Interview: Li Gang on Seeing the World With a Different Slant

    Li Gang's "Beads" installed at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing

by Clare Pennington

Published: February 21, 2013

BEIJING — Discussing his piece “Beads” (2012), one of several works that will be on view at the exhibition “Lateral Edge” at Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing (March 2 through April 29), artist Li Gang says: “It’s about the paths and points of change in our lives that determine where we go and what we become.”

Which is something that the 26-year-old painter/photographer/sculptor knows well about. In 2008, Li arrived in Beijing with just 6,000RMB ($960) in his pocket; by the end of the week, he was living in a dingy underground room with just 40RMB ($6.50) to spare. Just in time, he met noted Chinese performance artist He Yunchang (also known as A Chang). “He told me I needed a job, and asked me to work in his studio,” Li explains. Working for the photographer in Caochangdi, Li rented a closet-sized space round the corner in which to create his own work. But, “nobody wanted to show my art,” Li says. “Even the galleries with bad shows in 798 [Beijing art district], they didn’t want me.” After having saved enough money, he left the job to study at theCentral Academy of Fine Art.

But then, a year later, gallery owner Urs Meilepaid a visit to He Yunchang and spotted one of Li’s works hanging in the photographer’s personal collection. He asked to meet with the artist; and just a few days later, Li was preparing for his first-ever solo exhibition at Meile’s Lucerne branch.

Preparing now for his second solo exhibition, the floor inside the Caochangdi exhibition space is scattered with cork-colored wooden spheres, some as small as a string of pearls amongst a few larger, beach-ball sized globes. “Beads” took just under a year to complete, and began with the artist’s return to his hometown of Dali in Yunnan Province.
After searching for a specimen of tree that had died naturally, Li ran across a Tiangtang Shu (“Tree of Paradise”) and took it apart, carefully carving the nodes where each branch connected into spheres.

There is something elemental about the wooden spheres, which were left untreated for their natural tactility and lightness, and are cracked and pierced with natural holes. The tiny pinpoints represent moments of transformation, bursts of energy and change that occurred at certain points in time. 

Many of the other pieces on display also make use of links and associations. Li’s own favorite piece in the exhibition, “Ridge” (2012), is an installation made of two stones connected by epoxy, painted using creams and grays. While the initial effect of the piece is something akin to an open circle of bones hung on the wall, Li’s own intention, he says, “was more about the process of connecting two things.”

The artist adds, “Originally I was also thinking of doing it with apples, or with fake human skulls. When I’d made one, and a friend commented it looked like a bone, so I asked ten more people to come over and have a look, and they all agreed. But it wasn’t part of my intention.” The rough edges of the stones and subtly contrasting mottled grays, browns, creams, and soft reds, relate to Li’s ongoing fascination with textural detail. “Using something similar to a black and white palette is about exploring the subtle relationship between colors and shades — it’s not about only the colors in themselves,” he explains.

Other paintings meant to call attention to texture and perception include blown-up sections of works by other artists, what Li terms a “new slant”: “Big Moustache” (2012) is a close-up on a section of a mustache from a Rembrandt painting. “Green Vase” enlarges a section of the handle in a smaller painting of a jug to encompass an entire 71-by-63 inch canvas. On both, oil paint is applied directly to canvases weaved from thick rope, rather than cotton or linen. In contrast to his installation work, however, these fall a bit flat; once you’ve figured out the trick and can envision the wider picture, they seem less mature.

In fact, though Li originally trained as a painter, he believes that breaking free of working purely on canvas is what led him to begin creating more sophisticated work. “The most important thing,” Li says, “is the chain of thoughts your work can instill in others.” By making his own creative connections explicit to others in his work, he hopes that he’ll be continually pushed to create innovative, thoughtful art.

“I don’t want what I tackle to become narrower as I develop as an artist,” he says. “Each time I make a work of art, I want something that can make people look at their relationship with the world around them in a fresh, new way.”

“Lateral Edge” runs from March 2 through April 29 at Galerie Urs Meile

Originally posted in Artinfo.

Q&A: Composer Liang Lei on Beijinghua, Peking Opera, and Missing Home

    Composer Liang Lei (Photo by Ron Jones)

 

by Clare Pennington

Published: February 17, 2013

BEIJING — Liang Lei, the Chinese-born composer known for his visionary and explorative compositions, had one of his earliest pieces played in China for the first time this year. “Dialectal Percussions,” which takes its inspiration from the local Beijing dialect (also known as Beijinghua), was composed in 1994, but was heard by a Beijing audience for the first time this January at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art.

The Rome Prize and Aaron Copland Award-winner, who now lives permanently in America, spoke to ARTINFO about operating in a globalized music scene, his cultural heritage and what it was like growing up amongst his generation of composers.

You wrote this piece when you were 22. What about “Dialectal Percussions” marks it as emerging from this point in your life and career? 

My sense of home-seeking was becoming more and more acute. I left Beijing when I was 17. Around the time I composed this piece, I was listening to a lot of cassette tapes of Peking Opera and Xiangsheng (a kind of Chinese stand-up comedy that makes use of puns and allusions, also known as Cross-talk).

Perhaps that was a way for me to relive my memories of Beijing. Only after I left China, did I start to miss Beijing so much. Growing up there, I used to dislike the Beijing dialect, thinking it too unfriendly to outsiders.

But when I discovered some old recordings of Hou Baolin's Xiangsheng (Hou Baolin, who died in 1993, was one of China’s most illustrious Xiangsheng performers), I started to feel the warmth of the dialect radiating through time. I fell in love with these sounds again and started appreciating their dramatic delivery and musicality. Along with Peking Opera [performances] by Mei Lanfang, this was a way of home-seeking. 

What was it about the dialect that attracted you? 

I was mesmerized by its dramatic effects in intonation, rhythmic articulation, and musical expressivity. Some of the materials are from Beijinghua, some from Peking Opera. I extracted those moments that were particularly attractive, and isolated them in my composition. Using music, I framed these moments with silences, as if I was using a magnifying glass to look at the details of this language in slow motion.

You have been commended for being truly cross-cultural in your compositions. Is this aspect of your music important to you?

What is important for me is to avoid using Chinese references as labels or national flags in the music. Whether it is Chinese, American or European doesn't matter at all, provided it is interesting.

The reason is that I think it is easier to provoke reactions by using cultural labels — but these labels are, more often than not, crude generalizations and misleading simplifications. It is more challenging and rewarding artistically to penetrate those juxtapositions, and to create works that are real hybrids both musically and aesthetically.

What marks out your generation of musicians from your forefathers? 

It is hard to speak for my generation, so I can only try to speak for myself. My predecessors have an enormous influence on me. But our age, and the intellectual, technological, and cultural resources are vastly different from what they were 20 years ago.

When I left China 23 years ago, the country had just started on its path to today's prosperity. Until then, I had never visited an open-shelf library in China. When I was in college in the US, the best way for me to study the Buddhist scriptures or Chinese literary treatises was by borrowing books from the Yenching Library at Harvard and hand-copying them.

Today, I still think that is the best way to learn, but at the same time, all of these resources are easily available on the internet. We live in a global age with almost immediate access to unlimited resources. This only makes me realize that I cannot satisfy myself by using cultural labels to communicate with my audience — they deserve better. 

They have seen much more of the world than they would have done 20 years ago, so these labels are hardly exotic anymore. Today's audience is more sophisticated and deserves musical dialogues that are more in depth and meaningful, which generate truly new and innovative experiences. 

“Dialectal Percussions” is for the following percussion instruments: the temple bell, 5tempbl, tam-t, tom-t, bng, b.d, xiao luo or small gongs, da luo or big gongs, two xiao bo or small cymbals, and peng zhong or Buddhist chanting bells (a pair). 

Originally posted in Artinfo China

Peng Tao Picks The Top Five Chinese Documentaries

Chinese director Peng Tao

by Clare Pennington
Published: January 29, 2013

BEIJING ― Chinese documentary cinema is gradually gaining international recognition, with films like  “Up the Yangtze” and “Last Train Home” winning awards overseas and thereby reaching a wide international audience.

But these films spring from a 20 year legacy of documentary making in China that remains largely undiscovered, in large part because the films were never cleared by the Chinese film bureau, and thus couldn’t be shown in cinemas in the country where they were made. ARTINFO asked director Peng Tao to give us an education in the best of early Chinese documentaries.

Peng is described as one of China’s New Urban Generation, mostly documentary film makers working at the close of the 20th century. Like many of his contemporaries, Peng began by crafting documentary films for the state owned China Central Television (CCTV) before later turning to a career in independent film making.

“Chinese documentary cinema was completely revolutionized in the late ’90s and 2000s in China. Suddenly everyone could own a camera because of digital technology. So we are also known as the D Generation,” says Peng. “We could afford to go and make something that was for ourselves.

1. “The Other Bank”, 1994, directed by Jiang Yue

Filmed in 1993, “The Other Bank” follows a group of young actors who studied drama at the Beijing Film Academy.  Some of them stay on to perform the play “The Other Bank” written by Gao Xingjian (later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature).

But Jiang doesn’t leave his subjects in the elation of their avant-garde theater debut. The film goes on to examine both the art of acting, and the challenges of breaking from the working class into the intellectual class of artists, which also promises financial gains. We see each penniless young actor fail, as they eventually return to work in factories or farms when their next performance prospect falls through.

What Peng says: “This is an independently produced documentary that tells the story of a group of kids from outside Beijing who failed to get into university but are trying to achieve their dream of stardom. I saw this film nearly 20 years ago, and I found very moving. It made an impression on me that remains with me to this day.”

2. “Dream walking”, 2005, directed by Huang Wenhai

This black and white documentary, a sequel to the director’s earlier film “Floating Dust”, seeks to show what it means to survive in China as an artist.

“Dream Walking” features four artists who move from Beijing to Henan province for the summer. Three visual artists and a poet are shown working on their own projects and discussing their understanding of the meaning of art in their society. The film is a record of the chaos and tumult in contemporary China as seen by artists. 

What Peng says: “Here a group of idealistic artists find clarity in art, as they explore their reality and their convictions. This film really made me look at myself and the way in which artists survive in China. Artists here are jsut a bunch of poor wretches.”

3. “For every minute that I live, I’ll enjoy the 60 seconds,” 2006, by Zhang Zhanqing 

Da Gang has just come into his forties. He’s divorced, has lost his job and his mother suffers from mental illness. A story both distressing and yet imbued with a deep sense of hope, we see Da Gang living on the edge as he tries to scrape a living in the morning and spends the rest of the day at underground clubs and drinking. 

The title for the film is the maxim by which he lives, as he seeks to forget the pains of his divorce and his financial failure.

What Peng says: “The protagonist takes a naïve, trusting and very basic approach to life, blocking out the past, and basically indulging himself where he can. In a way, this film made me feel happy. It shows a victim of circumstances doing what he can to stay hopeful.”

4. “Crime and Punishment”, 2007, directed by Zhao Liang

Set in a police station in Northeast China, Zhao managed to get the footage for this film by telling the police he was doing research for a fictional screenplay. A study of power, “Crime and Punishment,” shows the police interrogating petty criminals, going about their daily routines and in some scenes beating up the people they have arrested.

What Peng says: “This film takes place in a police station in Northern China, one that is just like any other, in any corner of the country.

“You see how they work on a daily basis for the government to control people, to maintain social stability and you get a a sense of their own idea of what their responsibilities are. This is a really excellent film, and I think its director, Zhao Liang, is probably the best in China after Wang Bing, famous for his film “The Ditch” about Chinese labor camps.”

5. “Dr Ma’s Country Clinic,” 2007, Directed by Cong Feng

Filmed in a small rural town in China’s Western province of Gansu, “Dr Ma’s Country Clinic” is the story of Doctor Ma Bingcheng and his patients. The film offers slice-like insights into the patients’ lives and their contemporary rural society, as they queue and gossip about the best and worst of their experiences with each other.

What Peng says: “A warm and heartfelt documentary of the people and landscapes of China’s rural West, this film has a powerful visual impact. Cong Feng is a good friend, and in this film I could really see the enthusiasm he has for his art.”

Originally posted in Artinfo China.