Wei Feng Analysis

Focus/Narrative/Symbolism
The focus is clearly on the bodies floating on the penis shaped aircraft that they are riding. To me the first impression I get is that this piece represents lust or uncontrolled lust. We see bodies that look like they are gyrating in sexual positions while a bull tamer uses his red cloth to tame the urge or direct it. The blindness of being held hostage to an emotion is represented in the woman in the front. There is a juxtaposition of symbols of death in the form of the skulls, the cuteness of the animals and the sexual positions everyone is in.

Composition
This leans heavily on the left and balances this by spreading out the visual interest on the right through having the cats and their parachutes go further in the distance which also creates a feeling of depth and perspective in the piece. We also see that everything is stacked on the left but it pushes our interest to the right through the motion of the bodies that all push in this one direction and our eye is kept from leaving the space by the first cat we see jumping off the giant phallic symbol and sailing in his parachute. Its important that this shape overlaps with the balloon above him. There is also the repeated shape oval shapes throughout the piece that helps connect different parts of the piece together.


Color
Color wise there are a lot of nice details throughout the piece. We see the palette is primarily a blue and red complimentary color setup and he finds a lot of variations of these colors and their adjacent colors to use in desaturated forms for the shadow shapes. For example there is a desaturated purple in the shadows of the parachute the cat uses on the far right, and we also see this in the clouds. We see a lot of desaturated blues and oranges used as bounce colors from the environment that shape the form of the phallic ship, with the blue on the top and orange underneath.

The blue is a nice high key color that pushes the forms of the bodies forward and he uses touches of blue at a similar key in some places to make it feel like the light from the sky is being truly reflected in the objects and figures. For example we see the blue is reflected and captured in the back of the machine they fly on and we also see a touch of it in the blue of the eye of the cat sitting on the end of the object. We also see purple in the clouds giving a nice contrast against the blue.

I also noticed that in the shadows of the bodies we see the sun hit a particular part of a face or body part and creates a distinct light shape and as it transitions to a shadow we see sometimes a bright spot of a different color before transitioning into the shadow color. He makes good use of bounce light in the underside of forms.

Value
When we make this image black and white we notice a few things immediately, for one although he probably painted this in color all the way through you could be fooled into thinking that he did it in black and white first because his understanding of value is so good. He does a great job of letting in these trails of light that catch your attention and suggest the forms of the bodies and surfaces it hits.

The first thing I noticed was that although the blue in the sky pushes things forward it is in actuality slightly darker than the values used in the skin tones of the bodies which is surprising. Like most paintings though the majority of this piece falls into the midrange with the darkest values being reserved for the man in black in center stage along with his cloth, the balloon and the stripes on the parachute on the right.

 He uses the lightest tones to help suggest form by creating these little light shapes on the body and faces and objects throughout the image, the lightest spots in actuality are probably in the backdrop of the clouds where the sun is hitting them.

Texture
I would say he suggests texture with the light hitting the ship form, he uses bold swatches of color with sharp shapes the suggest a metallic surface.

Ornamentation
The ornamentation here seems to be the details we see in the tattoos of the figures, the ropes and various shapes that make up the phallic ship they ride.

Juxtaposition
The Juxtaposition of life and death seems to be the key idea here, we have clear references to both sexuality and death in the various objects and people in this piece.