Green flames rise from the waving grass, yearning to embrace you, Flower. Defying the earth, the flower shoots upward, the gentle breeze bringing worry or glee.

If you are awake, push open your window and behold the splendid garden full of desires.

Under a sky of azure, our sealed bodies of twenty years have been deluded by an eternal enigma.

Like the song of a bird of clay, you have been set ablaze, crinkling and curling, with nowhere to which to return.

Sigh, light, sound, vision, color - all are laid bare Suffering, waiting to bleed into a new combination.

 

- Mu Dan, "Spring"

 

When he wrote the above "Spring", Zhejiang poet Mu Dan (real name Zha Liangzheng, 1918-1977) was a representative figure of the 1940’s “Nine Leaves School” of poets. His works were lauded as “most representative of that virtually cold self awareness of modern intellectuals”. Though in the above verses we can see the lifelessness of plain narrative typical of the early stages of free-form colloquial poetry, the poem is also full of the joy and sadness of a young and exuberant sentiment. There is a certain level of commonality here with the young artist we are discussing today, Li Qing – the placement of self awareness alongside individual efforts within the backdrop of reflections on a grander philosophy and historical background, with the results also appearing simplified. Between words and images, which depiction has more potential space? Often, this is not determined by words or images themselves. What matters is, between the words and images, what the artist intends to narrate.

 

In 2002, Li Qing, then a student at the China Academy of Fine Art Oil Painting Department, set out to boldly express his most initial understandings of art, creating a standout image form, and filling that image form with deep tragic tones. This was the first clash between youthful ideals and reality. With Li Qing’s 2002 – Keen Experience , what we see is the blurry magnification of a detail. This artistic effort towards the magnification of a detail was actually one of the basic principles he had held to for some time – using a familiar subject to create a result that transcends experience to arrive at an expansion from limits to limitlessness. In his thesis paper, "Intellectual Painting – Image-making for Multifaceted Worlds", he describes it thus:

 

Post Enlightenment science and reason did not resolve the chronic illness of the human spirit as people had hoped; that illness was rooted in the limitations of the human body and life, and resulted in emptiness and absurdity in existential values. Only transcendental methods such as religion and philosophy could lead man to spiritual limitlessness, and solve the problems of death and the body and soul. Art is also one of those methods. Intellectual art uses the fabrication and illumination of multiple times and spaces to dispel the pressure that is brought on man by limitlessness and death, and to complete the expansion of the individual life. As painting is an art form directed at the eternal, it must bear the weight of this problem. ...I yearn to engage in a form of painting practice that can carry ideas and the spirit, and avoids the dead end of painting serving only as the subject of esthetic appraisal and consumption.

 

If one were to say that 2002 – Keen Experience and 2003 – 100 Years of Solitude were trials in an image language brought about by conceptual extravagance and the artist’s incompletely defined artistic philosophy, then in his later works we can clearly see the following inborn logic: the artist has discovered, within the move from the emptiness of details to the postulation of scenic realistic depiction, a more appropriate method for expressing his artistic philosophy – the linguistic conflicts from the use of more realistic methods to depict less realistic concepts results in a more shocking force. In Li Qing’s later artistic creative process, this force developed into his unique contemporary artistic conceptual language route. This conclusion, however, might be burdened with the result of coordinated limitations from his early painting forms.

 

Since the beginning, Li Qing’s artistic path has always contained this something that inexplicably lingers there: we can never tell which narrative is the realest. In fact, the emptiness of the real narrative is something that quotidian physical language is incapable of attaining. In 2004 – A Lifelike Dream and 2005 – Perching in the Snow we can see that any attempt Li Qing makes at direct recreation of experience will inevitably entail the expressive style of physical language, and this entailment comes at the price of sacrificing the independence of the “quotidian physical language”. Gradually, Li Qing’s individual artistic concepts and unique philosophy of painting language took form; he found a suitable conceptual path that lay between quotidian physics and the emptiness of transcendence. Perhaps this will become the most important temporal phenomenon of the 21st century Chinese new painting period – the artist’s individualized concepts are imbued with deeper conceptual textures, which will bring about the fundamental transformation from contemporary art’s late 20th century “formal conception” to today’s “conceptual form”.

 

Li Qing began his most important artistic period, the Finding Differences series, in 2005. In this period, Li Qing began a new phase of his studies as a master’s student. Li Qing’s focus on the details of daily life was instinctual. This instinct led him for a need for more systematic concepts with which to engage in effective organization of these quotidian details. The common sense aspect of the quotidian experience often leads people to forget it out of habit. In the conceptual world, this habitual thing can be wrapped up by “numbness”, but in the personal realm, it gets recreated through a “play” method. Because of this, Li Qing’s artistic philosophy in this period entered into a more direct proposition: how to use a “game” method to resist the “numbed” aesthetic and universal notions:

 

My Finding Differences series seems to have also started with this evasive narrative aspect. People who have played this before know that it is only a game, nothing more than a way to pass the time. My recent work has also made me feel as if I am a game creator, using an ancient labor method to painstakingly create a simple game. I would rather encounter those people who like to compare reality – they’re willing to view these pictures as a comic with only two frames, linking together different stories, or to view them as a pair of mutually verifying and disputing photographs, and to try to figure out which one is more believable – I want to encounter them like the hunter wants to encounter his prey, even placing the thoughts I have the moment that they fall into the trap as one of my greatest joys. The picture is a lens. It is not about imitation, but refraction. Within it you can see what you wish – a reverent, grand and passionate narrative that shines on the great emotions of the world or a trivial, self- pleasing and disheartened tiny sentiment that focuses on private details. The moment that the veils fall one by one, the day of siege from all sides, when something of the world peeks out from the eternal fog, that is why I love Magritte . After things settle, everything is once again a game. Only time is the true fog, just as it is for me.

 

According to Li Qing’s account, there is no massive fundamental logical difference between artistic concept and artistic language. In this simple visual game we use a Karl Popper scientific philosophy method of “falsifiability” to find the differences in two opposing and apparently similar pictures. The setup of this game is where Li Qing’s concepts enter in. People aren’t looking for the simple errors in the picture but the logic play with conceptual input and output. This implies that the relationship between the two is not one that respects the so called “original and copy”, but one where “the screen presents and the film cells move”. The second mode also implies that the self can be aroused within formal language and the conceptual system. Eventually this will lead us to part with those outmoded lofty aspirations that seem to be trying to “perfectly recreate direct reality”, which will open this new realm of thought: metaphysical points such as concepts, ideals, the limits of man, freedom and the numb reality are not about refuting the perceptual world itself, but about the role we play when we focus on games about conceptual artistic language, and about our new understanding of the nature of the role they play. No matter what, concepts do not correspond to the source of meaning for what is referenced in the image, but are things that are presented in a specific environment, things that are absolutely self-evident – at the same time they also construct the logical antecedents that allow our conceptual artistic language game to play out . These conceptual antecedents exist in the subtle differences between the opposing images. These subtle differences may manifest in the person’s facial expressions, or in the process of change in the image backgrounds. From this we can see that the facts that Li Qing focuses on might be the unease caused by the limitations of man’s internal world, the increase in man’s limitation that is caused by changes in the physical environment, the inevitability that politics will turn into a game and man’s utilitarian instinct that presents itself within the political reality .

 

The corresponding fact is that when we place artistic formal language in a limited game process in order to seek out the limitless essence behind concepts, the opposition between the act of deconstruction and the philosophy of deconstruction once again becomes the apparent proposition, though this proposition today appears to be in the process of being increasingly moderated through so called “postmodernist” methods. For this reason, the postmodernist issues in today’s art appear to be more methodological than ontological. Li Qing’s paintings use a thickly painted surface, familiar settings, perceptually up-to-date colors and seminal events within a game construct to create the formal foundation of a game, showing us a new potential in contemporary art: having gone through the idealist and humanist waves of the eighties, and after commodified and packaged contemporary art has become victorious, we will reevaluate the completeness of the painted surface structure and the potential power of detail; the result of this form of effort will not be about classicalist aesthetics or those simple modern tastes of businessmen – such as painterliness – but about sincerely facing up to contemporary visual games. For this reason, Li Qing’s painting is not a process of superficial visual translation, but of attaining a conceptual refreshing of artistic creation in the new century through the implementation of modest painting skills.

 

Li Qing’s Finging Differences series was inspired by a classic visual response training game. His doubts about painting in an era inundated with images seem intelligent and sober. These viewing methods, originally from games, open up new potential for painting. Within the various rationales of time, traces, fantasies and handcrafting, he uses handmade marks to mock paradoxical reality and paradoxical images. Perhaps what matters most are not the differences or connections between the two images, but the process of using hand painting to stack time and space. They give painting a completely different definition, bringing painting back from profound and obscure grammar and complex image interpretations into our daily game experience, and then the surface of painting, in this chaotic age, becomes equally unknowable. Perhaps this is a joke, a closed and cyclical visual trap, because we realize that within all the webs and traces of the image we cannot find a single clue or answer.

 

The above was artist Zhang Xiaotao’s evaluation of Li Qing’s art. This evaluation reveals a shared perception between the new artists about the relationship of non-correspondence between conceptand practice. Once Li Qing established his theoretical and technicalframework, he immersed himself in the limitless potential provided by this kind of creation.The audience’s game spirit and the elitist conceptual perception converge on a common goal. The entry of new philosophical concepts is no longer done through the artist’s painful process of strengthened sentiment, but through a more “intellectual” and “cold” method of moderation. Realness and its requirement of verification no longer appears worth mentioning, because the boundary between the real and the false is interpreted by a juxtaposition through the medium of the artwork. This is the core of the “intellectual” painting that Li Qing places his faith in. In his master’s thesis, "Intellectual Painting – Image-making for Multifaceted Worlds", he writes:

 

For painting, what are really important today are the establishment of value-laden image- making tasks and a poetics of image, and this requires that we find a fulcrum point in the intersection of our cultural roots and the situation of reality. For mankind, certain closely related themes such as life and death, mind and body and time and space still form the perpetual matrix of artistic creation and have numerous connections with today’s reality, creating limitless possibilities. Creating images of multifaceted worlds today is not just a possibility, it is a necessity. They continue to dispel the pressures placed on man by limitlessness and death, and extend their life.

 

Perhaps this is the most essential thing for the narrative. It is also the goal that it has always been aiming for: gaining a grasp of the past, or a domestication of the “reality. It turns the “reality” of philosophy books into an actual that is more suited to our goals and purposes. This kind of actuality might just be Li Qing’s own artistic philosophy – the creation of an interesting marriage between the search for essence and the era’s games. The depiction of the past and present along with anxiety about the future is in order to form a narrative organization of all manner of spectacles. In fact, we and the artist know from the beginning that this narrative organization contains the artist’s unavoidable subjectivity. The real conflict isn’t necessarily the surface conflict between subjective and objective; the problem might still lie within classical aesthetic concepts: the dual opposition between truthfulness and the reality that results from the image grammar “arrangement” of the narrative aspect.

 

With Finding Differences, Li Qing’s dualist image-making, regarding experience and transcendence, form and concept and games and rules, has grown stable and mature. This also indicates that his individual artistic concepts have taken root for his future related creative processes. Beginning in 2006, while continuing with this series, he also tried verifying the real world he perceived via different forms. Among these experiments, Whipped Portrait, 2006 and Images of Mutual Undoing and Unity represent a different enactment method. This type of work brings the techniques of painting into the realm of the conceptual game. The concept presents itself as no longer just a flat result on the canvas, but instead may be determined by the method in which the resulting painting exists: with Li Qing, this method of existing has become an experiment in the production of paintings. Whether it is the act of “whipping” or the act of “mutual destruction”, especially with “mutual destruction” – a making process that relies on serendipitous marking, sticking together and pulling apart – the artwork is bestowed with a more indirect mode linguistic happening, from pure classical esthetics to the postmodern act of rethinking. The artist describes it thus:

 

The works in this series (Images of Mutual Undoing and Unity) show the audience a process of two forms destroying and melding with each other, where disintegration and reshaping happen together. The changes and disintegration of the markings of the two forms imply that reality is an illusion, like so many people and events appearing in succession through history. Perhaps both the stage and the backstage are false. The famous actors depicted here are everyone’s unverifiable self; we have no way of knowing at what time our selves originated from supposition. Perhaps we completely began with supposition.

 

The toughest part is that the two paintings are lost forever. Nothing can be restored. It is like so much spilled milk in life, but it is still worth mourning. The resulting forms are but aren’t; they’re muddled, like so many of our worn memories – a form slowly emerging from the depths of memory. The world of the past is always relegated to decline and amorphousness; some things have left us, some things linger. Is that which lingers longer real? The strange thing is, everything is as expected and nothing is as expected.

 

The emergence of this process is actually the result of Li Qing’s further pondering and practice along the lines of painting language. While he is only admitting to the effectiveness of abiding to some linguistic rules, he advocates for deleting the formal position that conception holds in perceiving a conceptual game – that’s because outside of painting, conception is still in a dynamic state. This is further evidence of his search for limitlessness in intellectual painting. Through this set painting game and this process, Li Qing is taking conception beyond the self, which is thencast outside of the self. This “distancing” forms the super-experience aspect within its purity. This “distancing” is also his process of relegating language to a distance, something which is further elucidated in his later Finding Differences works. If “whipping” and “mutual destruction” are his own creative games, hen Spot the Difference is the artist using a conceptual method to “play” the viewer. In his Finding Differences – Soldiers, Finding Differences – Mao Zedong, Big Shot and Pagoda, Li Qing takes into account all kinds of issues regarding the subject of his thoughts, their political identification and political recognition, the perpetuity of time and its unreliability, surface temperament and internal sexuality, so that the subject of the game can engage in effective interpretation. This reaffirms the fact that formal language really does rely on the appearance of conception as its antecedent, for this reason, the connection between form and appearance is revealed as a definitive theme. This might be explained as a grand artistic aspiration of Li Qing’s: a reinterpretation of the existence method for every kind of phenomenon from the beginning of life to the means of discussing it, such as farcical politics (Ping-pong), exquisite gardens (Colorful Pavilion), sculptures of great personages (Two Equally High Statues), children’s games and memories (Come to Eat Cake – There are 11 Differences in the Two Paintings ) and common buildings (Little Pavilion, Ma2007), to dispel our long-held illusions about them caused by the constraints of common language.

 

When we treat Li Qing’s art as an unreal realm in our world, we are viewing his art as having the same strict delineative significance as formal language. Li Qing’s formal efforts to make his art transcend language may be connected to his own understandings and abilities, to the concept of “intellectual painting” of which he speaks. The significance of Li Qing’s art is in that it has broken formal language’s monopoly over meaning. The form of meaning can be language and it can be art. There are different forms of meaning, but the different forms all have the conceptual conditions to become meaning. For this reason, we can say that Li Qing has chosen art as his life’s faith, and that his choice of conceptualized form is his philosophical belief. In this kind of artistic practice, while cynical realism and political pop were churning out mass quantities of tiring art phenomena, Li Qing carefully pried open two precarious traps: the creation of icons and painterliness. He chose icons that everyone is familiar with, but he doesn’t set out to produce them; he conveys the ability to control the serendipity and techniques of painting, but he doesn’t set out to achieve in them; he seems to have even set out to destroy the aesthetic hopes that people placed on his painting. He could only have one goal, to use the techniques and medium of painting to turn his set concepts into a physical reality. As for “what is art?”, the artist is confident that it is a false topic that goes without saying.

 

October 18, 2008

( Translated by Jeff Crosby )