2007.)

    By portraying the image of the Chairman in repeating sequences, Warhol simultaneously effaced the figure of its meaning while necessarily drawing attention to its inherent importance. Taken in the grander context of Warhol’s equal treatment of other figures and objects—from Elvis Presley to Campbell Soup cans—the artist’s frenzied images of Beijing in the present sale, of Mao, of its people, of its monuments are especially telling.

    From Warhol’s imitation of Tai Chi practitioners (Lot 14); to the image of the ever-present famed Chinese bicycles (Lots 6, 9, 15, 16, 18, 28); to the uniformity of Chinese Mao jackets (Lots 6, 8- 10, 15, 19, 24, 28); to his fascination and adoption of symbols and semiotics (Lots 3, 15, 17, 20-22); each lot in the present sale is a photographic extension of Warhol’s fascinations with symbology, and epitomises the artist’s machinations of dissecting, ascribing, and describing meaning.

  • Artist Biography

    Andy Warhol

    American • 1928 - 1987

    Andy Warhol was the leading exponent of the Pop Art movement in the U.S. in the 1960s. Following an early career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol achieved fame with his revolutionary series of silkscreened prints and paintings of familiar objects, such as Campbell's soup tins, and celebrities, such as Marilyn Monroe. Obsessed with popular culture, celebrity and advertising, Warhol created his slick, seemingly mass-produced images of everyday subject matter from his famed Factory studio in New York City. His use of mechanical methods of reproduction, notably the commercial technique of silk screening, wholly revolutionized art-making.

    Working as an artist, but also director and producer, Warhol produced a number of avant-garde films in addition to managing the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founding Interview magazine. A central figure in the New York art scene until his untimely death in 1987, Warhol was notably also a mentor to such artists as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

     

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20

Statue of Mao and Building

1982
Blindstamp credit in the margin. Initialled ‘T.J.H.’ by Timothy J. Hunt of the Andy Warhol Foundation in pencil, estate copyright credit reproduction limitation and date stamps on the verso.
Gelatin silver print
Image: 20.3 x 25.4 cm. (7 7/8 x 10 in.)
Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity signed in ink by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

Estimate
HK$80,000 - 120,000 
€9,800-14,700
$10,300-15,400

Sold for HK$200,000

Contact Specialist
Charlotte Raybaud
Head of Sale
+852 2318 2026

General Enquiries
+852 2318 2000

Warhol in China

Hong Kong Auction 28 May