Provenance: Private collection, Denmark. Acquired by the present owner via Zhu Huiping. Huiping is a Chinese curator, who was in Denmark in connection with the large exhibition of Chinese art at the Arken Museum for Modern Art. Huiping knows this artist personally through a gallery in Beijing and also accompanied the current owner on a trip around China to visit various other artists.

Lijun is one of the leading exponents of the movement “Cynical Realism” – or “Political Pop” – which, with references to the Cultural Revolution, the massacre on Tiananmen Square and the Chinese socio-political reality, created a distinct style based on tragicomic humour and sharp irony. Lijun's works are thereby both a reflection of his personal background and the history of Chinese society in the 1990s, where urbanism and commercialism swept across the country with rapid speed – a change that in Lijun's interpretation left the individual person in a form of existential powerlessness and unable to master one’s own destiny.

The work features a refined duality: At a distance, the subject is sweet, poetic, sensual and dreamy with colourful butterflies floating effortlessly and freely over the motif. If you look closer, however, you can see that the golden, wavy structures surrounding the person are actually ropes and that the butterflies are accompanied by stinging insects. The figure, which resembles the artist's own bald likeness, seems trapped in a net, and the initial sense of ease is replaced by a more claustrophobic feeling. As if trapped in quicksand, the figure is slowly being dragged down.