An album found - Interview with li tianbing 2009
    PARIS JULY 2009
     
    J:  All through your creative procedure you had tried various and completely different styles before 2007, from a series of blue flowers and birds to the LC House-made series with a black background. Heads are distorted in the portraits using hair as the material, and there are a number of black and white oil paintings, including head portraits of criminals, babies, rural laborers and prostitutes. You have been working on the children series since 2007. This is the longest period you have worked on one and the same series, and it contains the richest works, why?
     
    B:  Before, I had focused on changing painting techniques, trying to probe into problems from different views. While painting in two dimensions, the brush moves on a plane. However, we don't  spend as much energy on the movement into the depth of three dimensions when most of our energy is spent on the movement on one plane. Therefore, in 2007, I was attempting to find the key of moving to the depth of three dimensions. In my effort of further exploration, I thought of my childhood, which includes countless memories and feelings of my own, but it is somewhat mysterious and remote in time. That is why it improves my potential of imagination. Before, I had focused on studying different styles. But this series emphasizes rather the personal factors, on which I explored my emotions. Certainly, in these two years, I have still been working on the painting of my LC series (LC head portrait, body, cave). They complete each other mutually with the childhood series.
     
    J:  Then I'd like to carry on our conversation on your childhood series. First of all, I 'd like to evoke the question of the origins and  the context of your creativity and your motives. It's palpable that this series contains head portraits that look very similar at first sight but yet they are not the same. They are portrayed in different scenes. Do they have a real or a fancied source?
     
    B:  People born in the same period as me have no brothers and sisters. China's "one couple  one child" policy is still effective. I don't intend to discuss this topic from a political point of view. However, I'd like to represent my personal view of it. Generally, little boys are all naughty. My father was a serviceman, and my mother a Chinese language teacher; they contributed to the serious air of my family. The only way for a naughty boy to have pleasure in a lonely and serious environment was to free his imagination to please himself. The bed of my parents became my trench, where I fought against the enemy with my imaginary brothers, play chess with them, and paint what we like on the ground and the wall ... My main childhood memory is that I was living, left alone by myself, at the edge of the real and the virtual world, bridging over the gap between them. It is really miserable that this was the result of a social force, and not the choice of the family. My self-amusement was a lifestyle in the society of that time. Camera was a luxury in those days. You could only find it in a state-owned photo gallery. Generally, people would not go to a photo gallery except for having to get a photo taken for an identity card. My father served at the Department of Propaganda of the army. Sometimes he took home the only camera of the army to take some photos of me at the age of three, four and five. I have to thank my father, for these photos are the most important records of my childhood. Based on these illegible photos, I was able to use my rich imagination to create different scenes one by one on the canvas. My childhood seemed to be enriched and actualized due to the establishment of these scenes. Each boy or girl today will have an album of his or her up-growth. But I only have these five small photos taken before the age of seven. This blank belongs not only to me, but also to the whole Chinese generation of mine. I tried to fill up this gap with my painting, and to purge the loneliness of my childhood. As a magic drug, it makes my childhood seem perfect. Therefore, in fact, this series is a complement to my family album.
     
    J:  While painting these series, how do  you re-construct the different backgrounds? I would like to know your painting process. It must be connected to photography. Some of your paintings look like amplified photos from far away.
     
    B:  As I am making up an album,  I adapted some methods of black and white photography to painting. Old photos are often illegible caused by the lack of defined outlines. The effects of blurry black and white often give people more space to use their imagination and emotions. In order to re-construct the backgrounds of my past, I often toured the place where I used to live. Generally, I got nothing from such touring, because in more than twenty years' urbanization in China, these places have completely changed. I looked up a big amount of pictures and data of the 1970s and the 1980s, gradually establishing my library. However, this is far from being sufficient. So, I would often go to remote villages in the mountains that have been effected little by urbanization, so that I could still observe many scenes of the 1970s and the 1980s, and play with the children there. Just like producing a film, I set the scenes, and designed alterations to them. Sometimes my father would go with me to help setting the scene. I have accumulated massive pictures and data in this way. Later I began to select and re-organize these data. Step by step,  a  background prototype for  paintings came to existence. I thought that these photos could be used in an album separately. Therefore we could say that my paintings have a close relationship with photography.
     
    J:  In your oil paintings we often spot some black speckles, that seem to evoke how time wears everything, or how careless painting results in incidental defects in the photo. Some black and white photos of Araki Nobuyoshi have this effect on purpose.
     
     
    B:  I remember that once when I was viewing the photos taken of the criminals shot at the period of the Khmer Rouge, I found that almost every photo had such black speckles of different sizes. I was shocked a lot. These irregular speckles, which seem to have been left inadvertently, impress people with a destroying force which cannot be defined, a kind of horror coming from nowhere, and a fear from a merciless future. So I borrowed them for my painting to express a destroying strength from nowhere that cannot be demonstrated. It penetrates and taints gradually. Perhaps it symbolizes  memory that gets destroyed as time passes by, or the harm done to a person by the social system, or both.
     
    J:  Besides, when we look at the pictures carefully, we find some colorful toys floating in the air, and they  interact with the figures in the painting. How do you explain their presence in your paintings?
     
    B:  All through my childhood I was longing for toys. Today in the homes with children there are toys of dinosaurs, transformers, cannons stacked up to the ceiling etc. But we had none because of poverty. During my childhood toys were luxuries that could only be viewed, not touched. My father made a wooden pop- gun for me. That was the only toy of my childhood. My world was torn apart when I lost it. Later I had no toys. As a man in his thirties, I like collecting toys, painting toys, which is to amend the shortage of my past at a certain degree. Therefore these toys appeared in my paintings to make up my album, filling up the gap of the past with modern popular toys in a antagonistic way. The paintings show time spans and the co-existence of different eras.
     
    J:  You  began the children series in about 2006. Could you explain how the series evolved and what its starting-points were?
     
    B:  In fact I attempted several head portraits of babies when I painted the head portraits of criminals in 2003. But than I decided to put them aside.  My interest in Beizitou—One Hundred Children, the ancient folk painting of China, started to grow in 2006. I attempted to paint a modern Beizitou. In 2006 I held an exhibition called Beizitou at the gallery Kashya Hildebrand in New York. The head portraits in black and white of many children were exhibited on a wall. I hadn't known those children. Gradually, I began to think over my own childhood. So I began to paint myself in 2007, a black and white child standing lonely at a station. Step by step my imaginary brothers started to join me. As they are imaginary, they look like ghosts. I gave them colors and put them into different backgrounds, all constructed by me, making them interactive. It resulted in "Me and My Brother" exhibited at the gallery LM Art in 2008. Later I expanded the scenes into three directions: hospital, battle and comic book ( especially for children). Now I am about to concretize each series. In these series the environment and the air that set off the themes gain more and more importance.
     
    J:  Would you mind talking about these three series in detail?
     
    B:  The hospital series is dedicated to my experience of a half a year that I spent separated in a military hospital for typhoid as a boy. This experience occupied an important page of my childhood, for then I felt the threat of death and a deep loneliness for the first time. The small blackboard covered by the names of the dead and exposed at the gate still remains specially vivid in my mind. I was unable to find any record about this experience. The hospital where I had once received treatment has been re-built. I had to lean on my memory and some old data and photos to recover the environmental background of this period.
     
    Little boys are born to play, and I wasn't an exception. In the 1970s and the 1980s we had no virtual computer world to play network games. I had to construct imaginary enemies and friends in my mind. My imagination thus grew stronger and stronger. I remember that at that time, every day I was busy with painting or fancying battles. At dinner I would planish the rice in the bowl, and then dig out trenches by chopsticks. I imagined myself to be one of the children who played in the field, and went to the Tian'anmen Square (The Battle Before Tian'anmen). As being remote to Beijing, Tian'anmen was an utopia that I couldn't reach at that time. So I made up this scene.
     
    For the comic book series, I have just begun. As a special kind of book published in China at that time, comic books have practically disappeared for today. However, when I was a boy, comic books could be seen everywhere in the streets. One could borrow them from many booths. They were the Chinese version of cartoons. Historical and revolutionary stories contributed to a major part of the contents of these comic books. For me they were the models to mimic when doodling. They were my teachers that taught me the earliest techniques of painting. Therefore the three series that I have undertaken correspond to the three major parts of my childhood that I have got from collecting and combing during memory recovery. I use them to make my related memories concrete gradually. 
     
    J:  You have said that in these two years you have still been developing the LC series. I have appreciated some works of this series, finding a completely different style, or even an opposite one: one with expressive and vivid colors. One would wrong them to be works of another artist at first sight. However, further observation will find some common points at brush using and detail painting, for example the painting of some small objects and toys, the effect of blurry movement created by big brushstrokes. Meanwhile we may see many expressive brushstrokes in the children series that are special characteristics of the LC series. Could you demonstrate how you have created these two different series and what other internal connections can be established between them?
     
    B:  The LC series will develop towards the head portrait, body and underground landscape. The head portrait and body painting both belong to the field of self-portrait, showing the current status of mine. Relatively speaking, the children series talks about my past. I  always make efforts to view myself from different angles. As said by a Chinese proverb "The childhood determines one's whole life, and the hoof decides the performance of a horse." Actually, a person has his character basically formed in his childhood. Therefore I observed my personal development as a play-back. What's my current status? We may describe it by two words  - "Collision and confrontation". I spend half my life in Beijing, and the other half in the western world. I had received my primary education in China, and then studied western art for six years at Les Beaux-Arts de Paris in France. As a person that had already lived in two worlds with different values and cultural backgrounds, I experienced the collision of races, and the confronting and surrendering of cultures. So this kind of bumping strength seems to be bursting in the works of the LC series, either the head portraits or the body paintings. While painting, I peeled myself, finding myself to be a mixture of various cultures. This is the anatomy of my current Self. The representation of the underground symbolizes the values buried inside of me, as a continuation of the LC landscape series. In 2008, at the gallery LM Art the two completely different series were exhibited. LC Body was exhibited on the second floor, facing Drawbridge. Talking about artistic methods and expression styles they are two extremes, but they also complete each other mutually. After having finished several works in black and white, in a realistic and rational way, I needed a place to release my suppressed colors, my expressionism and sensibility. So I  continued the LC series at hand. We can see how, in this interaction, the colors of the LC series gradually penetrated the children series. The early children of a single color were followed by the colorful backgrounds of comic books. Meanwhile, the photographic, blurry method of the children series gradually became an integral part of the LC series. 
     
    J:  Among the various art media available today, why did you choose painting? What's your opinion about contemporary painting?
     
     
    B:  In art, all media have an equal position. Only they are different in their styles of expression. The only thing we should note is that the style of expression should correspond to the contents to be expressed. Painting is kind of a manual and relatively primitive way of expression. Every inch on the canvas is constituted of manual brushsrokes, all of them affected by the painter's moods. Even a fraction of a minute's emotional movement will be displayed on the canvas. I find, observing the same photo, that the paintings that result from it express  different things. The moods expressed by a head portrait can only be confirmed when the painting is finished. At the beginning I did not know why. Gradually I realized that in fact my personal mood influenced what I was painting. This is the miracle brought to me by the medium of painting - the uncertainty. We could never control or plan it. Certainly, I could create the scenes based on digital photos in a completely planned, controlled and precise way, wherein the image of each head portrait means the repeated copying. This is what I do as a preparation for a painting, but not my final goal. I want to interact with the canvas while reconstructing another world, to talk to it and to study from each other. The uncertainty of painting leads me to a new place, where I have another attempt to continue. It's like a friend that I may talk to all day. The canvas of oil painting allows several attempts. It can be covered repeatedly, and every new layer makes it richer. During the process of reconstruction of the scenes of my childhood, every detail is full of uncertainties, and each thing under brush is gradually formed in the battle against this uncertainty. Certainly, as an ancient media, it is quite difficult for a painter to create great, innovative achievements. Especially the portrait painting has been prevailing for thousands of years. Sometimes, when a kind of art style is combined with commercial profit, it  becomes fashion and trend, rising fast, but falling even faster. Contemporary painting might be influenced by  these trends. The most difficult thing for a painter is to stand above these trends and act following his own values.
Back
备案号:桂ICP备11006966号-1   技术支持:亿星网络