Guangzhou, September 27, 2011 - There are Chinese artists who poke fun at the Cultural Revolution and call it contemporary art, and there are Chinese artists who have been making contemporary statements with their art since before the Cultural Revolution.  There are today’s stylish dissident artists, and there are those who dissented for years, back when it was even more dangerous.  There are Chinese artists who have become crowd-pleasing commercial enterprises, and there are those who are more subtle, both in their statements and in their self-promotion.  Pan He, who has been making art for sixty years, is one of the latter, and all through those years, his art has had much to say.  While it may, at first, appear Red, on the outside, it has been expressing contemporary and, sometimes, even, bold statements, all through the history of the PRC, not retrospectively.

Yes, Pan He did reject the capitalist way of life and moved from Hong Kong to the mainland, in the middle of the twentieth century, but he and his art have not exactly been held back by the communist yolk.  Born in the second quarter of the century to an intellectual family with a lawyer as a father, Pan grew up as an elite, and even though he chose to serve the people with his art, he never really was a common man. 

The early recognition of his artistic talent reinforced his feelings of elitism, and after traveling and painting, in Europe, as a mere teen, he told his father that the only person who could teach him anything about art was Michelangelo.  Indeed, one can see the classical Italian influence in much of his work.  In other of his work, we see a style, more like that of Rodin, who was another sculptor who influenced him.  And while some of his art may appear patriotic, on the outside, it is pure contemporary social and political commentary, on the inside.

Back in the 1950’s, while Pan was still in his twenties, his art was discovered by Chairman Mao, who chose one of his sculptures, “When I Grow Up,” to represent the New China, and the sculpture toured several countries as an art ambassador.  The piece shows two children squatting and sharing their dreams of the future, while a teacher secretly listens in.  It was made as a tribute to all the rural teachers, who were educating the masses, but who were looked down upon by the upper classes.

As Pan tells us, he only makes art when he has something to say, but he says it in so subtle a way that his benefactors never see red: they only see Red, while the thinking man sees beyond the Red veil.  In fact, to him, that is the real beauty of art, especially, sculpture: that its message can be interpreted in a number of ways. 

Indeed, he is a man of contradictions.  He moved to the mainland, in rejection of capitalism, to make art for the people.  In fact, much of his art has been commissioned by the government for.  But the fees that he receives are in the millions, not the common man’s salary.  Yet, he gives away many of his artist’s proofs of those sculptures because he thinks that art should not be sold.  In truth, that is why he has never done an exhibition, in a gallery, in his seventy year career, until we convinced him to do the current exhibition at ours.  He says that his art should be for the public, like his many public sculptures, yet, he has done many indoor museum exhibitions.  In the end, he is a man of strong, yet, sometimes, conflicting, opinions, but the opinions that he expresses, through his art, are always uncompromising.

One of his most famous Red pieces, “Tough Times (1956),” was an outright challenge to the government.  It is a sculpture of a young boy with a rifle, sitting at the knee of an old man playing a flute: both looking exhausted but cheerful.  While, on the outside, it would appear to be a tribute to those who endured the hardships of the revolution, inside, it has meanings on a number of other levels.  First, it is a remake of a sculpture that Pan made, as a teenager, in which a young boy is sitting on the floor, looking up, questioningly, to his father, seated on a rock.  The meaning of the original piece was that his father, the intellectual lawyer, did not understand him, the young artist.  The revised version was made in 1956, in response to the government request for artists to make paintings, glorifying the liberation of Hainan Island by the communists.  First, he thought a sculpture would be better than a painting.  Then, in researching the event, Pan was privy to secret papers that told the true story of the event, which was very unflattering to the communist party.  More pitiable, out of a force of 40,000 sent to Hainan, only 24 survived: the man and boy, in Pan’s sculpture, were two of them.  To him, it was incredible that they still remained positive after all that they had witnessed. When Pan completed his sculpture, he sent it, along with a letter, to Beijing, telling what it represented and that he knew the real story.  As he awaited a response, he resigned himself to sudden “disappearance.”  Surprisingly, one day, the sculpture appeared in hundreds of newspapers, around China, but the story behind it had been changed to a tribute to the Long March.



A decade later, during the Cultural Revolution, he was asked to make a statue of the Chairman, himself, for the Chairman’s hometown, in Hunan, and he made another bold stand. By then, Pan recognized Mao for what he really was: a tyrant.  So, when he designed his sculpture, he portrayed him as the young poet idealist, who left Hunan to join the revolution, in Guangdong.   While he informed those involved in the project that he wanted to depict the Chairman as the youthful rebel, who eventually would lead the country, his real reason was that he despised what Mao became after 1949.   Although his inner dissent remained undiscovered, his outer portrayal was seen by some, as another form of dissent, and for his transgression he was carted off to jail and tortured, daily.

Indeed, although the young idealist artist, who left Hong Kong for the mainland because he thought that communism was preferable to capitalistic pursuits, has not only proved to be a good capitalist but has also had much to say, in his art, although with elegance and subtlety, against the system he embraced.  When he gave us a tour of his sculpture garden, in Guangzhou, he was quick to point out that the arrangement begins with his history of modern China, back in the 1800’s, when a few Chinese intellectuals began embracing foreign ideas and sowing the seeds of revolt against the system and the closure of China to the West.  Thus, he places his emphasis, not on Chairman Mao or the PRC, but on rejection of a closed, elitist system and the pursuit of new ideas.

He gained world attention when he made a bust of Albert Einstein, in 1978 after Deng Xiao Ping took control of China and once again opened China to the world.  Pan’s point was both to encourage the development of science and education, in China, and to let the world know that that was what was taking place in the new, new China.  As a matter of fact, he limited his sculpture to a to emphasize the mind, not the man.  As a man who recognized the values of Western ideas, as a boy, he has continued to credit them in his art.

He has also been a champion of those who have been wronged by the state, going all the way back to the Ming Dynasty.  His sculpture of Yuan Chong Huan shows, not only thoughtfulness, in approach, but also execution in a classical style that truly reminds us of Michelangelo.  Yuan was the person who turned back the Manchu incursion, using Western military tactics.   Since the Manchu could not defeat him, they used disinformation to topple him, and the emperor had him killed.  In Pan’s original sculpture for Yuan’s hometown, Dongguan, Yuan is climbing the mountain, a metaphor for the emperor’s power, the wind sweeping his hair, clothing, and beard, and deferentially handing in his sword.  It shows both the folly of leadership.  It took another hundred years before Yuan’s name was cleared by the Qing emperor, who was descended from the Manchu who defeated the Ming.

When the government informed Marshal He Long’s widow that they wanted to have a sculpture created for his hometown to honor him, Pan He made it his mission to land the job.  He Long was a hero of the communist revolution who was left to die in jail, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.  The Marshal is usually depicted atop his horse. But Pan convinced the widow that the horse should be diminutive, and the final result is a pillar of a man whose body is striated rock, like that, which lines the canyons of He Long’s hometown, and which frames the setting of his large statue.  A miniaturized horse reverently nuzzles his master’s leg: Pan says, “See.  Even the horse knows he’s a hero.”

In his symbol sculptures for cities, Pan has been both whimsical and serious.  Around his “Fisher girl”, which sits on a rock outcropping in the sea, in Zhuhai, there grew a legend.  The fisher girl waits, each night, for her lover to sneak over to Zhuhai from its sister city, Macau.  Pan’s meaning behind the sculpture is that Chinese cities, like Zhuhai, have people who work very hard, extracting the wealth of China, in this case, pearls, which she is holding over her head, while Beijing takes all the wealth and the credit for their hard work. 

In his “Spirit of Shenzhen”, the mainland modern metropolis sister city of Hong Kong, a bull is  uprooting a tree stump. It could be taken as the work it took to build the city, but what it really shows is a bull tired already just beginning to pull out all the dead wood, in China  In the 1980’s, he was sent to the city of Kelamayi, in Xingjian Province, where the Han had been working an oilfield.  They wanted Pan to make a sculptural tribute to those Han oil workers.  Then, he came upon a local family, who told him that the government was digging a four hundred mile long river extension to reward the local people.  It was then that he decided to create a tribute sculpture, not to the Han, but instead to the local people.  His sculpture, “Water Is Coming”, installed in 2002, when the river was completed, shows a Uyghur woman pouring water over her head from an oil worker’s hardhat.

 

In 1995, the city of Dongguan, a major factory city, had a contest to develop a symbol sculpture it.  All of the sculptures submitted by the entrants focused on obvious modern commercial themes, which government found tedious, so, they called upon Pan He.  He visited Dongguan, and as he was walking through the mountains, looking down on the city, his thought was that all of this industriousness of the Chinese people had really begun in the First Opium War, when the Chinese destroyed tons of opium at a small village inside the city of Dongguan.  Many major battles were also fought in the region.  In Pan’s mind, it was at that time that the real change came over the Chinese people to break the bondage of their past and begin to conceive a new future for themselves.  Thus, his symbol sculpture simply shows two massive hands breaking an opium pipe in two.

Of course, Pan He did not become an artist just to comment on the state of society but also because he finds it fun to create.  Several years ago when he was bed-ridden for months from an illness, his friends brought him clay to play with, and he made about fifty small busts of both men and women, which were then sent to the foundry to be cast in bronze.  Even so, the press created a new Pan He myth, calling some of that series the “Eighteen Heroes”, while they were nothing more than Pan He and his friends at play.  In more recent series, he did a tribute to the Hakka minority people, who live in the north of Guangdong.  To us, these scenes from the lives of the Chinese minorities are one of the more precious forms of modern Chinese social commentary.  Although the outside world sees China as looming metropolises, there are still over fifty minority peoples who are living much the same way as they have for hundreds of years, and, soon, they may fade away, as progress takes place in the headline China. 

All told, Pan He has been creating thoughtful and contemporary art for over sixty years with major works numbering over 100, and with sixty collected by museums.  He is the only Chinese artist to receive a national lifetime achievement award, twice.  Not a day goes by when Pan He is not in some sort of news publication, in China, yet he is relatively unknown, in the West.

We are constantly on the lookout for great Chinese art, and we don’t just look for it in the usual places.  From what we have discovered, there’s much more to modern Chinese art than what makes the headlines, and we endeavor to bring it to you through Leona Craig Art.

Although, at first blush, one might see Pan He’s art as Red, we see it as contemporary for over sixty years, from the China Republic to the modern PRC.


You can read the shortened version put out in a press release at MMD Newswire

About Leona Craig Art:

Leona Craig Art is a gallery of a different kind of Chinese contemporary art, focusing on fine art with more subtle, more meaningful social commentary from well-known Chinese artists, in modern oil and watercolor painting, sculpture, and more.  The curator of the collection is Craig Mattoli, CEO of Red Hill Capital Corporation, who has been involved in both art and professional investment for several decades.

Contact:
Craig Mattoli, Guangzhou, China: 86 136 3241 0877
Website: http://www.leonacraig.com 
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Telephone: 086 020 37625069