We Have Betrayed the Revolution
In the wake of the near disastrous reception of the exhibition The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art, at the Saatchi Gallery in 2008–2009, contemporary art from the People’s Republic of China has had something of a bad press internationally. Indeed, one anonymous commentator has recently described contemporary art from China as nothing short of the worst case of subprime realty currently for sale on the international art market. Li Songsong’s exhibition at Pace, London suggests that such criticism is, in part at least, misplaced.
Li’s paintings command a significant physical presence. All of the paintings included in the exhibition at Pace involve pictorial representation on a notionally flat surface. Most, however, are exceptionally large and the quantities of oil paint applied to their surfaces are so substantial as to exceed the usual meaning of the term ‘impasto’. Many are also made up of numerous overlapping aluminium sheets fitted together conspicuously like so many plates along the side of an armoured ship. When viewed anamorphically from the side, this combination of exceptional size, painterly excess and overtly modular construction overwrites the illusory aspects of Li’s work, projecting it firmly into the realms of the sculptural. Li’s signature method of constructing his paintings from a serial accumulation of individually considered and successively completed panels, also results in an unusual ‘all-over’ uniformity of realisation. Consequently, when seen from in front, Li’s paintings appear by turns as coherent pictorial wholes and, through the inescapable push and pull of figures and grounds, as fragmentary collections of disparate parts.
Li’s works are most insistently―and as the artist himself would have us see them―manifestations of intense labour. Li is (what was once referred to in less ‘conceptual’