Yan Lei was born in Langfang in 1965 to a company accountant and a school teacher. Several relatives were well-known painters. At the age of 14, when education was re-normalized, he moved to Baoding (in Hebei ) to attend the design school there.

After finishing in Baoding, he spent several years trying to get into the China Art Academy in Hangzhou, succeeding in 1987. “I was basically a printmaker when I arrived. Just having access to their the library totally changed my perspective. Suddenly we had a way to know about what was happening in the rest of the world.”

The Hangzhou academy, then with Xiao Feng as dean, was an incubator for many who would later be recognized as major artists. Yan Lei roomed with artist/curator Qiu Zhijie, put up the very young Liu Wei in his studio, learned from new teachers like video artist Zhang Peili and Wu Shanzhuan, and formed what he calls “a little gang” with Tang Song and Lu Anping. Perhaps most important was his personal tutor, Liang Quan, who had just come back from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Yan Lei graduated from Hangzhou in 1991. “I wanted to go abroad,” he says. “But I didnt have the guanxi to make that happen.” So he moved to Beijing, working for awhile as an arts editor at the Youth Daily newspaper. He experimented with different approaches, including some highly aggressive performances. But there was always the artists isolation. “Just getting a chance to exhibit was a big problem,” he says. “There were no galleries. And no system for making a living as an artist.”

“An artist cant develop without some loneliness,” he says. “It was all the loneliness I suffered from 1991 to 1997 that allowed me to develop. But most artists in China dont think about that. Money for them has become the most important thing.”

The 1990s saw the Chinese art scenes emergence from near-total obscurity to curiosity on the world stage. More and more critics, curators and collectors traveled there. Since it would be impossible to find their way around the art scene alone, a few Chinese go-betweens wielded enormous influence over who might get international attention, a situation which was obviously resented by many of the artists.

“I was frustrated by the art scene in the Yuanmingyuan and East Village,” he says. “It was sort of a contrived bohemian lifestyle, with gullible foreigners as the audience. This led, of course, to the question, why are we making art? And for whom?”

This frustration led to a few key works that paved the way for his later paintings. “Participating?” (1996) appropriated a generic textbook painting with slogan, in Mao-era dazibao, “Are you in that exhibition thats going to Germany?”. Similar was “”May I See Your Work?” (1997) — “They taught painting in my school by making students copy,” he says. “And this was a painting they made everybody copy.” In 1997 he forged an invitation letter to that years Documenta, signed “Eil Nay” and “Aoh Gnoh” (for the artist Hong Hao), and sent it to prominent Chinese art artist and critics. “Some of them didn’t think it was funny,” Yan Lei says, with more relish than regret. “I’m not sure if some – Yan Lei pointedly refuses to name names – ever forgave me. One even told people, I know this Mr. Gnoh. Hes a famous curator from Africa.”

In 1997, Yan Lei moved to Hong Kong, and these amusing anti-art-world pranks morphed into something more, a comprehensive epistemic critique of art-making itself. The same iconoclasm was there, but rather than the narrow problems of the Chinese artist, he focused on a universal issue: What does painting mean in the 21st century?

The “Super Lights” series (from 2004) overlays multiple color schemes developed in his abstract color ring paintings onto deconstructions of appropriated images. “I didnt feel I was changing my approach — rather, I was bringing my approach into painting.  Painting after all is just a mindless re-presentation of an image you might see in a photograph. The process of making that painting has become superfluous.”

The color wheel was developed by Isaac Newton as part of his research into visible light. It was Goethe who gave the color wheel spiritual and humanist associations, an approach that was made canonical in Western modernism by the work of Johannes Itten, a Swiss color theorist teaching at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany.

But Yan Lei uses the color wheel studies to show how color theory is itself phony. “Arts value system is highly arbitrary. A lot of art today is deceptive, even manipulative.”

The deconstructed color schemes in “Super Lights” come from his Color Ring series. In this system, there are hundreds of colors, and by mixing these colors pretty much endless possibilities. The effect is basically created by a very random process.”

The images in the “Super Lights” paintings come both from found images and his own photographs. He copies paintings ranging from Picassos 1905 “Boy With Pipe” (which sold for $105 million at a 2005 auction) and a work by “Congo”, a captive chimpanzee whose paintings enjoyed a brief vogue in the 1950s, to the extent of being collected by artists like Picasso and Miró (it also broke records at auction, for making ten times the estimate and as the first non-human work ever sold). At De Appel, Yan Lei copied the paintings that were removed for his own exhibition. At the Centre Pompidou, he symbolically replaced the huge Mao-like image of Georges Pompidou with a Chinese portrait painter he found in front of the museum.

The appropriations are interspersed with personal events witnessed in his adventures in the slums of Beijing’s art scene. One painting depicts artist Tang Song’s leg after a notorious incident in which he drunkenly kicked through the door of a Beijing gallery. The photographs are scanned and broken into twenty different layers to make a map of the image, much like the sheets used in “paint-by-number” kits. He transfers this to canvas and then paint is applied by his assistants, acrylic for its coldness. The colors are arbitrarily derived from the color wheel in the triptych. Yan Lei insists on using paints straight from the jar, unmixed, so as to remove the human touch as far as possible. “You dont see the intent of the artist in my work. But then again, you dont see it any work by any artist any more. Goya represented pretty much the end of the road for artists who tried to mean something.”

In these works, Yan Lei has gone beyond amusing critiques of art world politics to explore fundamental issues of art: Its relation to unquestioned hegemonic practices (Western color theory, “paint-by-number” — which was invented in 1950s America as an appropriation of “art for the people” by big business), the absorption by global capitalism of artworks as a form of tradable equity, the role of images in an age of pervasive information. And if honesty is even possible in a world of deceit, of mechanical reproductions and manipulated artifacts.

We stand by the window, in the fading winter light, in the studio Yan Lei still keeps in Langfang. His local assistant, Hong Mei, starts coloring a large canvas. She comes from the cold, stony villages around Langfang, with the ruddy face and pig-tails of the Chinese farmer. What must she be thinking?

We return to the car to drive back to Beijing for dinner. “Its all just a process,” Yan Lei says. “A way of getting through the irritating meaninglessness of making a painting.”

Is it all so bleak? “Well,” he says, smiling, “it gets me into the art world. And a certain status I wouldnt otherwise have. Did I ever say absurdity was totally a bad thing?”

Jonathan Napack

Jonathan Napack 1967－2007

Born in 1967 in New York City. From 1992-1997 wrote the “Art Diary” column in The New York Observer [newspaper]. After 1997 moved to Hong Kong to write about contemporary culture in China, Japan and Southeast Asia for The international Herald Tribune and about cuisine in Asia for The Wall Street Journal. He has also contributed to both general-interest and art magazines. He is preparing books about Beijing and about youth culture in Asia, and is currently editorial director of Ai Weiweis new China research project. Since 1998, he has worked for Art Basel as their advisor and strategist in Asia. He recently accepted a similar position with Botschaft Basel, a new art foundation.