Chan Yu: The Absence of Self and the Presence of Images

82 Republic and Connoisseur Contemporary, Published 2008. Wraps, 67 pp.; 24 cm; First Edition; bilingual text in English and Chinese; illustrated with 27 color plates. In Very Good condition. White illustrated paper covers. Scored hinges along spine edges of both covers are as issued, not creases. Light soiling with scattered dark specks to both covers, a soft diagonal crease across lower front cover, and light bumping to edges. Perfect bound and tight. Pages clean and unmarked. Twenty-seven acrylic paintings of 2006 to 2008, shown at Connoisseur Contemporary and Connoisseur Art Gallery in July 2008. Chan Yu was born in Chongqing in 1982 and took both his BFA and his MFA in oil painting at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, the master's degree in the year of this exhibition. He Guiyan of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts sets the work against Political Pop: where Wang Guangyi's generation borrowed the image for sociological commentary, Chan Yu paints images already worn smooth by circulation, a Coca-Cola bottle, Che Guevara, ranks of toy guardsmen, winged plastic pigs, and asks what remains of a self that can identify itself only through them. The canvases are hand-painted trompe l'oeil, not mechanical reproduction. Two of the paintings reproduced here have since come to auction. Coca-Cola sold at Pierre Berge and Associes in Paris in 2021 and again at Capitolium Art in Rome in 2023, both times catalogued with Connoisseur Contemporary as its provenance and the gallery's label recorded on the reverse; a Treble Personality of the same year and dimensions went through Cheffins in Cambridge in 2018 and 2019. With a biography and exhibition history recording shows in Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Shanghai, Guiyang, London, Saint Tropez, Rome and Guelph.…