The signature paintings of Feng Zhengjie—huge, flat close-ups of smooth-skinned and flawlessly coiffed young women, rendered in unearthly shades of green and pink—are one of the guilty pleasures of contemporary Chinese art. Skeptics will claim to intellectually disdain these high-fashion images, yet almost no one can resist looking at them. The compositional forms are at once so sweeping and strong, the facial features so alluring, the eyes so intensely fixed, that resistance seems futile. This is the artist’s conceptual coup. To have triggered that unwilled viewer response, to have uncovered that public hypocrisy, would in itself be enough to alert fair-minded observers to Feng’s dexterity and cunning, and to secure his critical standing. But in fact the pictures do much more than simply arrest our gaze, much more than play bait-and-switch with perceptions. In their very process of deception, they lay bare much about the history of figurative art in modern China, the innate dynamics of iconography, and the universalization of a visual code in today’s global culture.

　　Feng is operating in a context that has never placed great store in the Western mode of realistic portraiture: convincing volumes in pictorial space perceived as three-dimensional; subtleties of expression reinforced by chiaroscuro and modeling; construction of a single moment in which the visage seems to express the whole of the subject’s character—past, present, and future. Traditional Chinese painting is consistently flat—to the eye, if not to the mind—and individual personalities, in those relatively rare instances where they are allowed to matter much at all, are usually conveyed through the social accoutrements of clothing, possessions, and habitat, supplemented by relatively cartoonish facial signifiers: pursed, heart-shaped girlish lips; the manly beards of warriors and lords; wrinkles and scraggly hair for the old and wise.

　　This approach altered briefly at the turn of the 20th century, as artistic influences followed hard upon the heels of Western invaders, and as China began to send art students abroad to absorb the techniques of oil painting and the tenets of Western pictorial logic. But by mid-century, the demands of civil war and conflict with Japan elevated the crude visual rhetoric of propaganda over the fine observational intimacies of genuine character studies. The Communist victory in 1949 ushered in three decades during which the Social Realist style, borrowed from China’s sometime ideological allies in the USSR, reigned supreme. Especially during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), the approved depiction of faces in the People’s Republic was basically of two types. Common people (primarily workers, peasants, and soldiers) were shown as clear-eyed, bright-cheeked supporters of Mao’s utopian vision, their visages and often their fists raised enthusiastically, determinedly toward the light. Leaders—accorded more individuality, though not more candor—were often portrayed at closer range and from a low, heroicizing angle. Ultimately, when Chairman Mao’s personality cult was at its height, the supreme leader came to have virtual monopoly on tight close-ups done at monumental scale, with innumerable copies in all sizes disbursed into every imaginable public and private space. Even today that one-man imagistic regime lingers on in Chinese currency and above the entrance to the Forbidden City.

　　Following the death of Mao, Deng Xiaoping’s reopening and liberalization of China emboldened certain painters to treat the human face in previously impermissible ways. The practitioners of Scar Art and Rustic Realism allowed themselves to depict the physical effects not only of sun and weather but of deprivation, stress, and turmoil on the visages of everyday people. Avant-garde artists even went so far as to subvert long-standing conventions of closeness and scale. In Father (1980), Luo Zhongli rendered a hyper-realistic peasant’s face at a size (215 x 150 cm.) once reserved only for the political elite. Geng Jiangyi, in his four-part suite Second State (1986), shoved grisaille versions of an ambiguously laughing/grimacing male face right up to the picture plane, aggressively confronting the audience and nearly projecting the image into the viewer’s space. (Could anything be more different from the always perfectly readable expressions in Socialist Realism or the self-effacing decorum of traditional figurative work in China?) And that same year, Wang Guangyi began producing the series in which he dared to depict Mao’s face behind a cage-like linear grid of black or red lines, not as an emblem of political virtue or a target of satire, the artist claimed, but as a pure visual form subject to rationalist analysis. A cavalcade of close-up face paintings ensued, some concentrating on Mao—with a flower in his teeth (Li Shan) or as one element in a complex textile-like pattern (Yu Youhan)—others presenting friends and family members (Zhang Xiaogang, Yan Peiming), recalcitrant thugs (Fang Lijun), everymen with idiot grins (Yue Minjun), or thinly masked yuppies (Zeng Fanzhi).

　　Through the “open door” of the 1980s and ’90s came not only avant-garde influences from abroad, such as close-up portraits by Chuck Close and Andy Warhol, but also giant pop images of the advertising world and celebrity culture. Where once the visages of China’s political leaders had loomed large on walls and TV screens and in the pages of mass publications, now a flood of fashion models, movie actors and actresses, singers, and sports stars surged up before the public’s eyes. Omnipresent and never blinking, they seemed to embody a new type of utopian promise—not of collectivist camaraderie but of individual glamour. Earnest striving for a better way of life (by socialist definition equally shared) was replaced by a more psychologically desperate—though also more liberating and more enjoyable—lust for a better lifestyle, individually attained. Perhaps the portrait artist most finely attuned to this cultural shift is Qi Zhilong, whose young female beauties are sometimes shown, incongruously, in Cultural Revolution garb and sometimes fully assimilated into contemporary modes of self-presentation. In both cases, his subjects seem personally unaware of their link with a venerable tradition of “natural” beauty, one that long precedes the puritanical spin such attactiveness was given during the Mao period.

　　No one would accuse Feng Zhengjie’s vixens, on the other hand, of either naturalness or unknowingness. Indeed, they seem the very incarnation of feminine guile, the triumphant younger sisters of Suzie Wong. But exactly how calculating they are—to what extent victimizers, to what extent victims—is the key issue at the heart of this 41-year-old artist’s oeuvre. It is tempting to say the Feng, a former high-school and college art teacher from Sichuan, has simply been overwhelmed and taken in by cosmopolitan glitz, that his paintings memorialize an adolescent awe of the false goddesses churned out (for profit) by the world’s fashion and entertainment industries. But that reading ignores two important facts: one, that the rigorously trained Sichuan Academy graduate arrived at this imagery through an incremental and highly self-conscious process; and two, that the artifice of construction is the very focus of his art. Just as Wang Guangyi’s gridded Mao portraits exposed the squaring-up procedure by which small images are made monumental (and ordinary humans become irreproachable icons), so Feng’s super-beauty studies reveal the mechanics by which fantasies of ultimate cool are fabricated. Far from being a naïve, or even a cynical, adherent of the glamour cult, this artist is one of its most astute diagnosticians.

　　Feng’s early series “Analysis” (1992), exposes the underlying muscular structure of his subjects, drawing the viewer’s attention to the biological mechanics of movement and appearance. By 1994-95, he had shifted to works—many with the word “pose” in the title—that explore (and sometimes knowingly violate) standard methods of compositional patterning (especially of colorful circles and rectangles) and of presenting the nude body as an object that can be visually segmented, scrutinized, and rearranged. The “Pet” paintings of 1996 each offer a familiar animal companion surrounded, again in a flat allover pattern, by systematically arranged balls, flowers, and—most prominent of all—human figures with sexually provocative facial expressions or body arrangements. This implicit comment on the social attempt to domesticate the wildness in nature and ourselves is echoed in subsequent series like “Happiness” (1998) and “Romantic Trip” (1997-99), where young wedding couples—some in traditional garb, some in bizarre versions of modern attire—are shown large-scale against a blue sky filled with balloons and floating cupids, while a travel landscape (Washington, D.C., Sydney, Europe, Egypt, etc.) spreads out on a low horizon behind them.

　　Feng ambivalence about the promise of marital bliss is evident not only in the goony facial expressions of his newlyweds (several of whom look more Mexican than Chinese) but in the pictures’ sickly-sweet color combinations and their occasional invasion by cartoon characters, particularly a ridiculous duck whose silliness undermines the solemnity of the lovers’ illusion. Add to this the fact that the couples’ eyes have a drugged quality when they look directly out at the viewer, and a half-crazed strangeness when they gaze sidelong at each other. Clearly all is not well in the traditional nuptial scenario.

　　Just what the problem might be, in part, is indicated in the 2000 series “Coolness,” which features both female and hermaphroditic nudes with small breasts and enormously oversized bald heads. These alien-looking creatures, some armed with space guns, wear only wing-shaped techno sunglasses and thick lipstick in unearthly shades of green, red, or blue. The impulse to be “cool” at all costs has, it seems, half-dehumanized certain members of contemporary society—or certain portions of our collective consciousness. These mutants, in their monstrous self-sufficiency, are not beings that one could imagine as spouses, parents, loyal employees, or conscientious citizens of a striving nation. Rather, they are fashion made flesh—too “advanced” in hip attitude for the rest of their species.

　　Feng had addressed this problem as early as 1998, in his “Fashion” series, where more-or-less conventional female beauties, in various traditional Chinese costumes, are vastly outsized by new-age figures sporting eclectic gowns, elaborate bouquets, and headdresses of flowers and fruits, attended by yellow-and-blue birds. The disproportionate size of the heads of these modern girls (indicating too much brain power for the comfort of traditional male viewers perhaps), their isolation in the picture field (no successful suitors in view), their zigzag posture (facilitating self-display, not the welcoming accessibility of their tiny predecessors), and the vulpine quality of their red mouths and individuated teeth (revealed in indecorous smiles) all bespeak a femininity that is no longer coy and complaisant, like that of their diminutive predecessors, but self-confident, inner-directed, and verging on ravenous.

　　Within two years, beginning with the 2000-05 “China” series, Feng was moving swiftly toward the classic unearthly glamour images now so closely associated with his name. But along the way, he explored the collision of cultures theme, subtly but pointedly, in the 2001-02 “Butterfly in Love” series, populated by full-length figures engaged in ambiguous encounters. In No. 01, a grandee surrounded by his tittering wives and/or concubines, all in traditional garb, survey a supine young woman—nude, with eager pink nipples erect and a salaciously inviting expression—like one more fine object about to be added to the household treasury. But signs that this male-dominant erotic setup is passing can be detected in a gas streetlight (introduced into China by the intruding Western powers in the mid-19th century) and the pink hue of the new woman’s hair (a fad that would arrive in the late 20th century).

　　Butterfly in Love No. 09 pits traditional male and female characters against a green-haired nude who sits on a robe the same red color as the Coca-Cola labels that appear here and there in the image, another harbinger of change in what would otherwise appear a timeless mythic domain. In No. 19 and No. 20, the formerly unthinkable occurs—sensual embraces between two lovely females, one in Chinese dress, the other completely naked and pink-haired. As if to reinforce how shocking this exchange would seem to conservative sensibilities, a cityscape of that quintessentially Western metropolis New York stretches in the background of No. 19; in No. 20 two planes have replaced the series’s hovering butterflies, and the Twin Towers are ablaze. The emergence of openly acknowledged lesbian love, and with it essential female independence from men, is as cataclysmic as a clash of civilizations, a war of worldviews.

　　Who, then, are the women in Feng’s “China” and “Chinese Portrait” series (2006-ongoing), and what historical forces do they so strikingly represent? It has been often noted that Feng derived his pink-and-green palette from the Chinese New Year calendars of his youth. But this link with happiness and good fortune has been radically altered and complicated by eerie chromatic value Feng gives the hues, by his banishment of all natural flesh tones, and by his evocation, in these at once stunned and haughty faces, of both the Chinese past and the global present.

　　The exotic, inscrutable, but ultimately sexually conquerable Asian woman is, of course, one of the staples of Orientalist fantasy, a personification of larger colonist desires. But that is only one side of the story. By the early 20th century, Western films and advertising had created a new female esthetic in China. On posters, in magazines, on product labels, and in China’s own emergent cinema (especially in Shanghai), attractive young women, dressed in clothes that bridged the two cultures, conveyed not only commercial messages and narrative storylines but the implicit declaration that a type of New Woman—stylish, unencumbered by family, adventurous in spirit—had arisen in China. (That this New Woman shared certain characteristics with upper echelon concubines of old, and even with high-status ladies who elected to take lovers, was more subliminally felt than explicitly acknowledged.)

　　So strong was the current that the equality of women became a tenet of the Liberation under Mao, although the mode of female self-presentation had to change drastically, becoming one of unadorned collective dedication to the socialist cause. Women might “hold up half the sky,” but they had to do so without makeup, so to speak.

　　The Asian sexiness in Feng’s images is, therefore, in one sense a post-Mao return of the repressed, and an assertion of liberty. But it is equally a critique of the shallowness of consumer culture—Feng’s pictorial field is without depth, and such glamour, in the end, sells only itself—as well as a wily exercise in semiotic minimalism. For Feng has found a simple iconography, and a jarring color scheme, that seems to work immediately wherever his art is shown. This means either that he has struck a basic vein of human psychology, or that the vast cultural apparatus which makes idols of Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Angelina Jolie, and Zhang Ziyi has thoroughly pervaded the entire civilized world.

　　Or perhaps both. A language, whether visual or verbal, could not become so ubiquitous if humankind did not already share a genetically engrained proclivity to receive it. Some of Feng’s recent pieces—skull and flower paintings, green-faced portraits of his deceased parents, ceramic sculptures of flower stalks blooming into death’s heads, dangling humanoid forms stylized to resemble crosses—bespeak a deep, genuine grief, matched by a capacity to translate private emotion into universally communicative artworks. By the same token, Feng’s giant female faces teach us that, while the codes of glamour may be somewhat culturally specific, pure beauty—like its antagonist, death—transcends place, time, and history to strike directly, with the immediacy of music, at the core of our being.