Zhou Chunya’s iconic “Green Dog” may at first glance seem an arbitrary subject of artistic obsession, but it is rooted at once in Zhou’s personal life and his deep inquiry into fundamental problems of art making. From the late 1990s onwards, Zhou adopted the dog as an avatar for his exploration of subjectivity, color, expressivity and form.

The figure was inspired by his beloved German shepherd dog Heigen. Zhou first painted Heigen in a surrealistic bright green color in 1997. In 1999, Heigen suddenly passed away and the sorrow-stricken Zhou ceased to paint the series until 2001. To the artist, the green dog has become a metaphorical self-portrait: its amorphous forms and opulent colors were employed to express Zhou’s conflicting feelings of solitude and romanticism during his sojourn in Germany. In this way, the dog embodies cacophonous symbiosis of horror and beauty, death and life, tranquility and destruction.

The current oil on fan work was a gift of the artist to the current owner in 1998. In the Chinese tradition, painted fans were usually gifted between like-minded friends or from artists to patrons. There is a heightened sense of intimacy and sensitivity in painted fans. In the present lot, the disembodied portrait of a yawning dog is stylized into a nebulous cluster of green and red colors. In this simple work, Zhou explores a gamut of traditions, interpretations, and relationships between subject and object. Viewed from a distance, the work resembles a splashy abstract landscape. At the same time, the richness of colors, the raw emotion, and lack of background remind us of Marlene Dumas’ figures whose ambiguous identities, isolation, and sexuality similarly leap forth from their compositions.