李青 Li Qing

Li Qing : EAST OF EDEN
Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin
July 9 to August 22, 2020
Li Qing's first solo exhibition in Germany, EAST OF EDEN, focuses on the cosmopolitan ideals manifested in different periods, different classes and different groups of people in China's urban and rural modernist movement through a series of interesting fragments, especially the public consumerism and society's hypocritical stances on beauty ideals since the 21st century. Among them, different concepts, ideologies and aesthetics collide and conflict, forming a mixed cultural landscape. This theme also forms a kind of intertextual relationship with the history of East Germany and East Berlin where the Galerie EIGEN + ART is located.

Exhibition view of Li Qing : EAST OF EDEN, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin

Documentary on Li Qing’s creation 2020

<Neighbor’s Window> is an important series of Li Qing's works. He combines the solid window frames on the demolished buildings in the urban renewal with the landscape paintings out of the window, creating a virtual interaction between the audience and the landscape. This virtual neighborhood connects the micro daily life with the macro history, and also brings a kind of personal memory with traces into the narration of urban history.

Exhibition view of Li Qing : EAST OF EDEN, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin

Architecture is an important theme of the series. The landscape in comes from the Sino Soviet friendship building (Shanghai Exhibition Center) built in the early stage of socialism in Shanghai and the sculpture in front of it. The two parts of collages, one is the simplified symbol of the building in the commercial advertisement, the other is the advertisement of a fitness organization, The individual's demand for shaping his own body is in contrast to the socialist style sculpture which represents the collective strength.

Li Qing，Neighbor's Window· Shanghai Exhibition Center

wood, plexiglass, oil color, printed matters, aluminium-plastic panel 157.5 x 92 x 9.5 cm 2019-2020

Li Qing, Neighbor's Window · The House next to Disneyland

wood, plexiglass, metal, marker pen, aluminium-plastic panel 111 x 95 x 8 cm 2019-2020

<Neighbor’s Window · House Next To Disneyland> combines the self built houses of the farmers in the suburb of the city with the scene of the construction site of Shanghai Disneyland and the form of traditional Chinese pavilions, which embodies a kind of spontaneous in-situ architectural practice of mixed Chinese and western style.

Exhibition view of Li Qing : EAST OF EDEN, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin

Left: Li Qing, Hangzhou House No.1,

photography, 90 x 60 cm, 2017-2019, Hangzhou house series includes 56 photos

The series of photography <Hangzhou house> takes a large number of single houses left by the villages in the city to be demolished during the urban renewal and expansion in Hangzhou in recent years. These buildings (mostly nail households) are isolated from the original community buildings, forming a special and absurd sense of form. Photography is the last gaze of these buildings. At the same time, the images of these houses also become a special database, reflecting the aesthetic judgment of Chinese people on the rich life in imagination in an economic development and consumerism period, and the style of hybridity and cottage reflects a kind of local modernism architectural practice.

The design of the two wallpaper works comes from the brocade of China. This kind of fabric is a kind of decoration popular in Chinese families in the last century, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. It is also often used as a gift. The patterns on the brocade are usually landscapes from all over China, while the back shows black-and-white effects similar to negative films. The patterns of Shanghai Bund and Nanjing Road are the most international and modern urban scenes in China at that time, and also represent the collision of Chinese and Western cultures. The constant repetition of patterns highlights an ongoing debate between tradition and China's modernization achievements through "Westernization".

Li Qing, Surface Science No.3

mixed media 60 x 80 x 10 cm 2019

<Surface Science> are composed of blackboards and some ready-made objects, paintings, sculptures or landscape pictures, which are mixed with multi-layer reality and time. These objects are related to urban space, decoration and other contents. The audience can also see the symbol codes used by the artist when he creates through the blackboard window.

The unfinished modernism, anxiety about westernization, consumerism and globalization have a profound impact on today's China. The "East of Eden" attempts to discuss the relationship between history and reality, nostalgia and the future, purity and parody, truth and reproduction through different viewing paths, through the different and parallel relations between objects and images and their complex implications, and invite the audience to question the relationship between people and the changing world around them.

Exhibition view of Li Qing : EAST OF EDEN, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Berlin

Related press :

Ingeborg Ruthe. ‘Der Garten Eden des Fernen Ostens’. Berliner Zeitung. 2020.7.17

Link: https://www.berliner-zeitung.de/kultur-vergnuegen/der-garten-eden-des-fernen-ostens-li.92867

Harriet Thorpe, ‘Li Qing: East of Eden’. Studio International. 2020.8.21

Link: https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/li-qing-east-of-eden-review-eigen-art-berlin

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