Dr Emmanuel Lincot

It was a March day, just a few days before Easter. Li Tianbing welcomed us in his workshop at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. Interesting discussions followed over some wulong tasting. Li Tianbing, before being labelled an artist, is above all, a man of great repute. His studies would have led him to pursue a career as a diplomat. He renounces this option, convinced that the art of mastering the stroke of a paintbrush is not very different from the ungrateful work of a writer associated with a chancellery. With some liberty at least. Li Tianbing could not forget his love for a wandering imagination that incited him to contemplate about landscapes with mountains and water, about his motherland Guilin, in the south of China, about his attraction for languages and foreign cultures and amongst all this, about his love for France, which over time has become his second home. Let's observe his paintings. They are often painted on a big format, the colours being swell and thick. Here we have a 'work' of art that expresses blossom in limits. Because we can find, in a constant manner, a specific characteristic of Li Tianbing and his paintings: how to create paintings from graphical images? There is a considerable time lapse in the procedure, which is equivalent to a true philosophy of action. It means that the act of painting includes the style; that there is a union between the matter and its symbolism. It is not simply Li Tianbing's claim to address all our five senses at the same time and to systematically call out to the olfactive and gustatory connotations of the paint that he informs. All mixed, all included: from pink to brown, from the blue meddled with mad machines of destroyed roots of abandoned trees, the fantasy of an undetermined manner, hardly formed from a material restored from the wild state and of noble preference, close to rejection.

Strange, still, it is this painting matiérism that lately defines Georges Dubuffet. We don't see any heterogeneous enhance effect. On the contrary, according to us, this universe comprises of a sleek and spontaneous irregularity. This work of painting, dear to Li Tianbing, seeks its perpetual resources from a tryst sought after by the quality of raw sensations that allow us to experiment with new intensity and which stretches from the sentiments of marvel to terror, from disgust to ugliness. And thus, Li Tianbing is enrolled as one of the great artists of Chinese paintings. The choice to resort to ugly and bizarre styles as a means of expressions is, in fact a constant phenomenon in the lettered arts, particularly during the Ming epoch, the period of Renaissance with Xu Wei (1521-1593), Fu Shan (1606-1685) and Shitao (1641-1707). And the 21 st century represents a general renaissance period for China . A new trilogy, with respect to sentiments, develops in this country and meets with the key issues of post modern globalisation: "pleasure, individual, universe", following a displacement of the image and of its codes towards a field of interpretation situated half way between the absolute indifference, the most extremist as well as the cold taxonomy of a disillusioned and scientific speech. From political eviction of social disaffection, from a personal quest of new integration plans to an urban culture, a new expression is born from the information chaos. This has a name: kitsch, a word of Viennese origin, invented without doubt at the end of the 19 th century to describe the Sezessionstil (the Secession style) which provided an answer to the needs of a refinement pushed to the extreme by a morbid sensitivity. From here, it would be easy to provide a definite judgement on Li Tianbing's art while combining its reality by a denomination that would avoid us to face its reality.

Li Tianbing's paintings disturb us. Are they kitsch? In the theory of knowledge and its modes of transmission, we often strive to learn about the far away through what's close by. But what's near to us might be difficult to apprehend by virtue of its blind proximity. But in general, Li Tainbing's works of art do not remind us in any way of kitsch streaks in beautiful images. This painting, under all its forms, respires of an absolute ambivalence. We see the uninterrupted coming and going of actions and cultivated ideas that are born from imagination which is formed and inscribed as a mirror image of a society that has become like the thrust of a body that extends in the movement of the art. And this thrust, like the art of painting, is in complete disorder. Order, as we know it, represents stability, death in long term. Disorder, on the other hand, is packed with vitality: its power implies danger. And it wins itself the label of contemporary style in our stray eyes as we observe Li Tianbing's somewhat legendary paintings, that exhibit the tacit sense of these figures, their direction, their vectors or their incoherence in this disordered world where the global essence is intelligence. Drawing inspiration from the classical and Buddhist quotes, the artist establishes different worldly phases which are catalyst in finding an aesthetic reply to the cumulative mechanism of a libidinal stake where the rapport between what we see and hope to see is a rapport of allurement. It is here that the eye can serve the purpose of an object, in the sense of what's missing. From this frustration to an eluded reality is born the realisation of an ideal which desires the confines of eroticism – an ideal which is that of an image, of order (which imposes the limits of a painting) where the present is invaded by the past and an uncertain future which exposes us to a great vulnerability that undoubtedly resembles our perception of death. This is present in all essence without change when Li Tianbing exhumes from our memory the image of agony of S-21. Li Tianbing, is according to our knowledge, the first Chinese painter who takes up the subject of the genocide khmer red, thirty years after the end of this cultural Revolution and its torments.

These images, reinterpreted, measured by observation, separate us from reality and contribute in the creation of an imaginary translation of the world that inspires what our soul could become aware of. They become from this – even in a place denied of all hospitality and of a possible communion. But nothing can imagine this communion – it seems to tell us everything – if it is not connoisseur of this code in a world where the analogies are only found in buried relationships of things that are finally explained in the world of deliriousness and vision. From here, undoubtedly, in the culture of an artist, like in his predecessors, we come face to face with the poetry and the madness, of the order and the outburst. This outburst that reveals, as in China as everywhere else, the awareness of the need to defend one's genetic and human patrimony, is depicted in the paintings of Li Tianbing as a phenomenon of total utilisation of the corporal material. The hair, in the infinite diversity of the cells, provides the artist with the element of composition needed to create a link between the present and the heterogeneous memory whose contours will be defined by the choice of portraits – models (Jesus, Stalin, Mao, Deng, Jackson…) or then traditional Chinese landscapes (the kinds that are executed by Ni Zan…) 'known' places born from apprenticeship; or then for the adolescent Li Tianbing, the classics of cultured paintings. A golden era, that represents for the painter, a liaison with the profound discomfort of that what language has not been able to establish; a world where diverse similarities collect together, put down identities, superpose different criteria: a world of worries which finally arrives to the edge of agony at not having understood anything in the semantic field of denominations. Li Tianbing seems to be instilling in these persons, that are often grotesque accompanied by their crazy flying machines or mutilated and intruding insects, the apparent serenity of our representations - presence in a void heart where the singular destiny of an artist is inscribed, stable both in Chinese and European cultures, threatened alternatively. This disquieted space, complicated to access, is a heterotopy . This word described by Michael Foucault stimulates anxiety and uneasiness as it tears down the perceptions and the names of a common universe. The heterotopy shows from the sterility of the order of the sensations known to design the universe, to that of the adolescence, enchanted such that the artist moves away and what comes before our eyes are the archaic forms of effects that are trapped by the terror of history. Because the world that Li Tianbing shows us, already exists in reality in the military and civil laboratories. This space of the world, often simple and clear from the virtual outlet, reveals an opening susceptible to fear, paralyse, seriousness and also the expression of a particular sensitivity of the weight of things, associated, according to us, to the world of technology, of the disquieting presence of untameable monstrosities whose power grows with the eye of the artist and ours too, but also of this work of art which makes us contemplate about a conscious that likes to turn to stone in a closed space of a non-place where history is lived like a comeback or a repetition of a golden age that refuses to give us a name. This painting is all the more fertile since it escapes the categories of a known world. It is constructed around a vacuum, which for a historian is all the more doubtful as he has approached neither the subject of the form nor the degree of emancipation with respect to the content. Thus delivered on itself and on the game of dreams and thoughts, this painting becomes a direct emanation of the human feeling. From where do these images originate, from which depth, from which internal germination? Should we trace a give and take relationship between the images of a dream and that of art? These similarities don't stop arising in our mind. This interlink between figures or temporal telescope graphics evokes in us 2046 of Wang Kar Wai but also a friendly touch like that applied by Li Tianbing – the Imaginary Architectures , of Monsu Desiderio whose lines according to us, don't stop, being attached to his northern predecessor, Altdorfer, where the scenes alternate between sweet relaxation of Nativity and hallucinatory field of the crest of mountains underlined in white and sunlight.

Li Tianbing's paintings don't satisfy us: there are all sorts of possible questions, oppositions and contradictions. As much as this painting inspires beauty, that much only it disgusts us. Don't you feel awkward by the use of such acidic and sugar sweet colours that are only unique to Li Tianbing? This voluntary anarchy refutes the discriminatory trap between abstraction and figuration. The painter seems to be telling us that the incongruity of a meeting forever finds its welcome in the space of a canvas, between the differentiated fragments of things buried under one sole order of unusualness, so warm and renowned that it represents for us a brutal ideogram of Li Tianbing's name. And however, we'd always said, this style, believe us, is not isolated. The history of Li Tianbing's paintings exists in the form of a body. The union between an artist and his painting lives on beyond its particularity, the same kind of connection that is established between one human being and another, between one style and another, thus resembling one cumulative and changeable attitude which is placed next to culture. Our eye is caught by the external signs that impose a typology that expresses itself better in images laden with tradition than in words, that borrows substance from other civilisations, passing through the world among the different classes and human societies. These images stretch out even to the universe of mental images that reveal, as in the words of Aby Warburg, an intense theatre of time that is more and more diverse where there is a transmission of secular gestures of a genealogy of artists wrapped around one another in an uninterrupted choreography. The tactile rapport with the painting makes it undoubtedly easy to understand this apprehension to be able to register, alive, many offspring generations. Because, according to us, meeting many societies, individuals, imaginary heritages, in their largest acceptation constitutes to a multi-dimensional history open to diverse echoes of the world and its images. And Li Tianbing accentuates the impact by the choice of his painting formats, confirming by this – even the plastic and expressive effects of each of his compositions – soft textures with imprecise contours – offer a perpetually volatile and interpretation. These Chinese images offer us, by shifting themselves to a centre, which is not immutable but invisible and by changing what varies with respect to the relation that is constructed between the painter's perception (of the work of art) and that of its receiver in a fluctuating relationship since it is oppressed under an incessant respiration. And this respiration is that of a thought in movement whose traces we can distinguish from the vast organisation of canvases that the painter Li Tianbing provides. This philosophy embraces not only the aspects of philosophy, aesthetics, political ideas, ethical fundamentals of biology, but go beyond the boundaries of China because it sows the seeds of correspondence with preoccupations that rule the human lives at the primacy of their regularities on their differences, of their invariant on their disparity. In this sense, Li Tianbing deserves the biggest praises because the appreciation of his works of art come with an interrogation that man is faced with at the rupture that entails science and technology in the equilibrium of our societies. But is it the subject at stake in our society?

Should we view an operation in a historic time? A performing speech not of a heterotopy but of a utopia? At the least it reveals the state of the conscious which feeds the artist as much as it nourishes us on the reverie of images where the aesthetics shoulder the strategy, observing the emergence of a world that arrives as we await the enemy at the edge of the entrenchment, gauging his weaknesses and his strengths in the light of the morning hue and the evening dusk, incapable of capturing the signals that watch over peril to peril. However, we would need the practice and the courage to dominate this disquieting strangeness of this world so unknown. We would do that by rereading the Epicure, Xi Kang and many young libertarian. We would know, otherwise, the serenity, which envelops the soul that procures the words and the marriage or the divorce of images. Our inevitable shipwreck on the rivers of this world that we don't yet know how to name, only seems more sweet. Our fear, while harmonising with our resolute quest, born from the carefree and the knowledge, will have changed aspects. All these strange objects painted by Li Tianbing will soon be real and will become when their turn comes a starting point to a phantasmagoria that we will dress up by an erudite and energetic language. And now, silence! Part of the gloominess has been put up and darkened while the words that we think appropriate to the description of the visible. We prefer, unanimously, the tender rose of Li Tainbing's works of art. By contrast, this colour incites us through a light way, sensually dream-like that can be compared to the kiss that you'd plant on the lips of a woman desired since long. If it lives on, after midnight, a lone image of this majestic masterpiece painted by Li Tianbing, we would reply to you with enthusiasm and directly: the rose, the rose, the rose!…

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 (Translation: Sejal Gupta)