A little more than two months ago, on a freighter sailing from China to Spain, a small cargo container placed in the ship’s dark, crowded hold went through the long, slow voyage in anonymous silence, sealed off from sky and sun. Finally it arrived on the distant shore of the Atlantic, and after clearing customs was allowed to be shipped by highway to its destination—the Thomas Art Center. Within the cargo container there were big and little boxes, each of which was probably lined with a layer of impact-resistant material, and inside of that were the works to be exhibited. They would see daylight again within an exhibition hall, and they would be lit by floodlights as if on stage, placed according to a carefully devised layout, to be gazed at, praised, or criticized by viewers. Upon conclusion of the exhibition, some of them would perhaps remain in Spain, and the others would embark on another voyage.

 

These little events constituted the background story of the exhibition, and what is more, were themselves an enactment of the theme of being “Drift.” For Li Qing, the great volume of Chinese-made articles shipped and distributed to various places in the West, to be consumed and used and, having been used up, discarded—in other words, goods caught in the intersecting contexts of post-colonialism and consumerism—for a time leading up to this exhibitions were one of his main inspirations. However, in the course of his creative work, he finally put aside sociological explorations (though retaining a fitting amount of social information) in favor of “adopting the standpoint of things” and re-enacting the traditional aesthetic trope of treating objects lyrically. Perhaps we can characterize what he has done this way: an overcoat of consumerism, a countenance of playful expressions, and a heart of mono-no-aware[1] constitute this exhibition as a whole.

 

I.

 

Though not a story, it has a thread similar to a story. At the entranceway two supermarket shelves are set up facing each other, each stocked in an orderly manner with the same items. The two shelves constitute a mirror image, but as viewers begin picking up items at will, the orderliness and mirror relation of the shelves is ruined. This interactive scheme is captured live, perhaps emphasized, on two facing video monitors. Next to these is a diptych of paintings about a “claw crane machine.” This arcade-style game machine is often placed at doorways of stores. Within the glass case are little gifts that look like pieces of consumer bait. Consumers who walk by this machine fortuitously in the course of shopping may stop to try their luck. Here in the first section of the exhibition, this piece “Erosion” is like a facsimile of our daily life as consumers, and at the same time it hints that objects are being set “adrift.” By whim of a consumer’s hand or a mechanical claw, objects are made to shift places. They leave the space where they were jointly displayed in their packaging and offered for sale. They enter the consumerist process of private ownership—to be used and discarded—which is also a process in which objects are shunted about, depleted, and eventually effaced from the everyday human world. This process can be long or short. Take a can of cola, for instance: perhaps by the time one leaves the store, its contents will have already been consumed and a naughty hand, before carelessly tossing it into a trash bin, may have crushed it into an ugly, flattened shape. Just like that, the buyer parts from it forever.

 

If the consumer buys a refrigerator, the length of time before saying goodbye will be much longer. It may be a just few years, or the wheel of seasons may turn many times, but when the refrigerator begins making odd noises, when it can no longer pump out drafts of cold air, it will be thought to be no better than a detestable skin-growth, taking up space for nothing, and will be purged from the household. Compared to cola, a refrigerator’s fate seems much more fortunate: in the system of consumption there is a fundamental, perfectly simple law, namely, that the higher a thing’s price is, the longer it can be expected to exist in the human world. To put it another way, an item which possesses greater use-value and wear-resistance can be sold for a higher price. However, we can recall here Baudrillard’s reminder in The System of Things that articles produced in today’s consumer system are not as durable or long-lived as traditionally produced articles. Assembly line production intends for articles to meet an early “death.” Their existence is to be what Baudrillard calls a “brief synchronous state,” so that people can buy and consume again, as soon as possible. In other words, the length of time during which things can be tossed about in the human world is getting shorter all the time.

 

Refrigerators are the presiding entities in the exhibition’s second section. Yet here, aside from the piece “Fontana’s White,” refrigerators do not appear as physical objects. Rather, they are transported into the two-dimensional space of Li Qing’s paintings as “lexical items” and are given expression, from various angles, within the context of his linguistic forms. Among them, carrying forward the consumerist atmosphere of the exhibition’s first section, is “A Pretty Piece of Merchandise”: this canvas shows a cute toy refrigerator, pink in color, stocked with little imitation food items. However, if we understand this as a strategy adopted by consumerism, whereby each person is subliminally indoctrinated starting in childhood, this image will not be as simple and charming as it may appear on the surface.

 

“Finding Differences • Refrigerators” adopts Li Qing’s customary form of playful juxtaposition. This gives viewers the pleasure of spotting differences in detail, but at the same time it shares a deeper purport with them. Unlike earlier works in the “Finding Differences” series, here the differences in detail are clarified directly in written words. Words are fit into the visual composition—which takes the form of a cut-away diagram—to annotate little stories of what is happening in the refrigerators. At the same time, the intention is to give a visual definition of refrigerators in their own right. A refrigerator is not just a thing, it is a thing that stores other things. As a space it is a kind of modern root cellar. With low temperature conditions and airtight seal, it preserves the freshness of edibles for as long as possible, in order to meet human needs. Furthermore, the refrigerator’s reason for being relies wholly on its specific storage capability: in order to keep food from rotting, it must remain in a never-ceasing state of operation. In other words, the prolongation of freshness for each food item comes at the cost of wear and tear on the refrigerator itself, and the shortening of its lifespan. In our daily life it remains in a static state, noiseless and unmoving as it occupies one corner of kitchen or living room, slavishly silent and accommodating, yet serving us around the clock. All this time stealthily proceeds towards its own terminus.

 

By making refrigerators the main subject of his paintings, Li Qing “compels” viewers like us to concentrate our attention, to re-evaluate objects which we can have contact with at any time, and which therefore may not seem to exist at all. His “Fontana’s White” looks like a parody of the Italian artist’s famous work, but when viewers draw near this “canvas,” they are shocked by a draft of cold air from a crack in the surface, causing them to realize the presence of a hidden refrigerator within the frame. This seems like a touch of cold humor on the refrigerator’s part, protesting our habitual neglect of its existence.

 

He goes further in “White Group Portrait,” where he attempts to confer the dignity of existence upon a group of discarded refrigerators. They stand erect in an overgrown corner of a courtyard, with the texture of boulders and the solemnity of memorial plaques. But in “Black Group Portrait,” the refrigerators and their reflections evoke associations of a waterside building complex in a city at nighttime. The background color of the sky gives an effect of a contrived backdrop, setting off this corner of deathly stillness full of revenants. The doors of these old refrigerators have fallen off, exposing the shelves inside with objects still heaped upon them. They are like the interior of an old-style residence building, exposed by a cutaway view, where every floor is filled with the disorderly accumulations of traditional life. Only in partial areas do the dazzling colors of modern life appear, but with respect to the whole space these partial touches seem quite disharmonious, or even illusory. In these paintings we see that through contemplation of objects, the artist can present a new view of the conditions of our own existence.

 

In these painted works, we can also trace a change in his personal language. Compared to the self-contained delight he once took in brushwork, or the pleasure he took in painterly values for their own sake, the language appearing here gains force by the unusual degree to which it is congealed. It highlights the texture of things themselves, and it highlights their existence. However, this is not presented as a simple strengthening of representation. In fact, as we can see in “White Group Portrait,” it presents itself as a synthesis of language techniques: “hard-edged” drawing, flat areas cleared by the scraping knife, and brushwork rich with inscriptive feel. These are juxtaposed, kneaded together, and effectively used in shaping objects.

 

In the entryway to the third section of the exhibition, there is first of all another diptych: “Finding Differences·Clothing Store.” The varicolored garments in the laundry seem to further play out the earlier thread of consumerism, but upon entering the inmost exhibition room, one finds that a pensive, illusory tone rules the space. Dozens of old quilted garments have been cut open, and downy feathers are being blown about by an electric fan, manifesting the effect of willow floss floating in mid-air. Corresponding to this, a video screen on the wall plays a short film about a down-garment factory. In scene after scene, no workers appear in the film, so downy feathers play the role of protagonist. They float about within the large glass enclosure of the factory’s down separator; they float in mid-air through the workshop or along the floor; and sometimes they stick to leaves of trees in the factory yard, or to window sills. When a jet of steam issues from a pipe in the factory, they puff along with it, carried out of their own trajectory.

 

This section is like a hallucinatory slice of life taken from deep behind the scenes where goods are being produced industrially. As magnified objects, the downy feathers are deliberately linked with natural scenes and cultural memory, and the chain of metaphors extends from there. As traditional object of aesthetic appreciation, bits of floss floating through the air in spring were quite likely spark lyrical daydreams. However, in their most moving historical uses, bits of floss were often taken as imaginary avatars of uprooted wanderers or women who sought their faraway lovers in dreams. In other words, objects still occupied a subsidiary place, where they were viewed anthropomorphically, and where lyrical subjectivity could project its emotional activities onto them. Contrastingly, these works by Li Qing attempt to efface subjective consciousness to the greatest extent possible, so that down feathers take the place of persons and become the subjective, lyrical center. What is more, by means of an industrial, modern setting, the thematic expression of being “adrift” is distanced from its traditional texture and mood, yet at the same time allowed to echo it.

 

II

 

After giving this personal cicerone-style rundown of the route through the exhibition rooms, perhaps I should still venture a few surmises about remarkable features that to me seem fraught with paradox. For example, shelves: in the first section they appear as physical objects in “Erosion.” Then they give inner structure to images of refrigerators. In the paintings of refrigerators, the interior view showing food items ranged on separate shelves is obviously a focal point for Li Qing. At the same time, in the diptych “Finding Differences·Clothing Store,” shelves in altered form take up a large area in the distance. One could say that shelves in one form or another run through the creative typology of the whole exhibition. So what does this signify? First of all, shelves are the stereotypic means of displaying objects in consumer society. Or one could say that for young Chinese born in the Eighties like Li Qing, the shelf has been the stereotypic way of coming in contact with objects. The background of agricultural society has gotten progressively more distant, and scenes of harvesting crops in a natural setting become no more than glimpses along a travel route. Grains, fruits, and cotton textiles are converted by factory processing and packaging: only then do they appear on shelves. Perhaps this can explain how the image of shelves figures in an exhibition which explores “things.” For the artist, shelves have become an undeniable formal element in his memory of things. Aside from that, as a concentrated embodiment of orderliness, shelves are in a relation of tension with the exhibition’s theme of being “adrift.” Shelves in a formal sense can be taken as a structural metaphor for the space of modern society. The potential of such a metaphor is cleverly applied in “Black Group Portrait.” Likewise, its presence in the exhibition’s first two sections accentuates the contrasting effect of being “adrift” in the third section.

 

Another paradoxical point is that the more he emphasizes material existence in his descriptive personal language, the more this is offset by the seeming illusiveness of materiality. The Italian writer Italo Calvino once distinguished two opposing, competing tendencies of language: “One tendency works to make language like a cloud, or one should say, like motes of dust, or one should say, like a totally weightless factor hovering outside of things like a magnetic field. The other tendency works to give language gravity and density, with the concreteness of things, bodies, and feelings.”[2] Obviously, Li Qing has chosen the latter, unlike abstract artists who opt for lightness that “hovers outside of things like a magnetic field.” Nor does he take the approach of Gerard Richter, who addresses his themes by throwing language out of focus and “making it like a cloud.” All in all, Li Qing has achieved startling effects, at least in the few outstanding works of this exhibition. Perhaps in fundamental terms this can be categorized as a successful infiltration of subjectivity—felt as an oriental aesthetic of emptiness—into objective entities.

 

August 2010

Tr. by Denis Mair

 

 

Author’s Notes:

 

[1] Mono-no-aware (literally, “sad awareness of things”) is a Japanese aesthetic principle which also embodies a view of life and death. It points to subjective awareness which seeks “instantaneous beauty,” and does not hold back from “seeking eternal stillness” in the instant of transitory beauty.

 

[2] Quoted from Italo Calvino’s “Memo on the Future Literature of the Next Thousand Years.”