Deborah Zafman

Tianbing Li ' s fundamentally dialectical paintings place me at the cross section between the scientific and the poetic, the real and the fantastic, the artificial and organic. Understanding the extent to which the artist acts as hybridizer provides a key to accessing his paintings. Technically adept, I see him as a fabricator of 21st century science fiction painting.

At thirty, Bing has already produced a substantial and diverse work . Born in Guilin , China in 1974, he arrived in Paris in 1997 and studied at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, where he graduated in 2002 with unanimous congratulations from the jury. He currently lives and works in Paris and continues to exhibit internationally.

His versatile paintings escape stylistic classification because, until now, Bing has concentrated on absorbing and mastering a variety of styles through the acquisition of diverse technical skills. I would describe this as a kind of horizontal and quantitative evolution : experimentation with an accumulation of various techniques, styles and subjects until achieving a certain mastery before moving onto a new series of experiments. Such a methodical approach to the study of painting might best be compared with training in the martial arts tradition : one is taught to master technique in order to ultimately surrender to it. We might say that Bing approaches his painting practice as a martial artist : he focuses initially on mastering technique as a means of giving way to a superior force, a force that goes beyond a personal self, a force that is painting itself.

Originally I had hoped to avoid any discussion of cultural differences between East and West in Bing ' s work, but as a master hybridizer, we cannot avoid detecting his blatant playfulness and pleasure in the confrontations he sets up between contradictory elements, whether it be Asian vs. Occidental culture, nature vs. technology, or science vs. poetry. He presents us with visual oxymorons, painting virtual realities, science fictions, spaces capes, self-portraits all which share for me an inventiveness and beauty, however remote and indifferent they seem to the viewer.

Such a painting practice may raise questions for Westerners regarding Bing ' s artistic identity ; in other words, with his versatility and deliberate experimentation with styles, how can we detect the genuine and authentic Bing in his paintings ? And moreover, must the lack of a fixed, graspable artist ' s identity suggest that the art lacks integrity or that the artist lacks conviction? These are the kinds of questions that came to my Occidental mind while studying Bing ' s work. I ' ve concluded (though it comes as no surprise) that Bing ' s relationship to his artistic identity is inherently non-Western by which I mean that he paints from the position of an impersonal self. This is evident both in his artistic process and in how his works position the viewer.

Bing ' s shocking self-portraits constitute a subject he has not stopped taking up and which hold a key to understanding the ungraspable, non-static nature of his fluctuating identity. The morphing and metamorphing of his face, with its haunting and fluid distortion, melting eyes and warping orifices, seem to capture a moment of an imploding self. He presents himself in a state of flux, as something ungraspable. These self-portraits operate as a metaphor for my inability to grasp him within his other works.Bing ' s paintings hover in ambiguity. And like every faithful dialectician, Bing is interested in the third category generated from the combination of opposites (like Hegel ' s Aufhebung) – He is a hybridizer because he believes the product of combining contradictory elements to be pure creation.

The following is a brief chronological overview of Bing ' s artistic development : In his earlier works (2001), his focus was to superimpose Chinese elements with American objects on the canvas (Two Different Worlds, Mao with Friends, for example). At this stage, Bing was placing opposing elements within the same canvas, but he wasn ' t actually breeding them yet. At this time he was also painting self-portraits which, as stated earlier, continue and remain a subject of great importance to him. In 2002, Bing produced the aberrant ‘ hair paintings ' where no paint is used but instead the works are entirely composed with black human hairs, which he collected from hair salons. From a distance, the works appear to be done in ink and one is stunned by the realization that it is human hair. During this period, he also did a series of portraits of journalists painted so realistically that they appear to be black and white photos. Hybridizing began in 2002-2003 with the sexualized Chinese nature paintings. Here B ing took subjects from traditional Chinese nature paintings like trees, animals, flowers and then distorted them in a capitalistic way – he sexualized them by representing genitalia and breasts not as natural but as fabricated – an indication of the West ' s obsession with plastic surgery. Then in 2003-2004, he began the ‘ new species ' series where he applies a pseudo-scientific approach to hybridizing opposing elements to create new species which though fictitious, appear convincing in their organic appearance. He displays them on the canvas as if they were enlarged illustrated pages from a naturalist ' s encyclopedia which reads like poetry. More recently, he has produced a series of tank toy species, taking up a similar form of hybridization but this time, rather than representing the new species as organic, he ' s done the inversion representing them as mechanical. We see an insect with airplane wings, for example or a helicopter fish. He inverts nature and technology by artificializing nature and naturalizing technology. This is most evident in his recent landscapes, where he proposes to us an imagined utopia, a far away place somewhere in outer space that transports the viewer to another planet, a place beyond subjectivity. My experience of these ‘ spaces capes ' is impersonal, I become but an observing eye void of emotion. The perspective he employs places us slightly above ground such that we have the sensation of hovering in a gravity-free zone. Nature is rendered with artificial colors – instead of the green we normally associate as the color of nature, Bing employs a radioactive green. The creatures and objects we find in these spaces capes are painted in miniature and dispersed throughout the foreground. Bing paints objects and creatures he finds from 3D computer-animated imagery but then naturalizes them to the extent that he renders them with paint (a primitive and manual medium), eliminating the glossiness of the original. Bing ' s overall desire to unite opposites visually in order to produce a new species is a quest for non-duality, an embracing of ambiguity.

Returning to Bing ' s development as a painter, we encounter him today at a crucial turning point. With the most recent self-portraits, he has reached that moment of surrender to painting ' s power. This is partly due to the loss of control when painting with diluted lacquer, a substance so fluid it cannot be contained, even with the most skilled brushwork. Bing explained to me how in the most recent self-portraits, the paintings have for the first time taken over him, the painting paints itself. One must appreciate the significance of this radical change in Bing ' s method, for it signals a major turning point in his artistic evolution : rather than proceeding along a horizontal axis of scientific and quantitative evolution, Bing ' s recent loss of control and surrender to painting ' s inherent power, has redirected him onto a vertical path of poetic and qualitative evolution.

This took some time to come considering that this Chinese-born artist who began studying art at the age of six was trained in the cultivation of close conscious control. Bing is an extremely methodical, deliberate and industrious painter. My prejudices considered these controlling traits to be opposed to the convictions I ' ve held as to what ‘ true ' art is (i.e. subjective, expressive, personal) as opposed to what I considered ‘ artificial 'art to be (i.e. objective, non-expressive, impersonal), this despite the fact that the word art originally comes from the word artificial. Bing ' s work presented me with the challenge of suspending my prejudices about his fabrications in order to find a way to talk about my experience of them despite their apparent indifference to my emotions. What his paintings have shown me is that it is possible to have an impersonal experience before a painting, to no longer feel a personal and subjective me looking but instead to simply become an observing eye void of feelings suspended in a space that seems far away. His paintings exist in a remote space which is precisely where they place me in my solitude.