Distant Echoes of Strife:

Exhibition “Interweaving” by Li Qing at Fundacao Oriente, Macao

The theme of Li Qing’s latest exhibition explores issues raised by clothing: the manufacturing of clothes, weaving as creativity and resistance, the social symbolism and civilizing effects of clothing. The artist’s ruminations on the subject drift across selected historical artworks, period photographic images and current realities of China’s export-based economy. The references bring together distant cultures and stretch across temporal epochs; this presents a puzzling pastiche that the artist seems to delight in. To thicken the narrative plot, his explorations are made intentionally ‘academic’ through visual quotations and historical anecdotes, but this also makes turgid the artist’s original visual imagination. Arguably it was his visual imagination that lured him into the theme in the first place, and this is where unpacking of the artist’s intention should start. It would be curious to know how he decided on his choice of references, how they fit into his own historical frame and what cultural milieu he speaks to. Behind the academic façade, the artist has perhaps left messages quietly embedded in this linked group of artworks.

The three sets of art pieces that constitute the exhibition have a dreamy disconnected association. They come together by argument, but they are not necessarily connected logically. Like poetry, the logic is associative, and the anchor points are images. The imagery that triggers the dream is perhaps that of the floss filling of padded jackets: goose down or cotton wool. This light and elusive substance floats with the slightest stir of air and goes up in fluffy clouds; it morphs into suggestive forms, elicits lyrical sentiments and an idle rhythm. The painting Magic makes a visual statement of the transformative experience of this material as it unexpectedly escapes the production chain within which both the material and the worker are doomed. The magic cloud of the dream billows into a map of the world, bringing into view the chain of capital and clothing production lying behind this dreamy material, and then drifts apart again. The dream reveals for a moment the economic reality of the factory worker’s predicament; but it is not an indictment, as making clothing also connects the worker to a primordial memory of female creativity.

The dream continues in the subsequent series through clouds and parachutes, the latter also an easily airborne material that ultimately descends onto the woman’s body as fashionable clothing. Finally, in the painting of a deserted landscape of a primordial couple’s habitat, the furry body hair they leave behind has settled on the ground. The dream ends with the face of a primordial man being smeared onto that of a shrouded woman.

The exhibition’s storyline presented above is linked by the imagery of a light floating substance, and the narrative sequence is retrospective, going from the realities of contemporary economic production back through to World War II and finally to an early modern anthropological imagination of humanity.

The presentation arranged by the artist takes another path, and adds another layer of meaning. It starts with a direct reference to Francisco de Goya’s A Heroic Feat! With Dead Man! from The Disaster of War (1810-1814), a series of etchings made as indictment against the horrors of war during the Spanish struggle for independence from Napoleonic France. The second group of works quotes pre-Raphaelite painter John Waterhouse’s Penelope, and the third group contains an oblique reference to Rene Magritte. Apart from a set of Chinese early modern portraiture the artist uses very little Chinese material, and it is curious that the works quoted are situated in realities quite incongruous with that of modern China.

The puzzle Li Qing presents is reminiscent of the painting games that first made his reputation. In these works he sets up simple visual puzzles to distract viewers from the narrative story that often deliver current political messages. In this group of works there is one underlying theme about war. Goya’s Wood is strewn with corpses in the original, but now replaced by discarded Christmas party dress; Waterhouse’s Penelope is of course waiting for Oedipus to return from the Trojan War; and Li Qing’s own Landing on the Isle of Desire is based on the anecdote about retired battle parachutes, based on the story of parachute fabric being developed into high fashion clothing material after World War II. The passage from a moral tale about war for independence to discarded Christmas outfit, in an age when Christmas has become the annual focus of the global consumer business, prepares the viewer for the new international sweatshops that have today replaced imperial colonialism. The video Floss’s lyrical moment is a reverie salvaged from the banality of Fordist factory production, which, in the artist’s subsequent painting/commentary Magic, gets transformed into a map of the globe’s continents. The dream world of the factory in the background of the painting opens up the woman to an imagination of the world that is in fact the map of capitalism today. Li Qing includes in this set the steadfast Penelope, whose weaving was kept inside the domain of the household; here it is possible to preserve weaving work as an act of ethics and courage. Weaving for Penelope is a retreat from the ravages of the Trojan War; it acts as a defense against betrayal. Penelope’s production remains autonomous and labour serves as a form of resistance.

The Crowns and Ladies in Hats refer to the era when the West first became the “civilizing” force in China, and foreign fashion capped the concern of the elegant set. Li Qing does not forget to remind us through his anecdote about battle parachute that the accelerated material production stimulated by war economy forms the basis of new market drive. His painting of a vitrine from the Museum of the Natural Sciences in New York shows the exit of the primordial couple, but it is a moot point whether their exit was a result of civilizing force symbolized by clothing, or caused by the eruption of natural volcanic power hinted at by smoking peaks in the background.

Li Qing’s exhibition remains a curious puzzle, however one interprets it, and its meanings are open ended. For this writer, one unresolved question is the relation between imagery from European art history and current cultural politics. The re-interpretation of historical imageries and symbolism has been a field of negotiation for modern art in Europe since the 19th century; the strategy of subsuming historical art through a unity of modern pastiche was made canonical by artists such as Edouard Manet. In Asia, especially in China today, there is again this tendency to re-use period art, but artists are taking art from a tradition very alien to China. What this signifies remains to be explained: Does this suggest that current global uncertainty and confusion in politics inevitably direct us back to the root of the modern world in Europe, meaning it is here that hints of new order and unity should be sought? Or does it reflect a new “academism” in China based on a European reading of world art, which is slowly digesting a visual language in order to absorb it as China’s new legacy? Or, might it simply imply some form of cultural schizophrenia? There is no ready answer at this moment.

Written for Li Qing’s exhibition at Fundacao Oriente, Macao

Summer, 63rd Year of the People’s Republic of China