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Dolls & Bricks

November 30, 2006- December 30, 2006

Reception: November 30, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm

Li Song

798 Avant Gallery

511 W 25th St

Li Song: Magic Realism

When I visited Mainland China from New York, on a grant from the Asian Cultural Council (part of the Rockefeller Foundation), my guides did not introduce me to a single traditional Chinese painter.Instead, I met all manner of artists whose idiom was conversant with the American-influenced internationalism that has held sway for at least a couple of decades by now.

What I saw was a very intelligent, even cunning appropriation of Western contemporary modes in painting, sculpture, performance, and installation. Yet there was a difference: because of the cultural sophistication of this generation of Chinese artists, there has been, in addition to the use of Western strategies, a consistent attempt at reading Chinese content into methodologies that came of age in the 1960s and ‘70s in New York City. Li Song, a self-taught realist painter born in 1961, in Heilongjiang province in Mainland China, belongs to this cohort; his oil paintings--a medium which itself proclaims independence from Chinese historical art--comprise both a marked regard for Western painting styles and the wish to comment on aspects of China’s past, a time vastly different from the manic capitalism of the country’s development today.

While Li Song did in fact study painting a bit in Harbin in 1981, he is more or less completely his own man, committed to a Western medium that he has nonetheless been able to infuse with a Chinese sensibility. The melancholy of his dolls and bricks reverberates as a language that is intensely personal--indeed, some of the unspoken grief in his art must come from the fact that he is physically disabled. But there is something more in his work than mere private satisfaction; the dark nostalgia that permeates Li Song’s paintings commemorates, in both style and content, a loss of innocence. Again and again, we turn to similar themes in the artist’s work; bricks strewn on the ground accompany highly detailed, beautifully painted dolls, whose wide-eyed, but artificial repose feels like a reproach to the way life is led now in his country. The bricks refer to the incessant rebuilding of China’s cities; one is reminded of the fact that Li Song originally lived in the countryside in northeast China, moving to Beijing in 1993 and thus experiencing the makeover of the city from a maze of crowded, narrow streets into an urban concentration of corporate architecture, not attractive but imposing in its brutal massivity.

Li Song’s integrity as an artist suggests interesting questions about his third path, independent of both Western and Asian avant-garde practices: Does his affiliation connect with either of the legacies he has lived with since a young man? How Chinese is a body of work whose medium is the oil painting? What is the symbolism of the dolls, often in cramped positions or turning away from the viewer? In the magic realism of Li Song, the viewer may feel that he is experiencing a depressed set of circumstances that are, even so, poetic in their elaboration of futility. The artist poses a world of suggestive regret, in which change is represented allegorically by the dolls and the bricks. His technical ability is the result of extended personal study, and while his technique is resolutely Western, it is also idiosyncratic in that his idiom is oriented toward Chinese art culture, which continues to value realism in ways that Western art has seemed to give up on. Despite the discipline Li Song imposes on himself, the art never feels academic; it is, instead, rife with emotion and acts as a warning to undisciplined consumers who are taken so much with Western ways. Li Song’s style, seemingly traditional, is in fact a highly developed skill that resonates across culture; as a result, the traditional categorization of his art has little, if any, meaning.

The audience quickly accommodates the allegorical energies of Li Song’s still lifes, which present a fragile, disconnected world. in one painting, a doll representing a newborn baby cradles a doll of a young girl in its lap. The girl’s dress, painted a transparent blue with white, ruffled edges, is the object of a virtuoso painting passage. Bricks lie flat at the edges of the painting, nearly encircling the two figures. The combination of the rough construction material and the delicate features of the dolls is oddly striking, as if two kinds of emotional display--the abrupt rawness of the bricks and the gentle dolls--were being communicated. Overall, the ground is a dark gray, lending an air of disaffection to an already darkly nostalgic composition. One is impressed by the technical skill of the painting, but it is also true that the elements of Li Song’s morality play converge to identify a troubled, troubling reading of life as we know it now. In another work, the newborn doll is completely engulfed in bricks, while next to the pile in which the doll has been installed, there is the figure of the same young girl, whose open-eyed gaze matches that of the figure accompanying her. In the front right of the painting is a red cloth, folded in upon itself in a beautiful display of technical ability. Li Song’s audience can appreciate his wonderful craft, but there is another kind of information that occurs in this odd, macabre composition. The dolls look hopeless and radiate an emotional frigidity, while the bricks stand for what they are: the tearing down of the past and the construction of the future. The opposing symbolic content of the two groups of imagery results in a philosophical languor that comes close to grief.

In another painting, on the left-hand side the newborn lies face down on the floor, its head framed by the ubiquitous bricks, while a rag doll with orange hair and pink pants rests on a stool, facing the corner of two walls. In Western culture, this position serves as a punishment for a child, but here the situation is puzzling--what could a doll have done to deserve such chastisement? The two figures have no relationship with each other; their placement emphasizes an alienated isolation. It is hard not to see this as an allegory of public discourse in a postmodern Mainland China, whose economy, having discarded communism for capitalism, is now responsible for social problems that Americans confronted more than a generation ago. It would seem from the paintings described that Li Song has successfully accomplished a vision in which both ability and content merge into one another, seamlessly representing an attitude that is both magical and real. The grief implied by these works cannot be eradicated; it is part of the current atmosphere the artist returns to again and again. Yet, for all the distraught implication of the artist’s sensibility, there is a strangely positive feeling as well; the emotion is caused by the brilliant composition, paint handling, and content facing us as viewers, who would not be so taken with the paintings if they were anything less than what they are.

Jonathan Goodman Jonathan Goodman is a writer who specializes in contemporary Chinese art; he has written on Chinese artist for such magazines as Art in America, Yishu, and Art on Paper. He currently teaches at Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design in New York City.

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