Preface :

With virtual images covering the real world, our perception will be submerged in the super whirlpool it has generated. In an age of visual power, "viewing" is a collective cultural proposition, as well as a way to test and temper one's self-cultivation. As Li Qing himself said, "When everyone says that the world is flat, I think it will be more meaningful to find differences on different sites and restore the world with our very body and eyes."

With excellent painting skills, Li Qing is not satisfied with traditional paintings. Instead, he has been trying to expand the conception of painting. In his "Find the Differences" and "Mutually-Ruined Yet Unified Images", the two series which he has been devoted to for many years, the couplet dual images form a twin mirror- image effect. The images, in mutual erasing and fusion, are expressions of the stream of time and memory, tension and ambiguity, and thus further shaped the subjectivity of the audience. He sensed that "the audience's viewing is actually defined by different interfaces", which involves multiple factors such as religion, commercial civilization, ideology and technology. In recent years, he has been taking old windows as the core component to combine paintings with objects, devices or images. Such an architectural visual effect contains and reflects more historical and geographical information.

"Self-Cultivation", the theme of the exhibition, is borrowed from the title of a book by Russian director and theorist Stanislavsky. Many works on exhibition are also drawn from films. By juxtaposition of simulacra, Li Qing reveals the absence of the original and the truth. Here, excessive derivation of visions is actually a mirror reflecting the crisis of consumer culture.

Text: Zhuzhu

August 2019