On September 12, artist Li Qing's large-scale solo exhibition "Lighthouse and Cradle" was launched at the Contemporary Tang Art Center Beijing Dual Space. Curated by Cui Cancan, the exhibition showcases Li Qing's important series "Window", "Everyone Comes to Find Stubble", "Mutually Destroyed and Identical", "Hangzhou House", etc., as well as the latest works in 2021.
Cui Cancan said that "lighthouse and cradle" is taken from the image in Li Qing's works and is also a symbol of utopia in literature. The exhibition uses "The Lighthouse and the Cradle" as a metaphor for the beginning and departure, ideal and arrival between several series, re-examining the story of Li Qing's works that has not been interrupted since 2005.
Labyrinthine back shape & arch multi-layered space
Li Qing, born in 1981 in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, graduated from the Oil Painting Department of China Academy of Art in 2007 and now lives and works in Hangzhou and Shanghai. His paintings, installations, and video works often look for rational cracks in similarities and contradictions, acting on the viewer's perceptions and cognitions through roundabout overlapping structures.
Artist Li Qing
In recent years, Li's creative tracing has extensively occurred in the historical fragmentation and ideological conflicts in information dissemination, collective memory and knowledge experience, examining the tension and contradiction between images, language, symbol systems and social spaces, stringing together multi-level empirical elements, and reconciling new narrative interfaces with conflicting structures. The capture of micropolitics in everyday spaces and images, and the observation of the identity of Chinese art in the context of international art, make him reflect the unique historical consciousness of the younger generation of Chinese artists.
The exhibition hall design of this exhibition is very unique. The exhibition is divided into two sections to symbolize the Bauhaus building, the cradle of modern design, a makeshift tent swaying with the lights of the sea, which serves as the center of the two spaces and a campfire.
Showroom scene
The three series of works of "Finding Fault", "Mutual Destruction" and "Window" surround the left and right, becoming the background sound to reality. Carpets of old house ruins, mixed and cottage-style Hangzhou houses, faces in magazines and artists' journeys, two huge group portraits of abandoned refrigerators, lead the eyes to a roundabout and overlapping world. Images, symbols, and reality intertwine, obscure, and alternate here.
And the two worlds that extend from this are a labyrinthine back shape, carrying a monumental grand narrative, the cradle of the Bauhaus and the metaphor of Kabakov's flight into space; the other is a multi-layered space connected by arched doors, surging with floating in the ruins, the smooth aesthetics of reality, reflective landmark buildings, and the orange tents on the lawn like lighthouses. The mirror image of reality and the exchange of reproduction run through it, which is also a typical feature of Li Qing's creation.
Extend the exterior space and viewing form of the painting
Cui Cancan pointed out that as a representative of the new generation of painting, Li Qing's creative clues and vision are extremely rich. Compared with his contemporaries, his paintings no longer revolve around the work within the four corners of the picture, but constantly extend the external space and viewing form of the painting.
Everyone came to find Sister Lou Lou (there are five differences in the two pictures), oil on canvas, 200 × 150cm × 2, 2019
Stubble rear window (six different in two pictures), oil on canvas, 160 × 120 cm × 2, 2019-2020
The "Finding The Stubble" series, two similar pictures, makes viewing become recognition. Which one is closer to reality? What kind of relationship does painting with a realistic tradition have today with reality? Viewing and authenticity became the theme of this period.
Portrait Aesthetics of Mutual Destruction and Unity, Photograph 2, Size Variable 2, Oil on Canvas, 180 × 140 cm × 2, 2021
The inquiry continues in the "Mutual Destruction" series, where two images of intertextuality merge into one in a completely new picture. The result of the superposition is far from the truth, becoming a "reconstruction" that is neither like this nor that. Reconstruction and reproduction point to the mysteries of pictorial expression, about the meaning of rhetoric.
Labyrinth And Exhibition Center, Wood, Metal, Plexiglass, Oil Paint, Clothing, Prints, Photographs, Aluminum-Plastic Panels, 212.5 × 106 × 10 cm, 2019
Reception, Antique Wood Windows, Oil Paint, Linen Canvas, Plexiglass, Frame, Aluminum-Plastic Panel, 107 × 170 × 5cm, 2021
The window, as a metaphor for the outside world and the imagination, is the best carrier of "reproduction". In Li Qing's works, the window ledge and lattice become part of the picture structure, and the traces of old weathering are mixed with paint and brushstrokes. The window is also a landscape in the city, it carries the story, recreates the hope, divides the distance, and each window implies class and power.
In the new works, Li Qing no longer continues the literary nature of the past, or the discussion of time and space, the window returns to itself, pointing to the existential relationship between it and the building and the city, and the structure of the window ledge and the smooth aesthetics and reflective landmark buildings in the picture form a strong opposition. Painting returns to reality, to radical aesthetics.
Cui Cancan said: "Language never exists in isolation, the experiments that have never been interrupted between several series, and the perseverance of motivation have originated from the issues that Li Qing has always cared about since 2005, the information and images in the era of science and technology, the social mechanisms and powers of viewing, the relationship between people and architecture and cities in globalization, and the aesthetic style and discipline of the era of consumption." Between the majestic buildings and the swaying tents, the literary meaning of 'lighthouse and cradle' gradually disappears and becomes the antithesis of utopia. ”
The exhibition runs until 27 October.