Schoeni Art Gallery is delighted to announce Li Hongbo’s first solo show in Hong Kong. In Self, Li Hongbo explores the concept of human identity through the prism of nations or races and cultural expressions with or without borders, such as violence, religion or philosophy. The artist has transformed the material of paper into artworks, playing with its appearance and cultural connotations, making it his artistic language.
Li Hongbo uses a variety of artistic expressions in Self: either reinterpreting a masterpiece, reinventing his own sculptures of a girl or creating new works that resemble the actual model or not. Three of the works are made from international newspapers collected worldwide in different countries and cities from all continents. In Dance, five countries of origin of the material were selected to represent the permanent members of the United Nations, whereas in Me and Stone, they were purposely mixed up all together to convey diversity and render the notion of origin meaningless.
Reflecting on his first visit to Hong Kong, and how multi-national he felt the city was and how people of different origins interacted, Me is a series that represent the commonly distinguished five races through the presentation of four women, which have ethnical features and skin colour rendered on the surface of the paper instead of resembling a wood carved figure as in the artist’s previous rendering of the human figure. In terms of content in Me, Li Hongbo objectifies the racial distinction and makes it meaningless by focusing on the individuality and how it inescapably ties up to society. Indeed, all four are intertwined by the presentation the artist chose, playing on his material expandability and flexibility.
Stone is an attempt at mimicking real stones. The metaphor here dwells on the cultural and on Asian concepts. To him a stone is both vibrant and calm, carries presence or absence of meaning. Such ying and yang like distinction is not the sole philosophical reference stone inspires. In China, stone is present in many ways notably in the scholars’ culture.
In this exhibition, the artwork Bullet is part of a body of work representing destructive weapons. Appearances are played upon like in an earlier work that was recently shown at the Biennale of Sydney (2012), which was made of brightly coloured papers guns and bullets, like paper toys and festive decorations, which inspired the artists to work with honeycomb paper in the first place. The non-resemblance to the real object is the artist’s point. This work and its presentation refer to culture, violence and worship.
In this show, through different representations of Humanity, Li Hongbo brings up different concepts and distinctions all man-made and all linked to the individual and its relation to a larger community through culture, religion, geography or history.
