李青 Li Qing

Dark Magazines

Series

2014-2020

A series of art magazines such as Flash Art or Artforum are wrapped with a piece of brocade, a type of fabric popular in Chinese families in the last century, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Often used as a gift, the brocade features patterns such as landscapes of all parts of China, whereas the back shows a black and white negative effect suggesting a dark aesthetic feeling and a loss of reality, maybe prompted by the exhibition of contemporary Western art in China as well. Magazines are enclosed in cloth, therefore their content becomes unavailable and loses readability, while their titles create new intertextual relationship with the black and white scenery.