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.

Conclusion

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.

[i] E-mail from Tianbing Li to the author, 24 February 2008.

[ii] Much information concerning the artist’s life and the meaning of particular paintings is drawn from e-mail correspondence and telephone conversations between Tianbing Li and the author, 23 February – 6 March 2008.

[iii] E-mail from Tianbing Li to the author, 24 February 2008.

[iv] E-mail from Tianbing Li to the author, 6 March 2008.