It is the journey of a life to discover and define the self.  Tianbing Li’s recent paintings, the LC Body and Me and My Brother series, suggest at their core that while human beings are not in control of their paths of existence, there is much they can do to further their understanding.  Life is pieced together, subject to exterior influences, and in flux.  There are two approaches to this human dilemma:  we can accept that we are part of a universe in transition, as is represented in LC Body, or we can struggle to adjust, finding that while there may be moments when we have a sense of control, they are fleeting and illusory.  Li seeks resolution through exploring the latter approach in his Me and My Brother series.

 

Tianbing Li has experienced enormous personal and historical transformation throughout his life, ultimately embracing change as a key element of artistic growth and production.  He was born in 1974, two years before the close of China’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), a chaotic decade during which the Red Guards pursued their goal to “turn the old world upside-down and smash it to pieces” in the name of ongoing revolution.  Although the extremism had waned by the time Li was born, it was years before China emerged from the chaos to ascend the world stage:  during Li’s lifetime, the nation has morphed from isolated and impoverished third world state to international economic powerhouse determined to demand recognition from the rest of the world, for example as host of the 2008 Olympics, and member of the World Trade Organization.

 

Against the background of a China undergoing rapid metamorphosis, Tianbing Li’s life and education have followed trajectories of change.  He was born in the southern Chinese provincial capital of Guilin, celebrated for its dramatically beautiful landscape of improbably steep mountain formations jutting up from the earth and reflected in meandering rivers and streams.  With his father a soldier stationed away from home, and his mother a university student engrossed in her work, Li was often alone as a child.  To entertain himself he drew incessantly on the pavement with chalk, most often rendering horses and people, with whom he then conversed.  A friend once told his mother, “You will never have a problem finding your son:  wherever you can find a lot of drawings on the ground, your son must be around, and beside each drawing there is always your name in big characters.”[i]  Eventually an elderly neighbor began to take Li with him to a traditional Chinese painting class, where the child practiced on newspaper, being unable to afford anything better.  Recognizing Li’s talent, the teacher Xu Jiaque arranged for him to enroll as his student at the local Children’s Palace, where he gained a reputation as a prodigy.  During middle school, Li attended Children’s Palace classes on Western style realism, including sketching from still-lifes and plaster casts, and painting with gouache.  In addition to his formal artistic training, from the age of four until fourteen Li was taught calligraphy by his mother, who required him to practice for at least half an hour a day:  as calligraphic brushwork is intimately tied to painting with Chinese brush and ink, this nurtured his talent as a painter. [ii]

 

Following graduation from middle school, Li moved to the sprawling northern capital Beijing, where he attended the Institute of International Relations from 1992 to 1996.  Although this seems counter to his promising career as an artist, particularly at a time when young artists from throughout the country were flocking to Beijing to participate in the burgeoning avant-garde art movement, Li sought to emulate the well-rounded example of the Song dynasty (960-1279) literati painters.  These men of letters frequently served in administrative positions within the government bureaucracy, earning their posts by virtue of their education, and pursuing painting as a means of personal cultivation.  As Li has remarked, “I was always a very good [art] student with very high scores, but I hoped to learn a lot of things outside of painting.  To be just a painter is very simple:  we just need the talent.  Although I hoped to be a great painter, I planned to build my career as a pyramid, learning a lot of different things at the beginning.”[iii]

 

Upon completing the International Relations program, Li astonished his teachers by returning to art.  He recognized that art was his avocation and determined to study in Paris, the cultural mecca to which many influential Chinese artists of the early twentieth century had traveled in search of broader artistic horizons:  when these painters returned to take up leading positions in China’s art academies, they introduced French academic realism to the curricula, and thus are the source of the Western style Li was taught as a youth at the Children’s Palace.  Having emigrated to Paris, Li initially enrolled at the University of Paris in the Department of Visual Arts (1996-1997), and then tested into the prestigious École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts (National Academy of Fine Arts), which provided his first opportunity to focus on oil painting.  He graduated with highest honors in 2002.

 

Tianbing Li’s rich and varied personal and educational journey has afforded him an unusual awareness of some of the defining dichotomies of the twentieth century:  East and West, communism and capitalism, third world and first world living conditions, ancient culture and modern consumerism—many of which now exist side-by-side in China.  Bringing duality to the canvas, he mixes elements of Chinese and Western painting to express the full range of his experiences.

 

The creation of a hybrid style fusing Chinese and Western painting was a preoccupation of many Chinese artists, critics, and government officials throughout the twentieth century, but unlike Li they were hampered by the drive to arrive at a formula that could be widely applied.  This resulted in an over-intellectualization of the creative process.  During the twentieth century’s early decades, some believed the process of China’s modernization would be enhanced by the integration of Western realism with Chinese ink painting.  Those painters who sojourned in Paris—most notably the great educator Xu Beihong—were part of this movement, but their studied stylistic mixes often appear awkward.  Later, under Mao Zedong both oil and ink painting evolved to reflect the import of socialist realism from the Soviet Union.  Socialist realism reigned for decades, its influence waning only gradually throughout the 1980s as older professors trained in this mode retired from teaching in the art academies.  Its legacy has been the tendency of contemporary Chinese painters to focus on message-bearing stories in their works, and to employ color and light for their symbolic value.  While these qualities have been limiting but not overly detrimental to contemporary Chinese art, a third—the tendency to settle complacently into a successful formula—has resulted in a loss of creativity for some.

 

Tianbing Li’s hybrid style has developed naturally, without ideological imperatives:  it is a personal style rather than the directed outgrowth of a movement, and therein lies its great success.  Because of its organic development, it feels seamless and whole, and it will continue to evolve freely as the artist evolves.  Unlike those Chinese painters who have discovered formulae that are highly successful in the international market, and who hire assistants or ghost painters to alleviate the boredom entailed in producing formulaic works, Li is responsible for every brush stroke of his paintings.  His oeuvre thus evolves even as he paints, remaining constantly open to change, including that wrought by chance.

 

Trained in oil painting in Paris, Li brings to his works in that medium his long involvement with Chinese art.  He does not force a mix, as some artists do by combining Chinese ink with oils, or by employing a Chinese brush or brush technique with oil paints, but his years of daily practice with the Chinese brush nevertheless leave their mark.  With Chinese painting and calligraphy, following mental preparation, the artist’s qi (life force or energy) flows from the body down the arm and into the brush, thus imparting a particular strength to each stroke of the brush, no matter how simple.  In addition, the artist’s control of the qi contributes to the overall compositional order.  According to Li, even when he paints in oils, his life-long training in controlling the flow of qi through the brush and into the work of art remains in play.

 

Li’s most elegant and subtle fusing of cultural influences is countered by destructive elements in both the LC Body and Me and My Brother series, suggesting that the effort Li exerts to live and create successfully in a hybrid space produces psychic pressure.  The LC Body paintings express this explicitly, presenting the artist’s self exploded open for examination.  The violence present in the Me and My Brother series is less obvious.  Having finished painting a work in this series, he often destroys the surface in one of two ways, either writing or scribbling through the paint with a pen, or spilling a mixture of paint and water onto the surface, to dry in an uncontrolled excrescence that suggests the deleterious effects of time.  Of this latter action the artist has said, “for me it’s a very exciting element, especially to destroy something which was well-controlled before (the portrait), and then to have to wait a long time until the result.”[iv]

 

Highly aware of their position negotiating the space between East and West Tianbing Li and his fiancée, sculptor Yichu Chen, have been working on a project, LC Project, creating paintings, sculptures, and photographs representing a future hybrid world of mixed species.  Li’s earlier works include paintings that combine body parts from different animal species, resulting in curious hybrid creatures the likes of which appear in myths from throughout the world (the Nature Chinoise series, 2003).  By contrast Li’s new painting series, LC Body, turns inward:  according to the artist it is intended to “analyze the interior of my self.  Actually, I sometimes need the self explosion like [in those paintings] to liberate myself totally.”[v]  LC Body 2 shows the body opening out into a vast metaphysical space to reveal the artist’s interior composition:  reflecting a Daoist sensibility the artist is one with the universe, with no clear demarcation of limits.  LC Body 1 depicts a multitude of forms emerging from and penetrating the artist’s form, many of them phallic, but also including roiling clouds or water, as well as small candy colored shapes, such as a tiny blue helicopter.  The small colorful forms also appear in the Me and My Brother series, where they represent an amelioration of the artist’s deprived childhood.  Living a drab existence and lacking toys as a child, Li has added colorful playthings to the imagined past he depicts in Me and My Brother and also finds them swirling through his psyche as it is exposed in LC Body.  With both painting series, he undertakes to discover the meaning in his existence, and to adjust it as well.

 

With the Me and My Brother series, Tianbing Li reconstitutes his past, probing his memories through the addition of those things of which he was earlier deprived.  Prior to this portrait series, Li created the ironically titled Beizitou—One Hundred Children series.  While in traditional Chinese art the motif of one hundred children features the children (all boys) crowded into a single scene, and expresses a wish for fecundity, each painting of Li’s Beizitou series depicts a single child, thus highlighting the issue of China’s one-child policy.  Now, with his Me and My Brother series, Li considers the personal repercussions of that policy as he attempts to recover fading memories of the past.  Aimed at slowing China’s explosive population growth, the government’s one-child policy came into effect around the time Li’s parents might otherwise have considered expanding the family.  As a child, although he was often alone with just his chalk drawings for company, Li did not realize that it might have been possible to have the constant companionship of a sibling.  Only after emigrating to Paris and finding himself truly alone and lonely in an unfamiliar land did he think back to his childhood and understand how much he had missed.  Furthermore, he realized that he was fast losing his hold on memories of his past.

 

The starting point of the Me and My Brother series lies with six photographs of Tianbing Li taken between the ages of about two and six years old.  Cameras were rarities in China then, and to visit a photography studio prohibitively expensive:  if Li’s father had not worked for the propaganda department of the army and been able to borrow secretly the only camera belonging to his division, there would be no childhood photographs of Li.  For each work in the Me and My Brother series, Li reproduces the face from one of the six photographs of himself as a child, adding “brothers” based on photographs of himself at a different age.  As during his childhood, he is inventing companions and playing with himself, but now he has made a conscious choice to do so as a means of exploring his personal history, both what was and what might have been.

 

In Waiting we see Li sitting alone:  according to the artist, he is waiting for the imaginary brother who would be invented in the future.  The limited palette of black and white refers to early photographs, and to Chinese ink painting.  The image is blurred, just as the artist’s memory is no longer sharp, and also referencing the blurring of ink as it is absorbed into the paper.  Mottled forms seem to float atop the canvas, mimicking the deterioration characteristic of old photographs.  Other works in the series feature the addition of one or more “brothers.”  Tragically, it seems that bringing together lonely boys seeking the gift of companionship does not necessarily result in a connection between them:  the artist may project his dreams for a better past onto the canvas, but those dreams will remain forever unfulfilled.  With Against the Wall with My Blue Brother Li has devised a method to distinguish the boys:  he, the “real” past, is represented in black and white as in the photographs surviving from the time; the brother, or invented past, is painted in blue. 

 

Pause and Me and My Brother in the Hospital are founded in a tragic episode of the artist’s life, when he was hospitalized for several months with typhoid, which remained undiagnosed until he lay close to death. On a return visit to Guilin, Li searched for the hospital where he had stayed as a child, but it was gone.  This is not surprising given the upheaval of rapid urban development that has wracked China for the past two decades, inevitably predicated on the razing of vast swaths of old low-rise neighborhoods.  To reconstitute the destroyed physical locations of remembered events, Li has drawn settings for his paintings from magazine and newspaper photographs published during his childhood.  Match with the Bicycle, for example, is based on Li’s memory of bicycling, but with a crowd scene and tricycles excerpted from an old magazine photograph.  Although the artist is searching for an authentic setting for his remembered events, the repertoire of backgrounds is constrained by the limited, invariably upbeat government-controlled media content of the late 1970s and early 1980s.

 

With Drawbridge and Together with Yichu, Li represents imagined historical memories.  Drawbridge refers to a decisive moment in the Long March when Red Army soldiers accomplished the dangerous crossing of the Luding suspension bridge (1935):  promoted by the government, this event has become a widespread Chinese cultural memory.  Li plays with it, giving form to his childhood dream of being a hero.  Together with Yichu depicts an important but impossible personal event, the meeting of Li and his fiancée, Yichu Chen, as children—impossible because Chen is from Taiwan, and throughout their childhoods China prohibited congress with Taiwan.

 

As Tianbing Li developed the Me and My Brother series, he explored the relationship between the viewer and subject, a topic of particular importance in this series due to the artist’s complex role.  The artist’s position as both subject and viewer is explicit:  as a viewer he represents the present, assuming a crucial role as foil for the past both real and imagined or desired.  In Before the Writing, for example, the children seem trapped in an actionless vacuum between the past—represented by the propaganda slogan on the wall—and the present, where we exist.  They cannot breach the picture plane, of whose existence we are made aware by the bright squiggly things floating in space between us and them.  Emphasizing that he is as much a viewer of this series as anyone else, the artist has removed the “real” Tianbing Li from Me and My Brothers with the Tree (2008):  the purple figures are his brothers, while the grisaille boy in the middle is from a newspaper published when he was that age.  Li has stated that he takes the place of the viewer; he wants to join the boys on the tree; and all the brothers are looking out at him.

 

In his Me and My Brother series, Tianbing Li has plumbed issues crucial to art creation for hundreds of years, notably the relationship between subject and viewer, and the place of the artist within that equation.  Because we are made aware of Li’s multivalent role as subject, imagined subject, artist, and viewer, we can experiment mentally with assuming those roles ourselves.  This is an illuminating exercise both in terms of understanding the functioning of a work of art, and in terms of considering our own relationships with our pasts.  While the original premise of combining childhood portraits to build a family is ostensibly simple, the result is satisfyingly rich.  Juxtaposing this thoughtful investigation of personal and historical memory against the energetic, Daoist-inflected symbolic metaphysics of LC Body affords a sense of the complexity of human life, and the immense effort we expend coming to terms with it.  With his enormous investment of energy in investigating his personal situation, Li illuminates a path for others.

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