In the artwork Music Class, Li Qing combines the diptych painting form with a steel pole installation. The two paintings depict the same scene of watching an exotic dance performance, but have obvious differences—the two scantily-clad women have been placed in different cultural scenes, one of them “elegantly” sitting on a grand piano, the other striking a suggestive pose on a pole. The piano and pole both allude to music and performance, but their very different references point to widely divergent cultural contexts, constructing the viewer’s gaze in different ways. The steel poles used for dancing have been laid out in a dense array at the entrance to this separate space, creating the visual feel of a cage. Viewers can only enter the space by passing between these poles in order to view the diptych up close. Here, the viewing subject and the viewed object begin to merge within the ambiguity of the viewing context. When the viewer passes through the pole array, they become, in a certain sense, the subject of observation. Now, the viewing subject fuses with the overall spectacle to be eternally exposed to an unknown gaze.

Mementos·Asian Scenery imitates a set of game devices on the street by means of installations and paintings, using colored fresco to depict the scenes of Asian streets as shown in the video game named Street Fighter. The game, popular around the world, is filled with imaginations of exotic cultures. Manual crafts are used to represent the keepsake significance of the virtual street scenes, making a souvenir of a daily life that has gone by.

Li Qing collected wooden window frames and other discarded lumber from the countryside to create an installation of a partial church with windows, the windows providing a view to another rural church. The installation has a strong feel of ruin, the image of the rural church itself has a kitschy beauty to it. Here, the imagery of the “window” has double meaning. On one hand, it separates the installation and the image of the rural cathedral, constructing the act of “viewing.” On the other, it creates a relationship of mutual referencing between the “ruins” and the image of the rural church, as if simultaneously dispelling the decline of the ruins and the false glamor of the object. In contemporary China, knock-off rural churches symbolize the implosive dismantlement of faith by postmodern consumer society and allude to the ideological command of capitalism over the global spectacle.

“Window” Series

“Window” Series combines paintings with real window to make a virtual view. The use of real windows gives these paintings a stronger sense of reality and drama than ordinary paintings of views. The contradiction, however, is that the falseness from painting remains and contrasts with the real window: this is a special contrast between painting and representation. The contrast lies in the illusion of neighbours’ windows looking toward each other and the foreignness of the window in a virtual scene. The psychological and cultural distance between the viewer and the view outside the window cannot be erased.

Exhibition view of LI QING: CATHEDRAL, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

Exhibition view of LI QING: CATHEDRAL, Hive Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing

In the work Human Relatives, the image of a man and a woman imitates the two primitive human beings in First Human Relatives shown in New York’s American Museum of Natural History. The garish golden color and the shrine in the back reveal a ritualization in man’s self-perception.

In The Last Doctrine—After Repin’s “Tolstoy Ploughing”, Li Qing strives to discuss the multiple rewriting and reshaping of the artwork in the socio-historical context. Leo Tolstoy was a Russian aristocrat and large landholder. His act of ploughing the fields was clearly an expression of nostalgia for the rapidly disappearing small farm, and had utopian connotations. Ilya Repin’s Tolstoy Ploughing seems to be intended to recast Tolstoy as a precursor to the social revolution. Li Qing recreated Repin’s original work in the brushwork of the Soviet School and as a sculpture, but cut the sculpture out of the painting completely, as if taking an industrial “cutting tool” to this cultural image, once again drawing nostalgic sentiments and revolutionary discourse into the spectacle of capitalist production.