Tianbing Li seems to be telling us that understanding an image depends on ever- changing interpretations, by a variety of different interested observers, at a variety of different times, arriving at a variety of levels of acceptance or dismissal, of roles and identities which are continuously in flux.  The very particular character of the images is built around these ambiguities (love, hatred, social acceptability, ostracism, etc), which concern us all, without revealing their origins.  Tianbing Li presents the images within a context beyond the conflicting concepts of authority and freedom, which are frequently too impassioned.  He gives us neither idols nor icons, but rather, idealised images aspiring to a desired goal, which has as yet, not been expressed in words.  This negotiation between the image and the viewer is also an interpretation of history, most importantly, the artist’s history, within the continuity of Chinese culture.  It is not a question of style, rather it is a way of life and  there is a defined aim: strategy.  In choosing to be an expatriate, to live in Paris, and to exhibit in Europe and the United States, and all by the age of 30, is quite an achievement.  It is also indicative of a strategic and discriminating approach. 

 

For more than a century Paris has indisputably, been the mythical artistic centre for Chinese artists, the most famous of whom have lived there: Lin Fengmian; Liu Haisu; Xu Beihong.  Some became French citizens including:  Huang Yongping; Chuh Teh Chun; Zao Wu Ki.  Li in turn, was drawn to the French capital, which has had close links with two other great art capitals namely, Shanghai and New York –two places he is also very familiar with. And what if the arrival of  Tianbing Li – this ‘cultural smuggler’ – were inviting us to overturn our perceptions of ourselves, and our relationships with these worlds?

 

Such a question is pertinent because perhaps, through his work, Tianbing Li offers us an answer by embarking, not without courage, on a very particular type of painting – the portrait.  This art form presents the viewer with the representation of an absent subject, or to put it another way, it records the absence of the subject by presenting an image of the subject. 

 

There are innumerable examples in the Chinese tradition of portraits commemorating servants of the State.  During the Han era for example, under the reign of the Emperor Ming Di, the portraits of twenty-eight important ministers and generals were painted in the Yun pavilion.  During the reign of the Emperor Ling Di, the portraits of the disciples of Confucius were painted for the Hongdumen Academy. It is probable that the art of portraiture in China could only ever truly flourish within these narrow political confines, and could only be deciphered through the use of written characters.  Thus, a strong moral connotation permeates throughout.  Establishing complicity between the viewer and the person represented is not an aim.

 

In China, landscape painting was favoured, portraiture being restricted to historiographers or other functionaries of the Court.  This contrasts with the work of the great European masters like Leonardo, Raphael, Mantegna or Courbet, who were concerned to express in their work an intimate engagement with their historical subject matter.  Chinese masters were reluctant to dwell on ‘the real’.  In this context, the sage Han Feizi (280-233 BC): ‘A guest of the king of Qi was a painter.  He asked him: ‘What is the most difficult to paint’?  ‘Dogs and horses are the most difficult to paint’ he answered.  ‘And what is the easiest’?  ‘Spirits and demons are the easiest, because dogs and horses are known to man.  We see them from morning to night.  We cannot render a true likeness (lei), which is the reason they are difficult.  Spirits and demons on the other hand, have no shape.  We can’t see them.  Therefore, they are easy to represent’’.3 This story is significant because it is part of a way of thinking in which intentionality takes precedence over form, precipitating ever-changing energies.

 

It is perhaps instructive to approach Tianbing Li’s art by first making this somewhat long detour.  His portraits are the synthesis of his researches into both the European and Chinese traditions.  His black and white portraits are illustrative of the alternating approaches described above. Is there an inherent nostalgia in the works or the blandness of the subjects’ expressions, which preclude a definitive judgement on the part of the viewer?  This question applies equally to portraits of well-known personalities (e.g., Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson) as to portraits of anonymous people, which because of a continually evolving world, because of chance and necessity, and because as human beings we are all potentially equal, might well one day take their place in a gallery of the famous.  At times the image is blurred by a multitude of pixels or by brushwork used ‘against the grain’ like a knife moving back and forth, destroying our visual reference points, the identities rendered impossible to penetrate.  The artist tells us that he begins by engaging voluptuously and energetically in the activity of blurring or deconstruction, and he likens the process to entering a confession in a diary.

 

Looking at the forty or so portraits of children alongside large format portraits of adults, brings to mind the extended family and the relationships between its members.  Sooner or later, travellers to China, like those already familiar with China, discover the importance of the art of relationships and those particular codes of conduct called guanxi.  As Stephanie Balme so aptly writes, ‘Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, which can be summed up in his slogan ‘Enrich yourselves!’ has spurred the Chinese on to seek prosperity, and has kindled a desire to free themselves from the power of the guanxi.  These ideas, ever-present in daily life, constitute a temptation, and are thus misused, leading to a slippage of the old ethical codes and a movement towards generalised corruption.  Locked in tradition as they are, how are the ethical codes developing in the context of such intensive modernisation?  What types of authority are being developed amongst an elite nurtured on egalitarian rhetoric?’4   Such questions spring to mind when looking at Li’s portraits, which if studied closely reveal branded trademarks stamped in relief on the faces of some children, whereas others wear expressions of astonishment.  The colours in these portraits alternate between mauve and yellow, representing sadness and pleasure.  Tianbing Li himself is represented beside his imaginary brother he never had. 

 

He seems to be telling us that family membership no longer attaches the individual to the clan, but rather to the great family of mankind, which is developing under our very eyes, with all the new compromises necessary vis-à-vis multinationals and state capitalism.  The contemporary nature of these images exists on three levels: that of the painter, Tianbing Li, which is also ours; that of the children portrayed and their parents; and lastly the anonymous mass composed of their predecessors, whose way of life we are familiar with, in the context of an idealised interpretation of the codes of conduct, which have nourished the imaginations of generations of families in China. There are many representations of children in traditional Chinese iconography.  The theme of childhood embodies the virtues of spontaneity (ziran) and availability.

Tianbing Li seems to be showing us a possible progression towards new notions of what constitutes a family.  Who is not familiar with the concept of adoption, of adopted children, of re-ordered families, either in a general sense, or even within their own experience?  And Tianbing Li, who is well aware of the power of these images, draws from us a desire for paternity, a desire however, with which we are unable to identify, and to which we cannot lay claim.  In China today, we have the tragedy of 30 million ‘black children’, (hei haizi), undeclared by their parents, who are considered ‘guilty’ for having exceeded the family planning quota of one child per family.6  What will be the fate of these children deprived of their rights and legal recognition?  Such children are easy prey in China, a country more than any other in the 21^st century, in which slavery abounds.7  In looking at Li’s paintings we need to be conscious of these problems and their social impacts, particularly since he was the first Chinese artist to address the memory of the Cultural Revolution in his work on Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge genocide.8

 

The face, which after all, is the essence of all portraits, pervades the mass media of today’s face-fixated society and for that reason has become devalued.  By substituting the face (and moreover a face which is no longer presented only as a canonical idol) in place of the mask, China too, has become part of this phenomenon.

 

The reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping were accompanied by the slow demise of the cult of Mao Tse Tung, the memory of which is deeply embedded in the Chinese psyche.  Whether he is in denial or whether he is making a simple admission, Tianbing Li has stated that he is ‘more concerned with Deng Xiaoping (than Mao)’.10  From a trip to Shenzhen when he was eight years old, Tianbing Li retains a strong feeling of having experienced a revolution on a scale quite different to that experienced by his parents.  As a young child, he saw this city of several million inhabitants transforming itself before his very eyes, representing the new face of China as intended by Deng Xiaoping, whose vigorous approach to the project created such a deep cleavage in the fundamental Chinese psyche that the traditional family model was utterly transformed, thereby shattering the historic fundamentals.  No one can understand Li’s work without being aware of this legacy from a past, which is still very much alive.

 

In his recent work two children appear – the artist and his double, his ‘invented’ brother, whom he was no doubt yearning for.  The children are represented in a variety of situations e.g., a trip to Tiananmen, a visit to the Shaolin Temple, as travelling acrobats, etc.  At first sight, this approach might suggest the work of post-modern simulationists.  A number of Chinese artists like Li Luming and Sheng Qi recall those forms of hybrid art, which erased the old divisions between academic art and popular culture. Seen thus, the concept of authenticity becomes meaningless.  Nothing could be less expected for an artist coming from a Chinese cultural background, whose focus is completely different.

On the one hand, Tianbing Li, does not draw his inspiration from a single document, but from a large number of photographs and images from which he creates a montage.  Furthermore, Tianbing Li has a very wide literary knowledge.  He is a man who enjoys conversation in like-minded company, with a good interlocutor with whom agreement is possible on issues such as life, death, women and the evolution of the world.  Whether real or imaginary, such an interlocutor, like ‘the invented brother’ of the picture, is capable of moving him with a verse by a Tang poet, or enabling him to communicate with that other world, to which we now turn.  That other world is the world of spirits.  It would be fruitless to try and define a doctrine underlying the work of such a young artist.  It is true that his predilection for the other world is explicable in the light of the hardships, which he experienced in the past. Tianbing Li did not have an unhappy childhood, but we can readily understand that, as the Cultural Revolution was drawing to a close and with it, its litany of suffering and horrendous killings, the family circle of the young Tianbing lived in fear on a daily basis, unable to contemplate a long-term future, with a minimum of food and clothing, constantly guarding their speech for fear of denunciation, deprived of little luxuries and with almost no toys.  In such a dismal world, it was his mother’s purchase for him of a picture book, which allowed Tianbing the child, to glimpse a flicker of hope.

 

Let us call to mind those paintings in which a royal child plays with his toys, for example paintings by Goya, or ‘Las Meninas’ by Velasquez.  Polysemically, the painting shows that which it hides. All of Tianbing Li’s work focuses on this central concern, which is not nostalgic but rather, which looks at the past from the vantage point of the present day, surrounded by the benefits of science and technology, and yet deprived of food for the soul and happiness.  It focuses on a symbolic understanding, which is well-tried by a long and still vibrant tradition, renewed from generation to generation, despite, or perhaps because of, ideological repression within a complicit community.  What is that community?  A community of artists, but first and above all, a community of intellectuals, who with Tianbing Li, share a literary and visual culture which extends far beyond the horizons of China.  Naturally, Li knows his classics and makes no secret of his passion for the strange, constantly seeking out the new: hence, his interest in the literature of Pu Songling,13 full of stories of spirits and ghosts.  Since the end of the eighteenth century, theatre, popular culture and cinema have drawn upon such stories.  Beyond the reference to Pu Songling, which I feel is especially relevant, since he was a writer who was not slow to have recourse to his own childhood memories, it seems to me that Tianbing Li himself, has a nostalgia for childhood as a time of learning and an awakening to the supernatural.

 

Hence the theme of the journey of those two children who appear in the latest series of paintings and which irresistibly call to mind the image of “hermits and eminent men” (in Chinese: yishi gaoren) or the guileless lives of young innocents beyond the constraints of authority.  This ideal of the wandering life is glorified in a classical treatise on aesthetics, the Bifa Ji (Notes onUsing the Brush), by Jing Hao (first half of 20^th century), which relates the dialogue between a young painter and a mysterious old man whom he encounters in the mountains and who initiates him into the secrets of painting.  The old man speaks of Lao Zi whose name can be translated in two different ways:  the ‘old master’ or the ‘old child’.  The two children painted by Tianbing Li are very often portrayed in a snow-covered landscape.  Such an image of purity points to the very human qualities of the future scholar, but also to the poem ‘Snow’ by the Mao Tse Tung, which was published in 1945 and was the prelude to a new fratricidal civil war between communists and nationalists.  In Chinese the words for ‘snow’ and ‘blood’ (xue) are almost homonyms, like ‘froid’ and ‘effroi’ in French.  The political significance of works such as these, which can be read at many different levels, should not be underestimated.  The richest and most profound is that which brings us back to Chinese legends, which have so deeply influenced Li.  The two children in these paintings remind us of the story of the God of Literature called Zhong Kui, sometimes called the God of Flowers (hua shen) and some paintings show him surrounded by winter flowers such as chrysanthemums and flowering cherry, because once upon a time he was associated with the New Year, thus with winter.  Moreover, depicting him in a winter landscape is more consistent with his tragic end, which in the artist’s imagination might be linked with that of the ‘invented brother’ who never saw the light of day.  Furthermore, it is quite usual in China, more particularly today in Taiwan, for a child to be offered to a deity as an adoptive son or daughter, without altering in any way its relationship with its natural parents. The portrait of these two children can equally remind us of the story, well known in China, of the Gods of the Gates.

 

According to the Book of Rites, the Gods of the Gates are included amongst the five gods of antiquity to whom offerings were made, as well as to the gods of houses, wells, the hearth and the land.  They were called Shentu and Yulü.  They were two brothers sent by the Yellow Emperor to take charge of the spirit world.  The seat of their power was the mountain of the City of the Peach Tree by the Sea of the East.  There, grew an enormous peach tree whose branches formed a great fork three thousand leagues wide.  Shentu and Yulü guarded the gate of spirits and ghosts (gui men) who, when they returned at dawn from their wanderings across the earth were scrutinised by Shentu and Yulü.  Those who had committed misdeeds against people, were tied to the peach tree with ropes of reed and left for tigers to devour.  And it is for this reason that statues of Shentu and Yulü, sculpted from peach wood, were placed at the doors of houses and tombs.  The common people contented themselves with engravings representing the guardians, printed from engraved panels of peach wood.  Others simply used two magic papers to represent the guardians.  These objects were a constant reminder of the awesome power of the guardians.  This custom might be the origin of the maxims, which today still decorate the entrances to traditional houses.15

 

What can one say?  The paintings in which the two children appear are objects of both memory and protection.  It seems we are being told that no one can enter into the inner memories or thoughts of the artist, without being familiar with the symbolic nature of the sanctuary, which the artist sometimes protects by the representation of a cock, held by one of the children.  The concept of a sanctuary under threat is signalled to us by the image, appearing at the bottom of some of the works, of a red dinosaur evoking gui che, a monstrous bird with nine heads, feared throughout the south of China, from where Tianbing Li originates.  The complexity of this work hardly needs emphasising.  It is multi-referential.  It creates an inherent exchange between the work and us.  Both Tianbing Li and the spectator share the ambivalence of a work which aspires to reach these shadow children: gui in Chinese, and is this not after all the homonym of a word meaning ‘to return home’, used to describe in particular, uneasy wandering spirits who come back to disturb the living?  Such spirits, trapped in their imperfection rather than in an aspired holiness, are seemingly in rebellion against the prospect of being forgotten.  In trying to understand in an historic context the social imagination of this artist, we need to link him to the concept of ‘belief’, in the very materiality of the image, which is presented to our gaze.  This might hold the key for the historian attempting to analyse and better understand the relationship that we have with the power of this dreamlike and haunting apparition.  It is upon this, that the whole basis of the work of this great artist Tianbing Li is founded.19

 

But it is a silent believing to which these paintings invite us, the origins of which are opaque, immaterial and abstract. These works are born of confused childhood memories combining fears and happiness, and are communicated to us in a manner which defies words, and bids us keep a respectful distance.  In answer to the sometimes verbose arguments of his contemporaries, Li Tianbing responds with dignity, ‘I have nothing to prove’.20  One does not fight adversity with words, which are always prone to confuse and to deflect energies towards the non-essential.  Instead of agitated ‘tomorrows’ promised by doctrine, one would prefer calm, melancholy ‘todays’ – also realistic and human.21  Melancholy?  Etymologically, black bile, melancholy permeates aestheticism in various ways.  What comes to mind are engravings by Dürer or by Lucas Cranach.  But when melancholy is portrayed, it usually takes the form of a woman and less frequently that of a man.  Melancholy can produce extraordinary and extravagant visions.  Walter Benjamin with his shock theory – ‘lyrical poetry could emerge from experiences in which shock has become the norm’ – is close to Aristotle’s thinking, according to which melancholy reacts violently to events which shock it, and turns them into a lived experience thereby giving them form.

When considering Tianbing Li and his art, let us once again turn to Walter Benjamin’s words ‘real memories should not so much detail the past, as precisely describe the place (current, present, anachronistic) where they were interiorised’.  One might also consider Benjamin’s concept – so singular, so extravagant – of the so-called ‘vortex-origin’, and once again, of the dialectical image.23  Li’s approach derives, from a process which consists of working on a page of history (his own history but also the terrible history of human hardship), and from a childhood filled with images and his ongoing questioning of those images: a silent dialectic owing its existence solely to violence and ‘the prodigious work of the negative’ (Hegel).  We may well take the view that this dialectic follows the path set by the painting, with its scraps of material attached in relief to the face of the painting, and which the artist works over with care.  These scraps together with the slashes (kong) on the surface of the painting act as catalysts, stimulating and animating the painter’s imagination.  They repel, yet tempt one to touch them.  The fact of being able to touch them in effect, defines a forbidden territory.  The child discovers the world by exploring it, but also by coming up against that which he cannot, that which he must not touch.  Kong is synonymous with scar, and just a few years after Mao Tse Tung’s death, Chinese literature directed itself towards a re-interpretation of history.  Kong addresses the crucial anthropological relationship between the image and the body.24  China in its relationship with paganism, and Europe in its relationship with Christianity, have each in their respective visual cultures attempted to reach, and even transgress the bounds: of imitation, in China’s case; of harmonisation between nature and culture, in Europe’s case.  Present day cosmology now allows new and unusual configurations, which for too long had been relegated to the familiar.25 

 

Incongruity is appreciated in today’s world. Tianbing Li for his part, is one of those important contemporary figures who are able to change metaphors into metamorphoses:  signs into symptoms.  A few years ago, when he asked me to write a text for one of his first catalogues, I asked myself:  ‘Where do these images come from, from what great depths, from what internal process?  Must I distinguish between the images of dreams and those of art?  Many analogies come to mind.  The intertwining of figures and the telescoping of time remind us of 2046 of Wang Kar Wai.  And because of his similarity of touch to that of Li Tianbing, we are also reminded of Monsu Desiderio’s Imaginary Architectures, which to our eyes, call to mind his great Nordic predecessor Altdorfer, whose paintings alternate between the gentle softness of a Nativity, and surreal backgrounds of mountain peaks outlined in white and in solar matter…In their composition, we can view these images as Chinese.  They move outwards from a central point, which is not immovable but which is invisible, and they change according to the relationship between the eyes of the painter (that of the work) and the eyes of the beholder – a fluctuating relationship because it is subject to a ceaseless dynamic.  This dynamic can be described as thought in movement, the outlines of which we perceive in the complex composition of Tianbing Li’s canvasses’.26

His search is also the search for the double.  ‘The invented brother’ who embodies both an individual’s darker side and his specular reflection – the adversary and the brother, the Self and the other – makes it possible to pose the complex question of the relationship between identity and otherness.  The double is the shadow, the mask, the spectre, the reflection.  He is a part of ‘the disturbing strangeness’.  He refers to the hidden thread of destiny, which governs all we do.  The motif of the double, as Freud has written, is ‘the presenting of characters, who because they appear to be similar, are inevitably considered to be identical’.27 The double, as in the self portraits of the artist Tianbing Li together with his ‘brother’, from whom he now exists separately.  Separate, because the ‘other’ seems to occupy an increasingly important place in the artist’s imagination. Horizontal script appears on a number of Tianbing Li’s paintings.  For such a highly cultured man in communication with the spirit world, this demonstrates that he belongs, that he is an initiate.

 

From the theoretical point of view, and within the context of today’s debate on contemporary Chinese art, the work of Tianbing Li cannot be considered without reference to the ‘other’, the double, whose work and position are poles apart from his art.  I refer here to an artistic movement within the overall context of contemporary culture in China, which still emphasises the art which emerged from the early avant-garde.  This movement, defended by Qiu Zhijie who is older than Tianbing Li, promotes ‘post sensuality’ (hou gan xing) in art,30 which assigns to it a form of determinism exercised in the choice of places in which the art is to be seen.  Qiu Zhijie’s bias is far from being anecdotal.  Without calling Qiu Zhijie’s undoubted talent into question, he is rooted in a period, which since the first half of the 1980’s in China, has been characterised by an infatuation with the tenets of post modernism, thereby reducing the question of memory to an unauthentic substitute (‘carton-pâtes’), (the expression of Chen Yan).31  There is another alternative open to Chinese intellectuals and artists: the honour of culture and the redefinition of modernism, the understanding of which would be different from that of the intellectuals of the May Fourth Movement.32  In other words, modernism is no longer thought of in revolutionary terms synonymous with rupture and therefore tragedy, but is rather seen as reformist, which would reconcile the qualities of Chinese tradition with those of the West, including those of India, to avoid the political and cultural deviations of the nationalists, which today threaten China and her elites.33  This might imply a new identity for culture, taking into account a narrative and sensual dimension of art, stamped with the seal of a Chinese-style cosmopolitanism.

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.      Yolaine Escande, L’art en Chine, Paris, Hermann, 2001, p.166

2.      Stéphanie Balme, Entre soi.  L’élite du pouvoir dans la Chine contemporaine, Paris, Fayard, 2004

3.      At the end of January 1980 a new development in the policy to limit births was launched.  This was called ‘one child only’.  The clear objective was to reduce the natural growth of the Chinese population to 5% in 1985 and to 0% by the year 2000.  This policy has been vigorously criticised during the current year (2007) and has given rise to many demonstrations in rural areas.

4.      Cai Chongguo, Chine: l’envers de la puissance, Paris, Mango, 2005

5.      Emmanuel Lincot, Li Tianbing: Transformation before all Things in: Tianbing Li Catalogue. Exhibition Musée de Gajac, 2005

6.      Conversations Tianbing Li / Lincot Emmanuel: Clignacourt Studio, Tuesday 12^th June 2007

7.      Pu Songling, Chroniques de l’étrange.  Contes traduits du chinois et présentés par André Lévy, Paris, Philippe Picquier, 1996; André Lévy, Dictionnaire de littérature chinoise,  Paris, Puf, 2000, p.244

8.      Jacques Pimpaneau, Chine. Mythes et dieux, Arles, Philippe Picquier, 1993, p.38

9.      Passage taken from the chapter devoted to ghosts in Chinese contemporary art and to the artist of Wuhan, Hei Gui in:  Culture, identité et réformes politiques: la peinture en République Populaire de Chine, Doctoral thesis, Paris VII – Emmanuel Lincot – Vol. 1, 2003, p.177 (copy available for consultation at Asian Art Archives, Hong Kong)

10.  Conversations Tianbing Li / Lincot Emmanuel: Clignacourt Studio. Tuesday 12^th June 2007

11.  François Jullien, Si parler va sans dire. Du logos et d’autres ressources, Paris, Seuil, 2006

12.  Georges Didi-Huberman, L’empreinte, Paris, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997

13.  Georges Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte. Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels, Paris, Gallimard, 2007

14.  Philippe Descola, Par-delà nature et culture, Paris, Gallimard, 2005 

15.  Emmanuel Lincot, Li Tianbing: Transformation before all Things in: Tianbing Li. Catalogue. Exhibition Musée de Gajac, 2005, p.33

16.  Michela Marzano, Double in: Dictionnaire du corps (dir. Michela Marzano), Paris, Puf, 2007, p.319

17.  Waling Boers and Pi Li, Touching the stones. China art now, Beijing, 2007, p.151

18.  Chen Yan, L’éveil de la Chine, Paris, L’Aube, 2002

19.  Vera Schwarcz, The May Fourth Movement, Harvard, UP, 1960