Werner Büttner is one of postwar Germany’s most important contemporary artists, with a career spanning more than 45 years. Trained as a lawyer, he never spent a day in art school and became an advocate of “bad painting.” In the 1990s, nearly every Chinese painter seemed to own one of his books. Büttner taught for more than 30 years at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts, retiring only last year. His students include such “first-tier” Western contemporary artists as Daniel Richter and Jonathan Meese, the veteran Chinese artist Liang Ying, who studied with him in the 1980s, and Wang Qianyao, a rising artist born in the 1990s who has been warmly received by the market in recent years.

Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025. Photograph by Alessandro Wang. Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025. On March 22, 2025, Büttner’s long-awaited first museum exhibition in Asia opened at Yuz Museum Shanghai. Presented as a retrospective, it surveys work made from 1979 through 2023.

“For me, painting means disobedience and a spirit of rebellion—and, of course, silliness and humor,” Büttner said with a loud laugh. The day before the opening, we spoke at length with Büttner, who was visiting China for the first time, and with his student Wang Qianyao, who had come especially from Germany. We also reached his first Chinese student, Liang Ying, remotely, to hear about the teacher she remembered as young and handsome, somewhat serious yet irreverent.

Werner Büttner in the galleries, in conversation with an art snake. Before meeting Büttner in person, we heard a burst of laughter. Then the artist appeared before us in a gray suit, with vivid blue eyes and graying hair. He told us that he had landed that morning and gone straight to the museum. “This is my first time in Shanghai. Everything is new to me, and there is so much to learn and see.”

Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025. The exhibition’s title, Fool, Leave Your Hideaway, is also the name of the purple painting we encountered upon entering the galleries.

“Stupidity is a subject that interests me, too, but I find humor more interesting than stupidity.” The short-armed dinosaur in a mosaic sweater, one of the exhibition’s works, is, in his view, a satire of “stupidity.”

“In Germany in the 1970s and 1980s, all the ‘idiots’ liked to dress this way. And dinosaurs are extinct creatures. I find it funny to dress one like this,” Büttner said.

Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025. Structured as a retrospective, the exhibition brings together 46 representative works, including his animal portraits, self-portraits, portraits of women, and “parodies of art history,” along with seven wooden sculptures from the 1980s that have never before been shown in Asia.

“When you enter the galleries, you feel that the display is a bit like a carousel, as if four axles were rotating through the space,” Büttner said. He painted many figurative works in the 1980s and 1990s, when such work was not accepted by the mainstream.

“German painters my age never painted animals. No one dared to do it. I thought: ‘No. If it’s forbidden, I’ll paint it now!’” From left: Martin Kippenberger, Werner Büttner, and Albert Oehlen at the opening of “The Women in My Father’s Life,” 1983. Photograph by Franz Fischer. It was for this reason that his style came to be called “bad painting”: he broke with the established order and rules of the time.

“In a sense, ‘bad painting’ is ‘good painting.’ It means disobedience. We never do what other people want us to do,” Büttner said of the central idea behind his work. The “we” he referred to included the painters Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger. The three like-minded artists founded the League Against Contradictory Behavior, becoming the three artists now recognized as progenitors of the “bad painting” style.

Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025. The work on the left is The Iron; the work on the right is Headache. Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025. Two very early works in the exhibition were made jointly by Büttner and these two like-minded friends: The Iron, the earliest work on view, made in 1979 with Albert Oehlen; and Headache, made in 1982 with Martin Kippenberger.

His artistic career began with a three-year conversation about art with Albert Oehlen.

Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025. “This is a very private story. One night, I went home with a girl. The next morning, I discovered that several men lived there. I began talking with them, and I immediately knew that I would become friends with one of them: Albert Oehlen. He was very interested in art, and I thought, why don’t we talk about making art? So we wrote a list: What is art still missing?

“What can we do? … We talked for three years, and then we began making art.” At the time, they all felt that “painting was dead.” “Minimalism was dominant in the 1970s, but we thought it was something artists had ‘pretended’ into existence. What had ‘died’ was not only figurative painting but abstract painting, too.” Under their lead, figurative painting gradually began returning to Europe.

Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025. But Büttner’s painting is about far more than figuration. It brings together art, literature, history, and music. The works on view make this clear in numerous ways, perhaps most strikingly in his series of “homages to art history.” There are works influenced by Giacometti’s famous “Nose” sculpture; a vortex centered on the head of Thomas Bernhard; a copy of Goya’s The Abduction; and James Ensor rendered as a strange insect, among others.

Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025. Photograph by Alessandro Wang. Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025; at far left, Irreversible Enthusiasm, 2005. Whatever the subject, Büttner’s work is marked by a humor that lingers in the mind, using absurdity and satire to challenge authority.

Painting, for Büttner, begins with making himself laugh. One painting featuring an ape is particularly memorable. In it, a small sculpture of the Venus of Villanueva—one of the oldest sculptures in the world, discovered in Austria and dating back 28000 years—appears alongside a wide-grinning ape and an apple chewed nearly beyond recognition. Werner Büttner, Irreversible Enthusiasm (detail), 2005. “This painting is the story of Adam and Eve,” Büttner told us with a laugh. “There’s an apple, there’s Eve”—he pointed to the ancient sculpture—“and there’s ‘bad Adam.’” He pointed to the ape.

As for why he is “bad Adam,” it is because he has chewed the apple into this state.

“He didn’t just take one bite. He grabbed it and kept biting wildly, very excitedly.” As he spoke, Büttner laughed and mimed the ape’s enthusiastic chewing.

Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025; on the left, Run-Over Hippie in the Egyptian Style, 1988. Another work pays tribute to Picasso, who once encountered the singer Umm Kulthum in Paris. Picasso told her, “We are both the greatest artists of our time: you are an Egyptian artist, and I am a modern artist.”

“You can see a hippie run over by a guitar. You know, artists can be really rude to one another sometimes,” Büttner said with a laugh.

Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025. The exhibition’s small room contains seven wooden sculptures by Büttner. Some stand, some lie down, some crouch, and some kneel. They have nothing to do with polished craftsmanship; instead, they possess a primitive roughness and directness, even a wild, uninhibited beauty.

“Have you seen Krishna sculptures? The avant-garde art of twentieth-century Germany drew inspiration from African art. And sculptures like these are quick to make. You finish one in no time—after all, I have to take a break after working for two hours.” Büttner wore an expression that said he was not joking. The public often sees his paintings as humorous “transformations” of art history, but he says: “You have to believe me: I am more serious than anyone.”

Werner Büttner in his studio. Image courtesy of the artist. Büttner’s combination of spontaneity and exacting seriousness also appears in his working methods—and in his choice of studio. The huge black-and-white photograph on the exhibition’s first wall is, in fact, his studio: an entire old hotel in Hamburg, Germany, whose 800-square-meter ballroom the artist converted into his principal painting room.

“It was so cheap. I bought it immediately, and then I could never leave the hotel again. It’s the best thing I’ve ever bought. How happy I am, haha.” Büttner laughed. Nor does he believe that artists should work through the night. “Those are ‘stereotypes.’ Unlike other artists, I don’t sleep until noon. I get up at 5 a.m. While most people are still asleep, my newspaper has already arrived.

“For the next two hours, I read the newspaper, drink coffee, and think about the day’s work. If I have an idea, I go to the studio. Or I take a walk in nature and read a good book.” Büttner and his student Wang Qianyao in the galleries. When we asked how he felt about having taught for more than 30 years at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts and seeing his students become leading figures in the art world, he said: “I am genuinely happy for them, and I don’t think their styles were really influenced by me very much. Every artist is a very independent person. All I can do is discuss ideas with them. I would never tell them, ‘You must do this.’”

Wang Qianyao, who attended the opening, is one of Büttner’s most accomplished younger students. Recalling the years she studied with him in the Free Art program at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts, she describes the experience as warm and happy.

“He is natural, sincere, and very generous.” Büttner and Wang Qianyao at her graduation exhibition. “Our class met once a week for a two-hour group session, but Professor Büttner did not necessarily discuss our work every time. More often, he asked whether anyone had recently read an interesting book, seen an exhibition or film, or listened to good music. The atmosphere was relaxed. We would drink beer together and talk about anything related to art, making, and life. With him, you learned more about the way an artist lives and thinks than about painting techniques or the fundamentals of making art.”

Büttner also took the entire class on trips to Greece and Paris. Although the school provided each class with an annual budget for a class trip or for students’ materials, the Paris trip happened to coincide with the opening of one of Büttner’s exhibitions. He invited the whole class to attend and paid for everyone’s meals himself. Before retiring, Büttner took his students to Greece for one final graduation trip. Büttner and Wang Qianyao. Wang remembers that during the four years of her undergraduate study, they saw one another almost every week apart from holidays. She had just gone to Germany after graduating from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and was still deeply concerned with her professors’ opinions, so whenever she finished a new painting, she could not resist showing it to Büttner immediately.

“Once, he told me that his opinion represented only his personal taste. I couldn’t expect him to tell me every time whether a work was good or bad; I had to find my own path. From then on, I truly began searching for the way I wanted to make art.” Artist Liang Ying in front of her work. Werner Büttner at the Max Hetzler gallery in Cologne, March 1989. Image source: online. If Büttner had already become a kindly old man by the time he taught Wang Qianyao a few years ago, then in 1983, when he taught the artist Liang Ying, his trio with Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger had only just broken up. He was younger, more volatile, more exacting, and more sharply defined.

“He was very young and handsome then. We young students liked fashionable things, and I had seen Büttner’s exhibition before. I knew that he had lived in East Germany in his early years, and his work had made a strong impression on me. Out of curiosity, I enrolled in his class. The school curriculum included quite a few seminars, and many teachers taught in a relatively freewheeling way. Büttner, however, placed great emphasis on explanations in class and discussions with students. He was someone with very strong ideas of his own.

Liang Ying told us. Werner Büttner at the Chantal Crousel gallery in Paris, 1986. Image source: online. Installation view of “Werner Büttner: Fool, Leave Your Hideaway,” Yuz Museum Shanghai, 2025; all the works pictured are by Büttner from the 1980s. The works by Büttner that she saw in galleries outside school were extremely bold, emotionally intense, and filled with satire, conveying an irreverent and playful sense of life.

Yet when Liang spoke with Büttner in person, she sensed a powerful contrast between the artist and his work.

“He was fairly serious, and he loved literature. I think the most important thing he taught us was to maintain, always, a keen eye and a capacity for thought about the world.”