Vosdanig Adoian was born in 1904 in the village of Khorkom near Lake Van. A painter of Armenian extraction, in 1920, when he was sixteen years of age, he moved to the United States. There the young Vosdanig changed his name to Arshile Gorky, leant to speak a language that was not his own, and became a painter. He remembered the places and art he had been in contact with during his childhood; however he did not draw on these experiences. Instead he was inspired by the art characteristic of the spirit of the times: Cézanne, Picasso, Miró, Kandinsky, De Chirico, Léger, Matta, and the French Surrealists Ernst and Masson. He looked so long at the works by these artists that, by their constant repetition, he virtually became depersonalized. But when he had finally digested these influences they became the starting point for developing his own personal language, and this was to make him one of America's greatest twentieth century painters. From being an artist who had undergone the influence of others, Gorky became the artist who more than any other was to influence the Abstract Expressionists. Despite the fact that he was by nature an abstractionist, he worked for some sixteen years - from 1926 to 1942 - on paintings based on a photo dating from his childhood in his homeland. Two very similar versions of The Artist and his Mother exist, one in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the other in the Washington National Gallery of Art. In both of them Gorky has eliminated his mother's hands.

In a different historical and geopolitical context, Li Tianbing too left his own country, with a few photos in his pocket of him as a child in his city of birth. Born in 1974 in Guilin, in 1996, at the age of twenty-two, Li Tianbing moved to Paris where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts. In France adopted a language that was not his own and came into contact with formal experiences that, in contrast to Chinese tradition, had for centuries made use of illusionist perspective. Not that in the West of the period this was characteristic of the most fashionable art: the predominating esthetic concept both in private galleries and in museums, and as a consequence in the art schools, preferred conceptual aspects to technical and formal ones. This was an imposition that Postmodernism is still influenced by, despite the fact that the 'eighties were typified by a return to painting, even to the

"easel painting" so despised by that part of Western culture influenced by the

ideas of the American Clement Greenberg.

Like Arshile Gorky, Li Tianbing has been receptive to many influences and has looked closely at various protagonists of the European art scene. In other words, like Gorky, Li Tianbing has cannibalized the experiences of others to the point of making them the basis of his personal expression, which is why we Europeans find him one of the most interesting Chinese painters of his generation. But differently to what happened with Gorky, Li Tianbing has painted nothing that does not contain the seeds, matrices, and symbolism of his culture of origin.

In order to reconstruct the memory of his childhood and to transform the realization of The Artist and his Mother into a kind of therapy that might allow him to interpret his human experiences, Gorky had only one photograph available. Li Tianbing had five small photos taken when he was three, four, and five years old, but he also has an archive of images that he put together over time whenever he returned to his country of birth. To have five photos from his childhood was a privilege for a Chinese boy of Li Tianbing's age. A privilege due to the fact that his father, a soldier in the army's propaganda department, every so often took his camera home to record the various stages of his son's growth. Although these photos are highly personal, once Li Tianbing has painted them they speak of the common experiences of his generation. Being an only son, for example, was a condition shared by other Chinese children, just as was the experience of not owning toys, playing alone, and having imaginary friends. Li Tianbing's poetics are based on a kind of archeological inquiry into his infancy, and this leads him to search for places reminding him of where he lived then. From this point of view self-portraits are an obligatory part of his search. In 2003 he painted himself as an adult with his face deformed in an Expressionist, almost Informalist, style which, at the same time, seemed the result of digital manipulation. At the end of 2006 he began his self-portraits as a child, sparking off a narrative involving an imaginary brother. At the same time he painted his first photography-based self-portraits showing him as he is now.

The first self-portraits as a child based on photographs date from 2006 and are in black and white like the original photos. The wide range of grays gives the image a dramatic aspect. In order to underline this, Li Tianbing has overlaid the subject with variously-sized irregular black stains, the marks of deterioration that time has left on the photographic paper. Li Tianbing himself has said he noticed those stains in 2003 on photographs portraying criminals from the Khmer Rouge period; these had aroused a deep sense of horror in him as well as a fear of something intangible and unpredictable which he could not defend himself from. On Li Tianbing's canvases these stains have become the allegorical account of the existential condition of those who know that their own image can be corroded by a mysterious and insidious force, a force that cannot be gainsaid. Their irregularity and size inevitably lead us to think that they will inexorably invade the surface, to the point of annulling the subject represented and, together with him, the very memory of his existence. And from the moment that the artist presents himself as collective man, the corrosive power of the black stains spreads from his own person to a whole social system. From those paintings onwards, Li Tianbing has reconstructed moments from his actual childhood, together with imaginary brothers and friends, to create a kind of family album which, in 2008, established its central nucleus in works referring to scenes taking place in hospitals, war games between children, and to the world of comic strips. With the passing of time the horde of imaginary brothers and friends has become even more crowded and recalls a traditional Chinese motif in which a large group of children symbolizes prosperity and good luck. A traditional image, then, and one in contrast to the policy, imposed by the Chinese government from the 1960s onwards, which allowed only one child for each family, the aim being to lower the country's demographic growth.

Another symbolic device employed by Li Tianbing is that of coloring some of the children, highlighting their presence within a group or landscape. The symbolism alludes to codes belonging to Chinese culture: blue is the color of capitalism; violet of nostalgia; green of ghosts; light blue of sadness; and red of blood and revolutions. Li Tianbing's use of such rhetoric as a communicative strategy also allows him to imply the very reverse of the symbolism: he shows a group of children in order to state that the single-child policy imposed a lonely infancy in children born in China in that period, or puts a toy into the hands of a little boy as a reminder that for a long time Chinese children hardly ever owned toys.

By wedding his Chinese culture to the one he discovered during his studies in Paris, Li Tianbing has searched for a third way, though one that is a synthesis of two different cultures. His aim is to know so much about the past that he can forget it, but also to use different styles in order to take his technical expertise for granted.

In the twentieth century, the artists who emigrated to the United States became American citizens. The biographical information on the labels beside the works on show in the Whitney Museum of American Art underline that, if an artist lived in the United States, even though born elsewhere, he was considered American. It still happens today that if foreign artists move to the States they are considered to be American. In Li Tianbing's case - as in the case of many intellectuals who have, over the past decades, moved to Europe or America from Asia or the Arab world - there prevails the wish to be considered an international artist. This aspiration demonstrates a post-ideological position that is mainly motivated by a rejection of the "culture of opposites" on which dominating political systems have always based their strategies for infiltration and establishment. The importance Li Tianbing gives to symbolic-narrative aspects and to a post-ideological vision of history is evident. By creating an imaginary scene that takes into account a situation experienced in the first person, he makes the work's meaning an adhesive for uniting art and the world. At the same time, by superimposing his own personal universe onto that of his generation of fellow citizens, he makes the very relationship between art and the world a political one.  This aspect of Li Tianbing's work is important because it allows us to understand that what his pictures show are not Surrealist fantasies. He does not aim at analyzing the subconscious in order to give a form to the world of dreams; if this were so his art would have to be considered light-years away from the spirit of the times. His esthetic outlook is, however, Surrealist, insofar as he shows situations that seem real but in fact are not, and others which seem imaginary but are real. The superabundance of layers of information that we find in his paintings also reveals the effects of the IT revolution, an awareness of a condition and not the result of choices dictated by the subconscious. As the expression of rational processes, it has much in common with the modern awareness that the subconscious can be deciphered and controlled, and the Postmodern awareness that it can also be manipulated, as is shown by the communications strategies used by politics and marketing. This explains why there are those who hold that Postmodernism did not start at the end of the 1970s, but at the beginning of the 1960s. This is what the many imaginary yet real - and also real yet imaginary - visions that the new century offers us derive from. This also explains the capacity of such artists as Li Tianbing to be proudly Chinese and, at the same time, proudly international. But then, if from the 1980s onwards artists could populate a single work with languages and styles once considered incompatible, it is difficult to understand why a single individual should not be inhabited by quite different cultural identities. The question becomes more difficult, however, when we relate Li Tianbing's art to the implications of the use of images, narratives, and symbols in the history of art since the Second World War.

On a theoretical plane, this argument has such important implications that in the 1950s it became the fulcrum for the opposition between American and European art. Clement Greenberg decried any work with a narrative as anti-Modernist. He held that any slightly recognizable image, when related to other elements within the pictorial space, creates a narrative. Furthermore, he considered perspective and a volumetric definition of the subject through drawing and chiaroscuro to be anti-Modern too. These ideas, already outlined in his 1940 essay Towards a New Laocoon and increasingly referred to in the following decades, marked a boundary which artists could not cross if they intended to work in the field of Modernism. From this point of view, French culture in the 1940s, still linked to Surrealism, was considered to stand apart from the spirit of the times inasmuch as it was based on a psychoanalytical process that gave great importance to automatic gestures and to images from the world of dreams. Similar reasons were used for undermining Realism. Realist painters were reproached for using images and symbols of a painful existential condition in order to take on the burden of human suffering and to arrive at an anachronistic result - also because in the second half of the nineteenth century representations of reality had become the exclusive domain of photography. This critical vision influenced the way of interpreting Western art and, in part, is still felt today. However, not all European art has accepted the "art for art's sake" theories of Clement Greenberg. It has been rejected by such artists as Francis Bacon and Gerhard Richter who have posed important questions about the use of images in painting. Richter, in particular, has noted how images are nothing other than appearance and resemblance. He says that, since being visible is only what we see as a result of reflected light, then artists do not invent images but repeat their apparition. And it was Richter who, once more, highlighted how appearance in painted objects and their referent in nature was not only a question of the relationship between represented objects and the real world, but also involved the history of art. If, for instance, we look at a white monochrome by Robert Ryman as a work of art, we do not perceive a white wall but the monochrome experience in art history. At the same time we have no other choice than to relate this white work to our experience of reality. We think, for example, of snow.1 This spontaneous process by our psyche is the same one that leads us to think of Joseph Beuys each time an artist makes use of animal fat, or that brings to mind the names of Michelangelo Pistoletto and Robert Smithson whenever an artist uses mirroring surfaces.

The Modernist experience, starting from Manet and the Impressionists, has undergone over a century of radical experiences. This has put artists with cultural backgrounds different from those in the West in the condition of having to assimilate theories, languages, and techniques extraneous to their own culture. They are thus forced to thoroughly master these theories, languages, and techniques in order not to be crushed under their weight. And this is what Li Tianbing refers to when he reveals his wish to be in control of diverse techniques and styles. He wants to assimilate them, not to repeat them but to forget them. In this sense, what is currently happening with Chinese artists is different to what happened to the American artists who moved to Paris in the early decades of the twentieth century when French art still imposed its own hegemony on that of the States. And it is completely unlike what happened from the 1950s onwards when the system was reversed and many European artists moved to New York. The situation is different now because today's geopolitical, cultural, and economic contexts are also different. But however much today's situation might be different, in the West the heritage of the twentieth century's avant-gardes still holds sway, a heritage that also judges the value of an idea on the basis of who thought of it first. And so every time we look at a work of art we tend to compare it to works which, in some way, remind us of it. This chronological dictatorship conditions our reading of the work -  often depriving us of pleasure in looking at it -  but, at the same time, it allows us to appreciate aspects that otherwise would have escaped us. A comparison of the most interesting works by Chinese and Western artists shows, for example, a curious parallel between their art.

At the end of the Second World War the geopolitical condition resulting from the partitioning of the defeated nation saw Germany divided in two. This situation led West German art to look suspiciously at the implications of "art for art's sake" which, by excluding narrative, stopped artists from contributing to any kind of social or political cause. In other words, a West German intellectual, free to express his own ideas, discovered the unification of the two Germanys to be the objective of his own narrative. In their work many West German artists highlighted the culture and history they shared with East Germany. A similar sense of history can be seen in the works of many Chinese artists who bring to the foreground events from the past and the present in order to make a narrative of collective experiences. We can pinpoint a kind of common attitude on both a formal and technical level. The superb paintings by Zhang Huan, dating from 2005 and realized on a surface of incense-ash collected in Buddhist temples, are similar to works from the 1970s by Anselm Kiefer created on a surface of earth and candlewicks. Zhang Huan considers the ashes of incense accumulated for centuries in Buddhist temples to be a material that, both concretely and symbolically, alludes to his roots. The subjects shown in these works refer back to the realist heritage of Social Realism, but also to personal and collective memories of historical and contemporary figures, and even to the Baroque iconography of memento mori. The historical conditions Zhang Huan refers to are, of course, different to those of Kiefer, but we can see in both the aim of giving life to a special value of history, to memory, and to collective sentiments. Both have created a complex body of work that includes performances, photos, videos, sculpture, installations, and paintings.

Zhang Huan's paintings on a ground of incense-ash were made in the same years in which the younger Li Tianbing was evoking his personal history and that of his generation, as well as that of his parents and his people. So we could say that Zhang Huan and Li Tianbing are Chinese and international artists in the same way that Kiefer and Richter are German and international artists. This is a situation that, in a very particular way, can be seen in the work of East German artists twenty years younger than Kiefer and, therefore, the same age as Zhang Huan and Yan Pei Ming. Such East European artists as Neo Rauch have, in fact, placed Socialist Realism to the forefront, something quite extraneous to other equally well-known Western artists.

Yan Pei Ming moved to France about a decade before Li Tianbing. There he painted his personal pantheon of people from the twentieth century until today. In this portrait gallery, realized with a synthesis of speedy brushstrokes and the dense color of Willem de Kooning, the drama of Alberto Giacometti, and a knowledge of the early paintings by Gerhard Richter, Yan Pei Ming has included, apart from his self-portrait, the faces of Mao Zedong, Pope John Paul II, Barack Obama, and Alberto Giacometti, to mention just a few. As well as them there are beggars, anonymous soldiers, whores, but also vaguely Baroque skulls and a reworking of masterpieces of European art. The figures of Buddha and Mao Zedong are a constant aspect in the work of Chinese artists, just as are those of Frederic II, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche for the generation of West German artists who worked during the period of the Berlin Wall. Nothing of the kind can be seen in the art of the second half of the twentieth century in Italy, France, or the UK.

To refer to history as a narrative, as so many German and Chinese artists have done, has nothing to do with national pride. That, perhaps, is more a concern of American artists who have often reproduced the Union Flag. Putting historical memory in the foreground was an aim that Gerhard Richter emblematically undertook in his series 48 Portraits, produced between 1971 and 1972, in which he used black and white photography to show 48 representatives of European culture in the 19th and 20th centuries. This similarity of aims between German and Chinese artists demonstrates how they never cease contributing to their social and cultural fabric whenever the events of the times require it. Which goes to show that so-called global culture is an invention by those who, in their desire to dominate the world, consider their own example to be the only one possible.

Demetrio Paparoni

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1 Gerhard Richter, Note 1989 (November 20th 1989), in Gerhard Richter, Text, Schriften und Interviews, Hans Ulrich Obrist (hrsg), Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main/Leipzig 1993; Italian translation: Gerhard Richter. La pratica quotidiana dell'arte, Postmedia, Milan 2003, p.139.