by Jonathan Goodman

Wei Dong, the young Beijing-based painter, offered twenty paintings, all from 1999, in his first show in New York. Entitled "River of Time," the exhibition gave viewers an ample chance to take in Wei's powerful conflations of Western and Asian painting styles and themes. The artist has been known for a while now as a painter of erotic scenarios, which often detail a literati existence of indolent pleasure; his imagery leans quite consciously toward decadence. At the same time, Wei's style takes on the major task of producing a merger, in which his appreciation of such artists as Durer and Rubens holds a dialogue with Ming and Qing dynasty styles, as well as the long tradition of Chinese erotic art, a tradition not so well known in the West.

The Chinese women in Wei's paintings are overripe, bold in their salaciousness. They return the gaze of the viewer with an assertion which redefines assumptions about the discreet coyness of Chinese eroticism. Wei's mannerist style pushes his compositions into a strange and provocative space, in which his technical skill is at variance with the affectless sexuality of his models. There May be many reasons why the painter's approach encompasses not only differing styles but also varying conceptions of what art is meant to do; the traditionally painted landscapes serving as a backdrop to Wei's figures ground the compositions in a historical awareness and lend strength and dignity to scenarios which otherwise are best understood as statements of cynical pessimism in regard to Chinese culture.

But then these paintings are not so much about the artist's penchant for voyeurism, although that is part of their power, as they are about cultural divides--between China's past and present as well as between Asian and Western traditions. The sexuality so much at the surface of Wei's art really works as a feint; the women distract the audience from the true, melancholic purpose of the paintings, which find themselves shifting back and forth between the great tradition of Chinese painting, which can no longer be adhered to, and a sense of the emotional poverty inherent in contemporary Chinese life. Wei's women, often portrayed in the provocative manner of the centerfold pinup, their lewd poses enhanced by the fetishistic use of clothing, begin as ironic statements about desire but then assume a greater meaning and responsibility, as the bearers of a blank emptiness not even sex can redeem.

In Gathering #3, as in all the works in the show, Wei uses traditional Chinese and Japanese inks to paint his signature, double imageries of a traditional Chinese landscape and idiosyncratic, sexualized figurative forms. In the painting, a group of four men sit together in the picture's middle ground, against a mountainous background, rendered in grays and browns and enlivened by the stylized rendering of pine trees. In the front, on the right of the composition, a voluptuous, bare-breasted girl, wearing an open, tan-colored robe and a dark gray hat, directs her gaze toward us. She holds a brush in her right hand, and it is hard not to see the image symbolically, as an emblem of the new generation of artists in China. The group of men also carry symbolic weight; one wears the green uniform of the People's Liberation Army, while another wears his hear in a queue, a style popular before China's modernization. The perfect breasts of the artist-seducer cancel out the men quietly sitting in a small circle.

More than anything else, Wei's paintings make their meaning as allegory. In Gathering #3, the gaze of the naked woman invert the gaze of the viewer, the erotic predilections of what we assume is an almost entirely male audience. It is true enough that the history of Chinese art is thoroughly dominated by male painters, and so the young woman's assertiveness, in addition to nullifying the privilege of the male gaze, countermands the unspoken assumption that it is the right of the man, rather than the woman, to develop ambition as an artist. Her naked body of course eroticizes and renders contemporary what otherwise would be a mostly classically expressed scene, but through and beyond her allure, she speaks to something else, perhaps a new tradition, in which it cannot be presumed that gender is linked to achievement or even the aspiration toward such achievement.

This interpretation May be reading Gathering #3 too much as social commentary when the image itself is all too clearly about desire. But the generally Northern Renaissance, mannerist style in which she has been painted destabilizes the eroticism of the image. Just whose tradition is being drawn on here? Is there a third way being expressed, and if so, what is it? Can the eroticism stimulate more than the viewer's libido? In another painting, entitled Getting Lost #1, a man dressed in a traditional Chinese jacket and hat sits before a rocky landscape; he holds a beer bottle with his left hand, and a glass of beer nestles in his crotch. Besides the jacket, he wears only a pair of red underwear. A young woman, placed before a rocky scene and also lacking pants, sits on his left, her body partly hidden by the vertical painting set behind the man. She wears a red, long-sleeved blouse and a blue cap; a pack of Camel cigarettes pokes out of the decolletage of her shirt, and she has a pair of earphones for her Walkman. She is the epitome of modern, commercialized freedom.

The flesh of these two figures, and that of the other people in Wei's paintings is a pale off-white. The sickly hue offsets the richer color of the traditional landscapes; the artist's figures look wan, almost ill. Even the title of the painting, Getting Lost, asserts a nihilist hopelessness; the painting can be seen as a deliberately degenerate version of high style, in contemporary culture as well as the history of art. Once again, after the painting's eroticism has been regarded, the viewer is left with the meaninglessness of a pleasure-filled present, which exists in contrast with the more substantial, but historically exhausted, tradition of classical Chinese painting. There isn't a choice to be made so much as there is a juxtaposition to recognize. The two worlds both have their strengths, but they are not continuous; the Ming dynasty landscapes are always in the background, playing their part as ironic reminder rather than as active vision. Wei's art makes no effort at transcending conflicting claims on his awareness, but he does recognize the intricacies of his position. His erotic fantasies are no more real than his versions of earlier landscape paintings; everything's become a virtual experience. heightened by the promise, rather than the actuality, of sex, and only fleetingly empowered by the painting achievements of China's past. Neither nostalgia nor eros are used metaphorically so much as they act to comment on our current, heavily literal imagination, in which what you see is sadly--and only--what you get.

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