Li Qing：Lighthouse And Cradle

The 1st and 2nd space of Tang Contemporary Art，Beijing

Curator: Cui Cancan

September 12 to October 27, 2021

Tang Contemporary Art is proud to announce the opening of Li Qing’s solo exhibition “Lighthouse and Cradle”, held in both of the gallery’s Beijing spaces on September 12. Curated by Cui Cancan, the exhibition will showcase Li Qing’s important series “Window”, “Spot the Difference”, “Images of Mutual Undoing and Unity”, “Hangzhou House”, as well as his most recent work from 2021.

Lighthouse and Cradle

The “lighthouse” and the “cradle” come from imagery found in the works of Li Qing, and are symbols for Utopia in literature. The exhibition takes “Lighthouse and Cradle” as a starting point and point of embarkation between multiple series, as metaphors for ideals and arrival, as it takes a new look at the continuous stories that have unfolded in Li Qing’s works since 2005.

The exhibition is divided into two parts. In an architectural space rendered in the Bauhaus style, symbolizing the cradle of modern design, a temporary tent appearing like a light swaying over the surface of the sea becomes the focus, or bonfire, at the center of the two spaces. Works from the three series “Spot the Differences,” “Mutual Undoing,” and “Windows” surround the space to the right and left, becoming background noise that leads to reality. A carpet in the ruins of an old house, a kitschy Hangzhou building in a mixture of styles, faces in magazines, the artist’s travels, and two giant group portraits of discarded refrigerators draw the gaze to a circuitous, overlapping world. Here, image, sign and reality intertwine, conceal and alternate between one another.

Two worlds, one with maze-like nested chambers carrying a monumental grand narrative, the cradle of Bauhaus, and metaphors of Ilya Kabakov flying into space; the other a multilevel space connected by arches, pulsing with the drifting dust of ruins, the smooth aesthetic of reality, glossy landmark buildings, and a yellow tent like a lighthouse in the grass. Mirror images of reality and interchanging representations, the basic traits of Li Qing's art, thread throughout.

As a leading representative of the new generation painters, Li Qing’s creative thread and field of vision are extraordinarily rich. Unlike his peers, his painting no longer focuses on working within the four corners of the picture, but instead constantly expands painting’s external space and ways of seeing. In the “Spot the Differences” series, two similar pictures turn seeing into recognition. Which painting is closer to the truth? What is the relationship between painting, with its realist tradition, and reality today? Seeing and truth have become themes of our time. The questioning continues in the “Mutual Undoing” series, where two intertextual images become one in an entirely new picture. The stacked result is further from the truth, resulting in a “reconstruction” that is neither one nor the other. Reconstruction and representation point to the mysteries of painted expression, and the significance of rhetoric.

As an imagining and metaphor for the outside world, the window is the best carrier for "representation.” In Li Qing's works, window frames and lattices become part of the structure of the picture, with the wear and tear of the old windows fusing together with the paint and brushwork. Windows are the landscape of the city, carrying stories, restoring hope, dividing distances. Every window has implications of class and power. In his newest works, Li Qing no longer continues the literary character of his past works, or the discussion of time and space. The window returns to itself, referencing the existential relationship between itself, architecture and the city. The structure of the window frame forms a stark contrast with the smooth aesthetics and glossy landmark buildings of the picture. Painting has returned to reality, to a radical aesthetic.

Language never exists in isolation. The uninterrupted experimentation and sustained momentum across these various series are outgrowths of the themes Li Qing has been following since 2005: information and image in the technological age, the social mechanisms and power dynamics of seeing, the relationship between people, architecture and the city amidst globalization, the patterns and disciplining of aesthetics in the consumer age. Between the lofty towers and the swaying tent, the literary implications between the “lighthouse and the cradle” begin to fade and become the antithesis of Utopia.

Curator: Cui Cancan

1st Space

In 1919, World War I ended recently, when modernism and the avant-garde were in their infancy, the Bauhaus School began embarking on the grand dream of building a human society in Germany. Later, it became the cradle of modern design. The Bauhaus laid the foundation for a modern design system based on science and rationalism, centered on problem solving, and using modern materials and standardized production methods. With more than a century of development, the Bauhaus style of design and living concept influenced the world and become a common style in globalized urban landscape and modern life.

In 1974, during the U.S.-Soviet space race, the Soviet artist Kabakov fictionalized the lives of 10 Soviets in a book of drawings and made them into an installation as if each individual was living in this world. One of the most famous stories is about a man who flown into space from his apartment. The installation depicts the apartment resident fabricating an ejection device that sends him out of the ceiling into space, and the surviving walls are covered with posters and scientific icons and calculations from the time.

Now, in 798 Art District - the former Bauhaus factory - the artist Li Qing reconstructs the most iconic building of the Bauhaus by overlapping and fictionalizing the two stories. The walls are replaced with Bauhaus-style posters, advertisements and magazines, and the cradle in the middle embodies the indifference and rationality of the industrial style, contrasting to the feelings of infancy and intimacy.

Space, monument, modern design, suprematism, utopia, globalization, these terms intersect in birth and cradle, lighthouse and ideal. The ubiquitous presence of Bauhaus worldwide, and its "internationalized style" has become the homogeneous soul of countless cities. It eliminates differences and assimilates perceptions.

In the sky above, where the ideals and dilemmas of the modern city are born together.

LiQing，Surface Science No.4

Mixed Media 60 x 80 x 11 cm 2019

2nd Space

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The large group portraits on the left and right walls have been exhibited in Li Qing’s solo exhibition in Spain in 2010, which was aptly entitled Drift.

The refrigerator in the image, long abandoned, comes from all over the world to represent the migration of industrial civilization and modern society. They were once precisely manufactured, like a large number of Chinese processed goods distributed throughout the world, via land, the sea or air, to be consumed and used by many families. But eventually, it will be phased out once its function to "preserve" is lost. These commodities, at the crossroads of post-colonialism and consumerism, are one of the inspirations for Li Qing’s works.

The broken glass, fallen windows, and abandoned storage space are metaphors for the "mirror image" in the movie, where the drifting is the place to come and the place to return. The moment we open the cabinet, we seem to see the life of the past and the sculpting in time. The group portrait of Drift preludes to this gallery space, pointing at Li Qing’s early work, and the two sources that always go hand in hand in his works: the poetic narrative and the real senses.

Li Qing，Garden-Lighted Tent

tent, sward 180 × 350 × 250 cm 2019

The landmark architecture on the walls is aggressive, embodying a kind of reproductive ambition. The mutated bodies in acrobatics share the same spectacle as these exaggerated buildings; they are the product of a cultural desire, a demand for smooth aesthetics, and they desperately want to attract attention and praise. These Bauhaus designs are ubiquitous, from the sofa, and cabin of spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey, futuristic style, to the "aesthetic lobby" of a luxury hotel in Beijing, with its expensive paintings, its rustic porcelain vases, and replica of its cubist sculptures.

The poetic narrative and the temperament of the stories in Li Qing’s earlier works are interrupted here, as the tent is surrounded by bright electronic colors, dazzling reflective glass, indifferent and arrogant geometric forms, mixed with bootleg aesthetic.

In the modern sea of technology, rationality and industry, the tent, permeated with faint light and shadow, seems omnipotent, however, with undeniable symbolic and prophetic power. It becomes an island, a lighthouse between land and sea, between peace and danger.

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2nd Space

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