I

 

Despite his recent breakthroughs in artistic language, the style of Li Qing’s art did not become defined until the series of works “Let’s Find the Difference.” Since 2005 or so, he has been working continuously on this series.

 

As we all know, “Let’s Find the Difference” is a program of a type which frequently appears on television. In this type of program, two very similar pictures are shown side by side on the screen, and the audience are asked to spot the differences between them in a short time. We have all played such games when we were young. The only difference is that they are now played on television with an award to the winner of the game. Li Qing adopts the format of the game and creates a series of vignettes of contemporary life. Hidden in the nuanced differences between the paired pictures is precisely what the artist wants to tell us. Or we could say that the artist has camouflaged himself, waiting to meet the viewer in the paintings. Architectural similarity is the underlying design principle of a labyrinth. Every track, every corridor, wall and corner resembles one another. One easily loses one’s way amongst the features that are hard to tell apart. The sense of confusion and disorientation also poses challenge to the pathfinder’s intellectual and emotional strength. The characteristics of architectural labyrinths are cleverly employed by Li Qing and applied to his pictorial labyrinths on paper. More importantly through his careful designs, the viewer is led to feel somehow split and disoriented by the images. Like a fork in a garden path, these images lead us onto different side paths. In the original game of Spotting the Differences，the paired paintings share the same space and time.

 

In other words, these images of reality are concurrent. The game designer alters the details here and there to create some differences between the pair. Naturally the more the alterations can deceive the eye, the better the design. Li Qing’s works retain some of the stunts of the game, but they are a whole lot more than a game. He exercises the art of estrangement between images. By making the images contradict one another, he tries to lead us to reconsider the nature of reality and its features of deception, absurdity and hollowness. In the nuanced details of Li Qing’s art we are struck by a tremendous narrative tension. Thus his paintings serve both as games and as satires.

 

But they carry an even more important and essential significance, that is, to contemplate and question the fundamentals of pictorial language. In modern art, this theme can be traced back to Belgian artist René Magritte; whereas in the oriental tradition, it has been there as a kind of “proto-”consciousness.

 

At the early stage in the development of the series, the subject matter leaned toward concerns of everyday life. But the twelve diptychs in this exhibition focus deliberately on historical memory and current news events. In other words, having found a mode of artistic expression, he now wishes to release his artistic energy in more depth and breadth. To an extent, this new direction takes away some of the pleasure to be gained from viewing art about the mundane world. As Vladimir Nabokov puts it, “Nothing is more exciting than vulgarity.” (“On Lolita”) In the paintings excluded from the exhibition, we can clearly see the contemporary environment in which the young artist lives: group photos of graduates, a bachelor’s room, television news, the run-down street in front of his apartment block, cartoon stickers around a computer screen, sculptures along a street, flames, tattooed teenage girls idling on the street at night. These help to draw attention to our chaotic, fresh reality which is now being transformed by the process of globalization. Perhaps the development of this art can be seen as a process of distancing from real life. By bringing a historical dimension into his works, not only does the artist’s vision become broader, but the ins and outs of contemporary life also get a chance for further delineation.

 

Dividing this exhibit’s subject matter mechanically by category, we can view “Hero’s Grave,” “The Concubine Zhen,” “Eminent Monk” “Pagoda,” “Chairman” and “Bright Mirror” as treatments of historical memory. Contemporary life is touched upon in “Hero’s Return,” “Assembly,” “Hillbilly” and “Soldier,” with a focus on politics and fashion. “Slot Machine” and “Self Portrait” are concerned with personal life and autobiography.

 

II

 

“Extra work brings us extra pleasure.” Augustine’s words reveal the gist of game playing. Indeed, our arts and literature often content themselves with surface descriptions of reality. Burdened with the weight of morality, they find it hard to equate art with games. But an aesthetic game is like an adventure in a maze. Its function is spiritually, psychically regenerative. One may imagine the audience being seduced initially by a reward. Once their curiosity is satisfied, they may begin to wander away from superficial differences without realizing it. They may begin to delve into the problem of “Why are they different?” In other words, the act of seeing is led astray—into an intellectual dialogue.

 

While Magritte’s paintings are snapshots of unlikely events, Li Qing’s works are fragments of everyday life and historical events, such as heritage sites, television news reports, sculptures in the street, old photographs and so on. But the paintings about them share one tendency—they go beyond the gratification of narrative urge. In their works, phenomena are captured for the purpose of conveying metaphysical ideas and concerns. One of Li Qing’s earlier sets of works depicts a scene by a pavilion in the park. In the first painting, the photographer and the girl on a set of steps, assuming a similar posture, gaze into the distance. Another man and woman are shown to be sitting apart on the grass. In the second painting the man has stood up, touching the woman’s shoulder with one hand. The difference in this minute detail seems to trick our senses. The time in this section seems to have run ahead of the other painting. It could be a few seconds, a few minutes or even a few hours ahead. In any case, the situation is no longer the same. But apart from this detail, the scenes depicted in the two paintings seem to be happening at the same time. Once we are aware of the temporal disparity of this detail and return to look at the photographer and the gazing girl again, we begin to sense a hint of sluggishness in them. They appear to exist beyond time. On a second reflection, doesn’t time slip by imperceptibly in the acts of photo-taking and gazing? Don’t they make people oblivious of the environment around them? Or if we take a very different perspective, we can also interpret the detail of the couple sitting on the grass as a reflection of the man’s fantasy. While talking to the woman, he was actually fantasizing about having more intimate contact with her. In either case, a sense of estrangement looms out of the images.

 

Perhaps the work “Eminent Monk” can be seen as the climax of the series in this game. In the first painting, the eminent monk Li Shutong is aged and his face wears a sorrowful expression with eyelids downcast. The second painting, in contrast, depicts a middle-aged monk, eyebrows relaxed and looking radiant and cheerful. Anyone familiar with the life of this eminent monk would have known that his last words before he passed away were “Joy mingled with sorrow.” This set of paintings is undoubtedly a pictorial interpretation of these words. But the effect of such a literal treatment of a consummate philosophical state—in which all flavors and experiences of life merge harmoniously into an integral whole—takes us by surprise. The two distinct expressions of the monk at different phases of life seem to split the integral whole into two contrasting parts. It is as if to suggest that far from the serenity on the surface, deep down in the monk’s inner world there is still an ongoing dialectic or struggle between the different sides of the saint’s ego.

 

In these works, Li Qing is like a spy lurking in the labyrinth constructed with realities and memories. He pops out surreptitiously to lift the curtains that separate the inside from the outside, and the true from the false. The identical parts of the diptychs are in some way like the walls, corners and tracks in the labyrinth. They are nothing more than camouflage, waiting to be penetrated or seen through. Once you identify the camouflage, the artist will then reveal to you the “ true nature of things” shielded behind it. By spotting the differences, the viewer is able to penetrate layers of blockades in real life and head toward the exit of the labyrinth. But be aware! The so-called “ true nature of things ” is an image that has been separated out from reality by the artist himself through his effort of spying and identifying. It is a metaphor of truth, rather than truth itself. All images are tied with a specific subject matter. They become different facets that constitute the labyrinth. Through these estranged images, the artist attempts to reveal his understanding of truth to the viewer. By doing so, he tries to encourage us to exercise our intellectual imagination.

 

III

 

The dimension of time lies at the core of all artistic expressions. The pagoda in “Pagoda” can be read as a symbol of time. The dilapidated pagoda in the second painting testifies to the passage of time. People having their photographs taken in front of the pagoda have changed. Their clothes and expressions also suggest the change of time. In “Self Portrait,” the scars on the face seems to record the psychological history of the young person in the portrait. For me, the most delicate and poetic treatment of the passage of time can be fount in the work “Bright Mirror.” This may well be the most flawless pair of paintings in the entire series.

 

These two paintings depict a corner of a courtyard, possibly somewhere south of the Yangzi River. The courtyard is visible just behind a partly open door. The door has probably fallen into decay and has fallen open. Perhaps the walls of the courtyard have already collapsed and it is now open to view, bounded only by a stretch or wire fence. In the past, it may have been the courtyard of a noble wealthy family. Later the estate was probably divided into separate quarters for many families later. Hence the garden design was completely destroyed and no trace of the original artful garden can be seen now. The flower platform is demolished, and carved lattice windows and doors were discarded during the “ Destroy the Four Olds ”campaign, or probably used as fire wood and burned to ashes. There could have been a well in the courtyard, but it was sealed after someone committed suicide by jumping into the well out of desperation. It would not have been sealed to commemorate the dead, but to avoid inauspicious influences brought about by the tragedy. The courtyard has already lost its old charm. Nothing but the plants—old trees, climbing vines, flowers and weeds—have managed to escape the onslaught of history. They seem to bring back the memory of the old days.

 

The formal arrangement of this pair reminds me of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow Up. 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 the film solves a murder that happened in a park by the details in a photograph, the painter solves a murder case that happened 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.

 

If we use mirror as a metaphor, then the corner of the courtyard is a shard of mirror mottled by dirt and scratches. The image reflected by it appears distorted and fuzzy, yet at the same time, its reflection of the traces of time cannot be clearer.

 

Ⅳ

 

When images betray our vision, not only are they pointing out the illusive nature of reality, but also rebelling against painting as a way of expression. As we all know, painting as an expressive language is full of falsity and misconceptions. It is not an entirely trustworthy medium. In his famous work “The Treachery of Images,” René Magritte pits images on canvas firmly against reality. Li Qing is undoubtedly influenced by this idea, but he prefers a relation of seduction, rather than irrevocable rupture, between images and reality.

 

“View borrowing” is an important principle in Chinese garden design. Using a window to borrow the shapes of trees, using a pond to borrow the light of the sky, using a pavilion to borrow the scene of distant hills, all these methods allow us to achieve unlimited enjoyment within a confined and limited space. In a sense, gardens have the characteristics of labyrinths. In Jorge Luis Borges’s fiction “The Garden of Forking Paths,” his imagination of a labyrinth-like Chinese garden serves to tie together different times and settings. This series of Li Qing’s works remind me of the idea of view borrowing. He uses principles of a game to accommodate all possibilities of history and reality in his paintings, and endow them with a spiritual dimension. On the one hand, the artistic format reflects the artist’s wit and mischief, sensitivity and reasoning capability. On the other hand, it also replaces the uncompromising, almost violent attitude of Western Surrealism with a gentler Oriental one. In his latest series “Images of Unity through Mutual Undoing,” we will see even more radical and creative reflections on pictorial language from the artist.

 

As we know, the beauty of labyrinth lies in its difficulty. Intellectual reasoning provides artists with a way to surpass themselves. The path is full of treacherous diversions, dead ends and fortuity. Perhaps he had thought over the issue carefully when he decided to follow this path. Or perhaps the outcome is hidden in his works Pinball. When I asked him what a number shown on the pinball board signified, he replied,

 

“Yes, it means scoring. If you press the button, the light will start to turn and gradually come to a stop. If it stops at some points, the machine will spill out coins. At other points, you get to play a few more rounds. But at most points, you get nothing. ”

 

August 2006

Tr. by Philip Tinari and Denis Mair