What do we engage in art? For Li Hongjun, who is more willing to be self-proclaimed “handicraftsman” rather than the “artist”, the act itself of “creating” art for 20 years is the answer. Compared to speculative studies and interrogate of a lot of the artists, this is a practical response. This thematic exhibition of “Into Papers”, apart from the concerns and inferring of the material itself, represents Li Hongjun’s respect for art creation itself.
Whether intentionally or unintentionally, whether consciously or unconsciously, creation of art by Li Hongjun fits the pulse on the cusp of Chinese Contemporary Art Practice——from the New Year Painting “fruitful” was selected the Sixth National Art Exhibition in 1984, to the personal care of real life scenario segment and self-absence in the “wife, children and rooster” series of oil paintings and language development of artistic expression in understanding the real life situation in “ red spider” series of installations from 1992 to 1993. If the sensitive grasp and immediate expression for painting theme and installation language had made his creation to be a valuable logic case of Chinese Contemporary Art Practice, then the return and investigation of material media itself in art language presented in “Into papers”, whether means he or Chinese Contemporary Art Practice has initiated the idea of over-expression.
Chinese Contemporary Art Practice has come to the time when our reality and life deserve more investigation to find the way of discovering and solving problems. So let’s start from the “Into papers” of Li Hongjun. Is it investigation of papers, or investigation of arts, or investigation of life, or all of them? We are waiting for the instructions from you.
Between Reality and Reverie
—— Li Hongjun’s Paper Art
by Yin Shuangxi
With the development of Chinese Contemporary Art, Li Hongjun can not be regarded as a young artist nor a latecomer of Fine Arts, who has more than 30 years’ art experiences, meanwhile, coming and going from Shaanxi province to Beijing for several times. Started from the folk paper-cutting, he has been painted fine brushwork paintings in peasantry style, made black and white wood block in Gu Yuan style, painted oil paintings similar to Kitsch Art and also done a fantastic surreal sketch “Landscape in Three Sides” in his art experiences. However, he caught people’s eye in recent years. Li Hongjun, an artist from Shaanxi province, has got his master’s degree with the major of Experimentation Art in Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2009 after he finished his study in the department of Folk Art and Experimentation Art in Central Academy of Fine Arts, eventually, accomplished his transition from folk art to contemporary art. Li Hongjun has been found the internal consistency of these two kinds of art which seems totally different in art style after experienced too much, that is, love for life, persistent pursuit for imagination and creation, and using unique symbol to express artist’s sensation and understanding of nature and society. Spider and head portrait were regarded as representations in his earlier works which showed a deep realization of life undergoing and destiny, while “Possessed by the Devil” series was the most important series which he combined folk art with West Modern Paintings together, meanwhile, possessed the nightmare traits of GOYA Art and the romantic imaginations of Chinese Traditional “Classic of Mountains and Seas” style.
In the exhibition of “the First Art Exhibition of Master’s Admission” held by Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2005, Li Hongjun’s installation “Red, White, and Black” was regarded as his first step from painting to contemporary art. First, he sprayed the oil onto flowers, and then put them into vase with the same color, displayed it on the table at last. Here, the live biology from nature was wrapped into a chemical substance after human’s behavior and then presented a mendacious hand-make conformation. Li Hongjun realized life and death, reality and illusion at the first time, that is, there was a huge difference between the intrinsic when the appearance morphology of the object is unchanged, while the difference was coexisted in the same object and in a constantly changing process. As a matter of fact, Li Hongjun has already paid attention to the isomorphic relations of heterogeneity between natural objects such as ice and water, stone and sand, dead fish and live fish in his installation “Red Spider Series No.2-5”, especially the conversion space of the existing objects such as the vacuity of life and dead, space-time distance of reality and illusion. According to this point, Li Hongjun’s works express the same idea with the German Anatomy doctor Guenter Von Hagens’s works who only displays plasticized human specimens.
In recent years, Li Hongjun’s paper installations appeared suddenly and became more and more active. It is a reasonable result which he kicks different artistic media more than 30 years and also his mastery harvest among different artistic Medias. Li Hongjun’s paper works are made of paper layer by layer, and then dig the image out, after digging the negative configuration also becomes a part of the whole work. We can say this principle is not created by Li Hongjun, is a precious heritage left by Chinese Traditional Paper-cut. I remembered that Lv Shengzhong had converted folk paper-cut into the armor-plate engraving and displayed a negative and positive shape Chihuahua in the grass in the process of the old creative practice. However, Li Hongjun’s unique exists in his visual experience of space and volume after received art trainings of academy. He converted complanate positive and negative shape into three-dimensional positive and negative shape and made it have a independent sculpture conformation, furthermore, displayed his installation works through different materials and body combinations in art space. Actually, from his “Dao·Utensils” series in 1995, he used big thick books to dig up all sorts of living appliance and then displayed books and the living appliance together. Because the scale and conformation was too small at that time, so the human image was not appeared. Although we have already known this pattern and we also have seen people used this way to take secret files and smuggle objects in the old cinema, the form of this language pattern has a decisive significance for Li Hongjun.
Once Li Hongjun converted this way into human images, the innovation of this language pattern would become a break point. When the head portrait digged up from the books sited there and watched the vacant big dictionary, even if the two hands which turn over the books, we would come into a displaced reverie space between reality and transience. Is the ideology language created by human beings agglomerating a kind of productive pattern of spiritual civilization, or the language of books forming and controlling human brain? When we see Li Hongjun’s surreal head portraits, we need to think about the civil evolution of human itself eventually result in between human beings and the creature, which is more real, and which has more possibility of historical heritage issues. The white characters created by Li hongjun with social characteristics and without costume marked self at first and adopted self-image in visualization, which seems to solve the individual confusion such as “who am I? Where am I from? Where should I go? But in my view, the audience who doesn’t know well about Li Hongjun’s characteristics can not see a concrete person. His works more like a kind of capitalized symbol of human beings, its creation and existence which seems like a sculpture has originality of ancient and immutability of future.
In his recent works, the head portraits engraved and piled up closely by paper sheets layer by layer offset apparently, and in a constant state of compression and deformation in space. Li Hongjun uses multi deformative head portraits to hint that there exists a convertible and influential possibility between human brains and their cultures, which also shows that it is a long interactive process of culture, language, ideology and the brain structure of human beings.
On condition that Li Hongjun’s works of characters have more archaeological nature of cultural anthropologic and a reflection on the state of contemporary human subsistence, I appreciate more about Li Hongjun’s recent works “Empty Hall series”. In these works, Li Hongjun never shows us a head portrait of figurative, but digs up different kinds of streamline hole and cavity through the thick square papers, accordingly has strong sculpture characteristics of minimalism and futurism temperament. Apparently, these works has a long distance with human society, but this series draw our attention on the nature itself and let us see the rich visualization created by human beings and the internal heterogeneity isomorphy of natural substance existence. The streamlined form structure especially the negative space of hole and cavity just indicates that nature is the real demiurge of form. Artist is just the emissary of demiurge, and their works are not creature but discovery, that is, showing the concealed structure of world essence to us, unfolding the visual window which sinks into the secular life, taking us in a wonderful visual world. In my opinion, the blockbuster of "Avatar," "Pirates of the dream of space" in Hollywood just use science fiction to bring us into a wonderful trip of future world. You can also feel the strong fantastic atmosphere in Li Hongjun’s works, forgetting the trivial and boring secular society temporarily.
Since the Exhibition of Contemporary Art in 1989, I have always stressed the essentiality of the innovation of art language. In the real world, there is always a wide various issues which the artists in different fields such as literature, movie and drama as well as other categories face together, well, what are the special issues needed to be solved by visual artists? In my opinion, it is just the issues of art language. The discrepancy in contemporary art is a discrepancy in the expressing way of vision
From the point of my view, Li Hongjun’s works discussed the contained “substance” through the usage of paper to express his observation and sensation of the whole world. Here, each individual imitation of objects is realistic, but the combination of different paper materials is subjective, works show Li Hongjun’s stirring independent consideration, that is, his cognition of discrepancy for human beings and nature, living supplies and art works. Human image interweaves with the creatures of himself in his works, but we would not consider the concealed Arcanum of existence because we are accustomed to see it in our daily life. However, Li Hongjun shows the most important invention “Paper” of human civilization in front of our eyes again after deconstruction, displacement and recombination, let us pays more attention and ponders to it when we are amazing.
Li Hongjun said: “The ultimate pursuit goal of artist is not ‘material’, but to achieve attention on the human spirit under ‘material’ form. So my greatest wish is to insist on my current creation ideas, seek expression in my vision, experience and knowledge, especially concern issues related to spiritual levels with my own vision and methods.” Li Hongjun’s series of paper installations, such as “Self”, “Inside and outside”, “Moved Paper”, “Empty Hole”, “Dilatant Paper”, etc, are all around a paper head-portrait, to explore the extreme of paper media cutting and three-dimensional sculpture. We can regard paper portrait as self-discussion, comparison and exchanges between self and virtual reality. Li Hongjun discovers a three-dimensional modeling language in engraving stack in paper-cut of Chinese folk art, focuses on the study of complex shapes, positive and negative forms, and the offset and overlapped image generated by cutting layers of papers.
Li Hunjun’s art removes the established form and returns to the origin of emotion, respects self-sense, opens mind space, reaches the reconstruction beyond media. His practice tells us that the concept of art resides only in practical object and it is realized by artistic hands. The artist’s cultural intuition is not only for material, but also for voluminous hand-made experience, they constitute an important aspect of art. Artists can reach the realm of ecstasy in the ongoing dialogue with the materials and production. Since the 20th century, Chinese art has been using thought themes and social issues as its criteria of value judgment, the depth of theme interpretation and intensity of criticism are set as the criteria of value. Contemporary art since 1989 is a sensitive response to social change using modern art means and language. In judging the value of contemporary art works, we often wonder between artist’s social criticism point and language expression level. I have been expecting pure, technical and linguistic artists. Some would say there is no pure linguistic artist, art is something comprehensive. But we can not consider social, critical artists, about whose art media and linguistic skills we can’t talk. Today Chinese contemporary art should bring up “experimentation” again. This experimentation is in terms of artistic expression, and in the level of artistic language and methodology. This is artist’s strength and the essence of his recognition in the art history. As Xu Bing said: “artist's skill is having an understanding of this era overstep that of most people, and knowing how to convert to a novel artistic language”. Li Hongjun’s works show us new things with a trend, that is, the new generation of artists begin to walk out the map expression of ideology and grand narrative of nationalism, more submerging in the exploration of art language and experiments of new expressing techniques. After the first decade of the 21st century was over, facing the new decade, we look forward to the growth of a number of artists with truly independent creativity and artistic imagination, and expect them to go beyond fame and fortune, make some more interesting works. Today, facing the impetuous enthusiasm of contemporary art exhibitions, we need to return to art itself.
Oct. 19, 2010
Yin Shuangxi the Professor of Central Academy of Fine Arts, a Critic and Curator
