From his first entry into public view with “Archaeology of the Future” to his emergence as a salient figure of the new generation, Li Qing only needed three short years. This show at Iberia Center for Contemporary Art is already his third solo exhibition. In September 2006 and March 2008, respectively, the F2 Gallery in Belgium and DF2 in America showcased his two major series of works on canvas: Finding Differences and Images of Mutual Undoing and Unity . These, together with his ping-pong centered video installations, have triggered escalating levels of public interest. In all of this we cannot rule out the favorable winds of fortune: the maturation of his works came at a moment of global enthusiasm for China, during an “explosion” of the domestic art market in China. The avant-garde art which heretofore had languished in the underground, largely dependent on “rescue funds” from westerners, emerged into society’s spotlight. Exhibitions were held everywhere, and older artists were pushed into the limelight. In the younger generation, anyone who showed a bit of promise would be snapped up by a gallery, quickly packaged, and put on the market. Li Qing established his persona by way of this process, and though this happened with uncanny smoothness for him, the thick atmosphere of commerce did not engulf him. More than that, with his talent and lucid intelligence, along with his facility for marrying concept and language and his adventurously unfolding mode of serial production, he has proven, over time, that his work yet to come holds forth a certain hope for the future of Chinese art.

 

In his diptych Jester and Elvis, the King (2007), Li Qing juxtaposes a clown from a painting by Velazquez with Elvis Presley. There is considerable similarity in their features and even in the character they project, constituting an intriguing parallel. The inscriptions on the two panels read: “They say I am a clown, but I’m an artist,” and “They say I am the ‘King,’ but I’m an artist.” What is emphasized here is the artist’s inner identity, a sober and isolated self-delineation. In fact, in Velazquez’s era, even an outstanding artist was relegated to the status of jester or barber in the palace hierarchy. What is more, since Andy Warhol made his mark in the West, and in light of recent changes in China, artists have come to play an Elvis-like celebrity role. Jester and Elvis, the King seems to touch on the metamorphosis of an artist, and we can read it as an act of self-examination by this young artist in an era filled with chaos and temptation.

 

This diptych can be viewed as an altered self-portrait; at the same time, one can draw from it an overall discussion of the painter. Li Qing’s visual language often works with similitude, with forms that are similar but not identical. Using the diptych format he establishes a parallel context, displaying a merely apparent similitude. No real connection exists between the clown and the ‘King’ except an outer resemblance: similarly, Li Qing’s mode of inscription deals with an unspecified relation, with the focus on mutual reference between images, rather than on reflecting reality through an image. I think he would agree, at least to an extent, that the real world cannot be faithfully manifested through an image. For the viewer, the mutual reference constitutes a oscillating movement, just as when we read contrasting lines in a classical poem: we are released from the linear space of the here and now, to enter a world full of associations and imaginings, sufficient unto itself, which is the world of art.

 

Behind Li Qing’s ideas we can surmise the presence of René Magritte. Li’s skepticism toward language, his fondness for paradox, his forays into polarization of objects or ideas , and his habit of working permutations on a theme…all of these seem to have their source in Magritte. Most importantly, from Magritte and other masters he learned a true modernist consciousness. He does not express static objects: all the forms he creates contain a dialectical, operative process, which is the very core of modernism, and is in keeping with the ceaseless change which belongs to the cosmic ground. In physics the background of this was Einstein’s theory of relativity, which overthrew Newton’s absolutist view of time and space, pronouncing the death of a static view of the cosmos. For Li Qing reality and illusion, language and reality, play and contemplation present themselves in a state of ongoing interpenetration. “Phenomenal forms not the forms we see.” The similarity and difference of forms are two indispensable sides of the same proposition—“In actual nature no single thing is a repetition of another, but in the natural order of thought, to understand things we rely on imagined similarity.” (George Kubler, The Form of Time, New York, 1962) Or perhaps we can sum this up with a sentence from the Daode Jing: “The One engenders Two, Two engenders Three, and Three engenders the myriad things.” From this art can take its departure, working out its spontaneous reformulation of the world of representation.

 

Of course, Li is not as enamored of metaphysical propositions as Magritte was. In the words of Gombrich, as quoted by Li in a prose piece: “To make a perfect pearl, an oyster needs something from outside; it needs a grain of sand or small object, around which it can grow a pearl. Without that rigid core, the nacre may only grow into a formless shape. In order for an artist’s sense of form and sense of color to crystallize into a perfect work, he too needs such a rigid core.” Having absorbed concepts and ways of thinking from Magritte and western art, Li has filtered through them and precipitated out his own expressive apparatus which I call "ghosting". Ghosting refers to his use of diptych to present a form together with its simulacrum. This is a “rigid core” which is used to incubate pearls. This is his vessel to contain, inspect and operate on personal memory and issues of contemporary Chinese experience.

 

Li Qing’s earliest series was Finding Differences based on an entertainment often shown on television: two fairly similar pictures are shown on the screen, and the audience is asked to spot all the differences in a short time. In Li Qing’s version of this quiz, he created a series of scenes imparting subtle differences between the two panels. Afterwards, he began working on his Images of Mutual Undoing and Unity series. The gist of this series is that two separately painted canvases are pressed together before the paint is dry. The two resulting images are similar, muddled, and riddled with divergences. One could say that this format injects “performance” into painting, and that such painting is no longer an activity confined to an easel-mounted surface. All paintings done on an easel display a certain static quality, and once the paint is dry, they become fixed objects. The act of “mutual undoing” deliberately brings in random, unpredictable and even violently destructive elements into the paintings. The language is made to submit to, or perhaps join with, forces from here-and-now reality, so that painting turns into a more fluid medium. Compared with Finding Differences, the latter series is conceptually more intense. What is more, in his early productions, Li stressed the absoluteness of concept. That is, he emphasized the cohesion of surfaces to the detriment of “readability” in the pictures. Later he made adjustments in this respect, painting with an eye to the outcome and controlling the cohesion. He also tried techniques of partial cohesion, so that even after “mutual undoing” the two pictures would preserve rich and subtle differences. Having gone through this exploratory stage, he achieved impressive results in his renewed treatment of this series: Poet and His Wife (2007) and Mei Lanfang (2008) .

 

Afterwards, he transplanted this concept from easel-mounted surfaces to installation and video. In Ping-pong (2007) , the two sides of a ping-pong table were painted with maps of China and America. In the process of playing ping pong, the ball constantly picked up spots of pigment from the two maps as it went back and forth across the net. In the end the two maps grew spotted and indistinct, like diagrams altered by spontaneous, disorderly “stippling.” Or one could say that they looked like misaligned color prints. Use of Chinese and U.S. maps here reminds the viewer of early stages of “ping-pong diplomacy” and the subsequent history of ceaseless discord and interchange between the two countries: the densely spotted maps serve as a visual metaphor. After this came another piece, Training Room (2008) , in which two ping pong players, with a mirrored wall between them, each hit their own balls against the wall’s surface. This can be seen as an antithesis to the theme of “Ping-pong”: it implies that true interchange between oneself and the other cannot exist, and that all such efforts are illusions setting forth from and returning to the self.

 

Finding Differences and Images of Mutual Undoing and Unity are continuing series. They are like two compartmented boxes which into which Li Qing alternately deposits his subject matter and inspiration. In fact, in his early stage of creating Finding Differences one could clearly sense the playfulness of a youthful heart. In his paintings he erected and threw open a labyrinth where his own daily experiences were put in storage, and he lured viewers to come in and explore it. In such paintings, which have now been set aside, we can discern the contemporary setting in which a young artist lives and breathes: a child wearing a red neckerchief, a photo of a graduating class, a bachelor’s room, TV news, the moody scene in front of an apartment building, cartoon stickers along the edge of a computer screen, a sculpture in a traffic island, crowds in a park, a burning building, a tattooed girl on a dark street, disorder, freshness, this reality being rewritten by globalism which forces itself into our field of vision….yet the onward development of his art, whether in the Finding Differences or Images of Mutual Undoing and Unity is a process which increases his distance from that youthful experience . Historical memory and topical references are entering into his work, and they are gradually taking on decisive proportions. This means that his horizons have grown wider; he intends to perceive and comprehend current life as a whole. At the same time, he seeks out the underlying forces that feed into the unique temporal setting in which we find ourselves.

 

Irony and lyricism are interwoven in Li Qing’s works. Often he uses his own “language installation” to gain perspective on political incidents and ideological concoctions. In Hero's Return (2005) the astronaut, under the escort of guards, receives a warm welcome from crowds along a street. In the first picture, we notice that his bearing is stiff and he seems bewildered by the attention. It seems he has not gotten used to such grand occasions. To exaggerate a bit, his posture resembles that of a prisoner being marched along by his escort. In the second picture, he is making a sweeping gesture with his hand, as if he has gotten used to the role of “hero.” We can surmise that his life from here on out will be an unceasing series of meetings with leaders, with appearances at televised interviews, award ceremonies, lectures, and briefings. In the process he will become more practiced, assured, and eloquent, but as this happens he will gradually lose his own sense of self, until he will look in the mirror and see the typecast image of a hero. Through this contrast Li Qing deftly exposes the schismatic process of a person’s image. Yet when an astronaut really is situated in the starry reaches of space, testing the limits of human endeavor, he definitely possesses the hallmarks of a hero. However, after making his victorious return, when he sets his feet back on the ground, he cannot help lapsing into the role of tool for ideological propaganda, an image for political advertising.

 

At other times, Li Qing tries to encapsulate history in a lyrical treatment of fragments. Seizing on a telling metaphor, he “converts history into a tragic moment of joy.” (See “Between Athens and Jerusalem,” an interview with the poet Adam Zagajewski.) Thus his works often possess a buoyant, poetic mode of expression. Take his piece Mirror for example. These two paintings depict a corner of a courtyard, possibly somewhere south of the Yangzi River. In the past, it may have been the courtyard of a wealthy family. Later the estate was probably divided into separate quarters for many families. Hence the garden design was completely destroyed and no trace of the original artful garden can be seen now. Nothing but the plants - old trees, climbing vines, flowers and weeds – have managed to escape the onslaught of history. If we see the courtyard corner as a fragment of historical change, then what the artist does is to magnify a fragment of a historical fragment, a corner of a corner. Just as the protagonist in Antonioni’s film Blow-up solves a murder by details in a photograph, the painter solves a fatality that happened in history. What were these shifts that happened across time? How was the bygone world reduced to decay and oblivion?

 

What will continue to linger, and what is gone irrecoverably? The intricate and subtle amalgam of emotions and thoughts that arise when we reminisce about this period of history is truthfully captured in the “before and after” of these paintings. Interestingly, when these two pictures are placed side by side and compared, they seem to evoke a far longer stretch of historical transition than the time lapse suggested by the actual differences in their details. Here are some signs of change in the paintings: the widening crevices on the wall, the sagging of a drain pipe, the strip of tape on the dressing table, traces of a different person in the hazy mirror, as well as a window frame without a window. Wild flowers and weeds climb over the edge of the concrete plant trough, sprawling outward, just as the effect of time takes over the whole courtyard bit by bit, day by day.

 

Such imaginative lyricism is also found in Mating (2007, 2008) . Up to the present Li Qing has created four versions of this subject. In each one a China Airlines passenger jet or Chinese fighter jet is merged with an American or French passenger plane or transport plane. Unlike other works in the Images of Mutual Undoing and Unity series, in Mating the cohesion of picture surfaces does not lead to confusion of forms. We may remember that intermixture was one of Magritte’s surrealist techniques: that is, he joined two familiar objects together to form a third bewildering object. For example, the union of toes and a shoe resulted in an oddity that was neither toes nor shoe. In Li Qing’s case, through cohesion the two planes constitute a dynamic story line, anthropomorphized and associated with coitus. The different types and nationalities of planes make us think of coital partners who are different in race and physique, or who approach coitus in different roles or states of desire. This erotic theme is metaphorically extended to the different political systems behind the two coital partners, or to their cultural backgrounds and current historical realities. It would seem to be an irreverent commentary on the clashing and meshing that come with globalization.

 

Worth noting here is Li Qing’s fondness for towers and memorial plaques. Among his works we see a family picture at the foot of Huqiu Tower in Suzhou ; we see the Leifeng Pagoda of Hangzhou , the pyramids of Egypt , memorials in Washington D.C., and People’s Heroes Memorial on Tiananmen Square . We even see a spiral tower plunked down imaginatively in the “bird’s nest” of the National Olympic Stadium. Such subject matter is repeated continually in his work. Towers and memorials are grand, stately objects which convey the collective spirit and memory of a people. Among contemporary Chinese artists one thinks of Yin Zhaoyang, who is older than Li and who uses these forms as a tribute to heroism and idealism. As for Li Qing, his personal stance seems a bit more free-floating: he has no interest in rendering of these shapes within realistic scenes; instead, he uses towers and memorials to show an overlap of past and present memory, to obfuscate the outlines of western and oriental ideologies, or even to achieve a somewhat abstract pictorial effect. Even in his A Hundred-year Nail (2008) , with its testimonial content, his mode of inscription is not a straightforward recording of reality: instead, it is a jutting, looming shape of an old house that stands against demolition - it can surely be seen as a memorial to daily life and childhood memory in our era filled with rapid dislocations - transposed to a virtualized future setting where it takes on Gothic moodiness and a sense of nightmarish tragedy.

 

Incontrovertibly, since the invention of photography and the advent of modernism, the hallmark of innovation for easel-mounted painting has shifted to conceptual content. “How to paint?” rather than “What to paint?” has become the question that puzzles and energizes every artist. Even for artists that are extremely concerned with visual language and technique, concepts have a crucial function; yet in their works, concepts seem restrained or perhaps hidden in consummate ways. Perhaps perfection in current painting lies in a true integration of concept and visual language.

 

In the case of Li Qing we see a possibility of that integration. Aside from a strongly conceptual quality, his visual language shows extraordinary clarity. Gone is the academic entanglement in details, yet the details somehow come through. He possesses all the elements of an outstanding painter, and at the present juncture he has already become a representative painter of the young generation. China’s new generation is expanding its sense of self-determination and play in the field of art; it is reclaiming the privilege of artistic imagination. At the same time, it is uninhibitedly absorbing various types of cultural information. This group finds itself on the tightrope of art in a post-authoritarian society, as the opposition of ideologies fades. They live in a society of rapid transitions and universal commercialization, and they have gained a true international perspective, or perhaps I should say an all-inclusive access to information about the West. The question now is whether they can build up their own subjective mode of expression? Can they undertake the reconfiguration of our civilization which has gone through such profound breaks in continuity, instead of being dependent on fluctuating trends from the West which would only plunge them into an imitative, derivative merry-go-round?

 

October 2008

( Translated by Denis Mair )