THE lights have been set. The camera awaits. Her flawless face emanates with the cool sheen of exquisite marble. Her careless windswept hair that alludes to her effortless elegance is one that has been carefully arranged. She knows the magnetism of her flaming crimson lips. She turns to the lens, raising her chin knowingly to the angle for the perfect shot that the masses will see. This cover girl is ready, except that this elaborate staging is no choreography of a high fashion photographer, but the art of Feng Zhengjie.

　　Since 2000, the prolific artist has producing various portrait series of nameless glamouristas in oil painting. Often in large-scaled canvases, Feng's pin-up beauties have been rendered with the precision of air-brushed perfection and their faces presented in the angle of extreme close-ups. The immediacy of their sensuality cannot be missed. Nor can the passion of his vivid palette of colours escape the mind. The majestic hues of kaleidoscopic reds and greens both electrifying and enchanting have been rendered to excite the viewer to revel in the beauty of his subjects. At the same time, there is something unsettling, even diabolic about this beauty that causes one to recoil from. But like the disconcerting revelation of a dubious memory in the split-second flash of deja vu, the viewer is once again bewitched by Feng's femme fatales. A sense of lingering ambivalence about the nature of beauty now remains, but it is also one that is resigned to the subjugation by that beauty. It is this state of reverie and revulsion that Feng Zhengjie so well conjures, that make his works so indelible. With his latest series of “Chinese Portrait 2007”works, Feng, in his investigation of the psyche of the self in contemporary Chinese society, engages with primary colours as a means that both reveal, and conceal, the essence of primal nature.

　　COLOURS reflect the different voices of the soul. They can declare the emotions of joy and elation; they also divulge misgivings and treachery. When we look at Feng Zhengjie's earlier works, such as those in his " Romantic Trip Series"(1996 – 1998) and "Happiness Series" (1998), both of which feature newly wed couples in clichéd poses of conjugal bliss, we cannot help but detect from his palette of brilliant colours that should symbolize of auspicious tidings, a certain ominous aura. The carnivalesque ambience that has been created by a riot of reds, blues and yellows begins to emanate a glow of ghoulishness and colours of cheer and festivity suddenly seem to bear the capacity to be even terrifying. This is how Feng applies his palette to present how primary colours themselves, have an amorphous attribute. Looking at Feng’s works, we are compelled to question, in parallel, the shifting personas that the subjects in his paintings begin to take.

　　Such is the quality of Feng's art which has previously been described as reminiscent of the category of "Gaudy Art" in contemporary Chinese art, a term which coined by Li Xianting, embodies, the feeling of gaudiness and its many appearances that have come with the development of a rampant consumer culture in China. This follows from the term "kitsch" that first appeared in China in the 1990s with the translations of Milan Kundera's " Unbearable Lightness of Being" with the term being presented as "meisu" ("mei" meaning "seductively beautiful" and "su" meaning "common, base or vulgar"). Feng's expression of irony through the characteristic of colour in Gaudy Art, represented a parody of kitsch and popular culture which proved to be a popular method of inquiry in artistic practice at that time. While the artist has since stated that he has moved on from working one the mechanisms of kitsch, it is important to recognize the significance and specificity of the images of artists who work with such schematics when they are fashioning their work. Without this consideration, Feng's works may be reduced to a mere aestheticization of the appearance of mass culture and consumer society without sufficient criticism or subversion. In his notes on the avant-gardist artist who operates with popular culture imagery, Gao Minglu raised the scenario of "double kitsch" which refers to the production of a "political kitsch" by old ideologies and a "commercial kitsch" that arises from the emerging popular culture in China was churning out, exemplifing the combination of the two mass cultures of socialism and capitalism in China.

　　For Feng, who belongs in the generation of post Chinese New Wave artists, the object of antagonism in his artistic practice, less so at the state, is more directed at society's rampant materialism, as evinced from his frequent satirization of China's new rich and their penchant to appropriate status and affirmed identities through the power of money as well as their preoccupation with the consumption of material goods. The turn to popular culture is hence one that is making use of their sensational imagery instead of succumbing to their soft seduction, and turning their marginality and incongruity into resources for new artistic production. Likewise, his deconstruction of consumer culture through various modes of representation was a deliberate deployment of popular and kitsch gestures in an intentional subversive attack on the ideological structure that keeps the people enslaved to consumerism. The ambivalent readings into the representation of colour and kitsch also allows viewers to see the conflicting and competing natures of capitalism and communism through their mutual insistence on hegemony, and the uneasy convergence of China's Maoist past and its promising economic future. Taken in this sense, Feng is empowered critically and gains a degree of mastery over the chaotic conditions of the economical bubble in contemporary China.

　　As we think of Primary Colours in the contemplation of Feng's works, we begin to see the position of the self in this conflicting schema of contemporary Chinese society, and the contradictions of the human condition when situated as such are being made apparent. Society is a product of Man, just as Man is a product of society. It is also a constructed reality that both includes and transcends him, and it is within this reality that Man can find himself. Hence when the man-made enterprise of society begins to project a parameter of higher power that threatens to subsume him, but remains intrinsically an entity that is nonetheless part of him, Man finds himself subjugated by the very system he created. Yet this is a symbiotic relationship and a reality that he cannot divorce himself from, and it is one that Feng is all too aware of, and indeed, reflective in his works.

　　WHEN we look at the cover girls of Feng Zhengjie's Chinese Portraits, we are reminded of her former avatar in his "Butterfly in Love Series" (2001 – 2003). The cover girl today is no longer the calendar girl who represented the juxtaposition of tradition and modernity, of nationalism and globalization and the dilemmas of these cross-cultural encounters. Nor is her demeanor that of the awkward debutante in the "Fashion Series" (1998), eager in her excess adornment and colour. This girl has matured, and in place is a worldlier woman whose pose and poise reveal a nonchalant confidence. She no longer courts for recognition for she knows she is the courted. She demands for your attention without asking for it. Amidst these comparative semiotics in Feng Zhengjie's subjects, we are reminded of yet another picture – a picture of a rapidly transformed and transforming China today. In the same manner in which she is under the wary scrutiny of the international world, we look upon Feng's portraits with a sense of persisting irresoluteness. We sense the authority of her dynamism and the dizzying progression that she continues to look forth to. We see her imminent arrival to the world-class stature that she seeks. Yet behind the hauntingly glossy veneers of these Chinese Portraits, their prefabricated chiseled features and mass-produced iridescence, what else do her enigmatic colours hint? If this beguiling beauty brings to mind a certain "poison" (to borrow the term from one of Feng's earlier exhibitions " The Beautiful Poison", 2004), it also reminds us of the old Chinese adage – "yi du gong du" – which refers to poison being utilized to purge poison.

　　With "Chinese Portrait 2007", Feng Zhengjie's journey with colour and nature has arrived at a pared down duo-colour palette that speaks volumes in their minimalism. Despite the splendour of this new neon monotone of red and green, these faces project an anonymous beauty that is one of a blank archetype, and what they seem to reflect, in parallel to Feng's meditations on nature and colour in his painting, perhaps, is that true nature or " ben se", is something that may well be essentially empty. Beyond the charm, the capriciousness and the contradictions of Feng Zhengjie's women, the ontological status of their beauty is one that is pretty vacant.