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Sunday 16 February

Pang Maokun: The Maestro of Pictorial Anachronism

Published on: 7 December 2024

By: Hervé Lancelin

Category: Art review

Reading time: 8 minutes

Pang Maokun transcends mere appropriation of classical art. In his series Flowers in the Mirror, he transforms mirrors into critical devices that fragment our perception, creating a fascinating dialogue between pictorial tradition and contemporary digital culture.

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, let’s talk about Pang Maokun, born in 1963 in Chongqing, an artist who offers us much more than a simple revision of art history. This master from the Sichuan Institute of Fine Arts is not one of those painters who merely slavishly reproduce Western classics. No, he does something much more subversive, more intelligent, more biting.

The first thing that strikes you when you look at his work is his absolute technical mastery. But make no mistake: this virtuosity is merely a trap, a lure to draw us into a much deeper reflection on our era. While you’re marveling at the perfection of his brushwork, he’s already deconstructing your most deeply held certainties about art, time, and technology.

Let’s start with his relationship to time and image, which constitutes one of the major axes of his work. When he appropriates Leonardo da Vinci’s “Lady with an Ermine” to introduce a contemporary leather jacket, it’s not just a postmodern style exercise. It’s a sophisticated meditation on the very nature of representation, echoing Roland Barthes’ reflections on the death of the author. But where Barthes saw the dissolution of authorial authority, Pang finds a space for play and reinvention.

His “temporal folding” technique, as he calls it himself, goes well beyond simple anachronistic collage. Each intrusion of the present into the past is meticulously calculated to create what Walter Benjamin would have called a “dialectical image” – a moment where past and present collide to produce a spark of historical recognition. When Pang paints himself sitting next to the Pope in a reinterpretation of Velázquez, wearing a modern wristwatch and transparent glasses, he’s not just playing with art history. He forces us to reflect on the very nature of cultural authority and how it is transmitted through the ages.

This approach echoes Jacques Rancière’s theories on the “distribution of the sensible”, where art becomes a means of redistributing social positions and identities. In Pang’s works, this distribution takes on a particularly acute dimension when he introduces elements of modern technology into classical compositions. A QR code discreetly placed in the corner of a painting that pastiches the 17th century isn’t just a visual joke – it’s a deep reflection on how we codify and share information, both then and now.

His “Altered Carbon” series pushes this reflection even further, directly addressing the question of technology and its impact on our humanity. The metallic faces emerging from his canvases are not mere futuristic fantasies. They function as what Giorgio Agamben would call “apparatuses” – mechanisms that capture, orient, and determine the gestures and behaviors of living beings. The stainless steel masks he paints with near-photographic precision become porous membranes between past and present, between human and post-human.

The way he treats light on these metallic surfaces is particularly revealing. He uses the chiaroscuro technique inherited from Flemish masters to create depth effects that destabilize our perception. The reflections on steel don’t just show us our own image, they confront us with our technological becoming with a subtlety lacking in so many contemporary works dealing with the same subject.

This confrontation between the organic and the technological takes on a particularly poignant dimension in his augmented portraits, where smart hearing aids and steel bones pierce through synthetic flesh. These elements function as contemporary vanitas, reminding us that our obsession with technological augmentation may be just a new form of the eternal quest for immortality. This reflection aligns with Bernard Stiegler’s analyses of technology as pharmakon, both poison and remedy.

In his “Flowers in the Mirror” series, Pang develops a complex reflection on gaze and power that echoes Michel Foucault’s theories on regimes of visibility. The mirrors that proliferate in his works are not mere decorative accessories. They function as critical devices that multiply viewpoints and fragment the supposed unity of the viewing subject. The way he integrates our contemporary digital rituals into this economy of the gaze is particularly relevant in the era of social networks and compulsive selfies.

His pictorial technique itself becomes a commentary on this tension between tradition and innovation. His masterful use of oil paint, the traditional medium par excellence, to depict scenes of a hypothetical future creates a striking contrast that forces us to rethink our relationship with technical progress. Each precise brushstroke, each meticulously applied glaze becomes an act of resistance against the speed and immediacy of our digital age.

Look at how he treats drapery in his contemporary portraits. The precision with which he renders the folds of a leather jacket or the reflections on a pair of modern glasses rivals the treatment of fabrics in Renaissance paintings. But this technical virtuosity is never gratuitous. It serves to create a complex dialogue between past and present, between traditional craftsmanship and industrial production.

The poses he has his models adopt also deserve our attention. Their apparent casualness hides a meticulous choreography that references great portraits in art history while subtly subverting them. A young woman consulting her smartphone can suddenly evoke a Madonna and Child, creating a temporal short circuit that makes us smile while questioning our new forms of devotion.

His “Folded Portraits” series pushes this reflection on time and identity even further. By literally folding pictorial space, Pang creates temporal collisions that go beyond mere style exercise. These folds recall the concept developed by Deleuze in his analysis of Leibniz, but applied here to our contemporary experience of time and space. Each fold becomes an opportunity to reveal the layers of meaning accumulating in our visual culture.

Pang’s night scenes are particularly revealing of his ability to merge different pictorial traditions. His nocturnal urban landscapes, bathed in the artificial glow of streetlamps, create an atmosphere that owes as much to Rembrandt as to film noir. The robot dog he sometimes places in these scenes, confronted with primitive obstacles like piles of rocks, becomes a powerful metaphor for our contemporary condition, caught between technological ambition and natural limits.

What makes Pang’s work particularly relevant is that he addresses these complex questions without ever falling into didacticism or facile solutions. His irony is always in service of a deeper reflection on our contemporary condition. When he introduces elements of modern surveillance into scenes inspired by religious paintings, he’s not just modernizing old images. He forces us to reflect on the persistence of certain structures of power and control through the ages.

In his group portraits, Pang excels at creating compositions that play with our expectations. He often uses light reminiscent of Vermeer’s interiors but applies it to contemporary scenes where characters are absorbed in their screens. This juxtaposition creates a distancing effect that makes us aware of our own social behaviors.

In his nocturnal scenes, the glow of smartphone screens replaces the candle of old paintings, creating chiaroscuro effects just as dramatic but charged with new meaning. These contemporary light sources become temporal markers that anchor his works in our era while dialoguing with pictorial tradition.

The way Pang treats space in his compositions is equally remarkable. He often uses architectural structures reminiscent of Flemish painting interiors but introduces elements of contemporary design that create fascinating spatial tension. These hybrid spaces become metaphors for our own position, straddling different eras and cultures.

His use of color is equally sophisticated. His tones are often more muted than those of the old masters he cites, creating a slightly melancholic atmosphere that perfectly suits his meditations on time and change. But he also knows how to use vivid colors when necessary, particularly in his representations of screens and technological devices that punctuate his compositions with their artificial glow.

The references to art history in his work are never gratuitous. Each visual citation is carefully chosen for its ability to enrich the dialogue between past and present. When he reproduces the composition of a famous painting, it’s not for lack of imagination but to create a temporal bridge that helps us better understand our own era.

This approach echoes Giorgio Agamben’s reflections on contemporaneity. For Agamben, being contemporary means maintaining a particular relationship with one’s own time, both adhering to it and maintaining distance. This is exactly what Pang does in his work: he is deeply of his time while maintaining a critical distance that allows him to reveal its blind spots.

His treatment of textures is particularly fascinating. The way he renders metallic surfaces, glass screens, modern synthetic fabrics demonstrates not only exceptional technical mastery but also a deep reflection on materiality in the digital age. Each texture becomes a commentary on our changing relationship with objects and materials.

The recurring presence of technological devices in his works is never anecdotal. Each smartphone, each screen, each gadget is painted with the same attention to detail as the symbolic attributes in 17th-century vanitas paintings. These objects become the new memento mori of our era, reminding us of the fleeting nature of our technological innovations.

The expressions of figures in his portraits are also worthy of attention. He often captures his subjects in moments of distraction or absorption, creating tension between their physical presence and mental absence. These expressions sometimes recall the meditative figures of Georges de La Tour, but transposed into a contemporary context where spiritual contemplation has been replaced by digital absorption.

Pang Maokun maintains a perfect balance between innovation and tradition, between respect and irreverence, between classical technique and contemporary vision. He shows us that oil painting, far from being an outdated medium, can still speak to our contemporary condition with remarkable acuity. His work reminds us that the most relevant art isn’t always that which most brutally breaks with the past, but that which knows how to establish a fertile dialogue between eras. In a world obsessed with novelty at any price, this lesson deserves to be pondered.

Reference(s)

PANG Maokun (1963)
First name: Maokun
Last name: PANG
Gender: Male
Nationalitie(s):

  • China

Age: 62 years old (2025)

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