NARRATOR:

The Second State, created in 1987 by Geng Jianyi, is a set of four vertical oil-on-canvas paintings, each 170 centimetres high and 130 centimetres wide.

This work is composed of four similar oil portraits of a man’s face. In each painting, the man shows different expressions like laughing and grinning. The paintings are all done in soft grey tones that are blended to avoid sharp lines or edges. The artist has painted these in a style called photo-realism, and, from a distance, these paintings look like black-and-white photos.

All paintings feature the same man from a similar perspective, showing only his face. The artist does not show his ears, and this gives a mask-like quality to the image. His face covers the entire canvas leaving a small amount of space around the edges to reveal a black background. In each painting, his forehead takes up about one-third of his face. It is smooth and without wrinkles. Not seeing the man’s hair, it is not clear if he is bald or if the hair is not visible. The man’s eyebrows are raised and scrunch together causing the top of his nose to wrinkle up. The man’s nose has a fleshy tip and is at the centre of each of the paintings. With a colour contrast effect, the nose seems to protrude from the painting. Many wrinkles are clearly depicted around the man’s eyes.

In each of the four paintings, the man has a different grin with his mouth opened wide showing a portion of his tongue. His upper teeth are neat and clearly depicted in white. These white teeth create a strong contrast with the grey scale tone of his face and the black background. The shape of the man’s mouth also varies in each painting. In one of the paintings, his mouth looks like the shape of a giant kidney bean and only a line of lower teeth can be vaguely seen. The man opens his mouth wider in two other images, looking like an inverted triangle with round corners with no lower teeth in view. In the image where the man has the broadest grin, his mouth is shaped like a huge oval so large that it could fit the fist of an adult man.

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