Author: GAO YU 高瑀
Size: 200×200cm
Signed and dated: Painted in 2008
Estimate: 800,000
-1,000,000
Final Price: RMB 800,000
LITERATURE
2012 Gao Yu Unrealistic / P25 / China Today Art Museum press
signed in Chinese and dated 2008（on the reverse）
EXHIBITED
2012 Unreality Galaxy SOHO StarGallery, Beijing
Among the avantgarde artists after the 1980s, Gao Yu has been wandering between mainstream culture and popular culture. His art is famous for its black humorous cartoon image and cynical banter attitude. In his creation, Gao Yu absorbed everything and created an art form that transcended the inherent cultural system with subversive ideas. He not only integrated Eastern and Western cultures, broke the opposition between tradition and modernity, elegance and popularity, but also maintained entertainment and criticism. His works emphasize plane and decoration, with lively and bright colors, integrating loveliness, fantasy and violence, with strong comic color, and are extremely provocative and ironic to authority and consumer culture.
In Gao Yu's works, panda is the longest used and most meaningful symbolic image, and is recognized as the most personal visual symbol of artists. Gao Yu reversed the stereotype of panda's docility and simplicity, endowed it with the elements of irritability and madness, exposed the hypocrisy, violence and desire in contemporary society with unreasonable behaviors and fantastic space-time scenes, and reflected on the invasion of human spirit in the consumption era. By 2006, Gao Yu had separated two new images from the early panda GG image: Peterpan and DADA. This is a word game he designed: 'if panda is separated, it can be written as Peter Pan and dada. It is not difficult to see from these two phrases that they are synonymous with anti orthodox world and anti adult order.'
The Little Boy Who Wakes Up (Lot 1086) belongs to the image of Peterpan. The little boy who doesn't want to grow up in the fairy tale is not living on a peaceful never-land at the moment. In the picture, he seemed to wake up from a nightmare, but found that the reality was a bigger nightmare: the mushroom cloud rising during the atomic bomb explosion occupied most of the picture. The frightened little boy tried to extinguish the flame by peeing, but it was a drop in the bucket. The image of the panda has been deliberately narrowed, highlighting its helplessness and fear in the face of major disasters. The large-area black flat background sets off the expanding mushroom cloud, brewing a tragic atmosphere. Gao Yu is good at using cartoon images to narrate, turning heavy themes into a relaxed and humorous philosophy of life, or metaphorizing the cruelty of reality in absurd forms. His art is both self and the true expression of the times.
