The Last Doctrine-After Repin' s "Tolstoy Plowing"
oil on canvas，frames: 74 x 50 x 11 cm x 2
fiberglass: 158 x 234 x 63 cm x 2 2013
Collected by Arario Museum, Jeju

 

In The Last Doctrine—After Repin’s “Tolstoy Ploughing”, Li Qing strives to discuss the multiple rewriting and reshaping of the artwork in the socio-historical context. Leo Tolstoy was a Russian aristocrat and large landholder. His act of ploughing the fields was clearly an expression of nostalgia for the rapidly disappearing small farm, and had utopian connotations. Ilya Repin’s Tolstoy Ploughing seems to be intended to recast Tolstoy as a precursor to the social revolution. Li Qing recreated Repin’s original work in the brushwork of the Soviet School and as a sculpture, but cut the sculpture out of the painting completely, as if taking an industrial “cutting tool” to this cultural image, once again drawing nostalgic sentiments and revolutionary discourse into the spectacle of capitalist production.