The world of Li Jikai’s is definitely not a happy one. While the idea of childhood generally conveys images of smiling children playing with teddy bears and fluffy sheep in a palette colored landscape, or, if thinking about China, of a generation of happy brats spoiled by their extended family, the loner kid who is the protagonist of Li’s paintings lives in a dysfunctional space littered with debris and stones, in a moonlike environment streaked by sadness and brooding. He is invariably alone, surrounded by a world which is disintegrating: walking, or lying on heaps of rubble, barely afloat in the midst of a flood or resting in a stony desert. His life is often at risk, either by drowning, burning or lightning. Desolation and alienation exude from every detail in these images which tend to dissolve in dripping monochrome surfaces. Li’s world is mostly beige, black and grey and his child is lost in a dreamy state that reminds of a nightmare.
The bright colors and shiny textures which have become a defining element of much contemporary Chinese painting are nowhere to be seen in these works. Li Jikai belongs to the younger generation of the Sichuan school, a group of oil painters who graduated from the Sichuan Academy of Fine Art and who have helped turning Chinese art into a sensation in the last decade: artists such as Zhang Xiaogang, Zhou Chunya, Guo Jin, Guo Wei, Xin Haizhou and Zhao Nengzhi, just to name the most famous. It is by now clear that this school can compete, if not outshine, in its output of talented painters and their impeccable technical abilities with the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, considered the most prestigious art school in China. But paintings from Chengdu or Chongqing are quite different from what is produced in Beijing: while painters there are concerned with a certain stylistic classicism in their compositions and are often engaged in grand historical narratives, even when projected on the everyday life, artists from Sichuan are intrigued by different aspects of the existential condition Their painting is more introvert and escapes an easy thematic categorization: it’s definitely not political or related to any particular social condition (as it often the case in Beijing). It’s not iconic and it does not use specific stylistic references associable with a school or movement. Their works mostly features inconsequential details of everyday life or the deformed representation of the artists’ peers. Subject matter often convey a sense of doom and despair projected through the troubled description of a spineless youth.
While the rest of the world seems to have abandoned the medium of painting to favor more trendy forms of expression such as media art and installation, China is the only place where oil remains the most sought after artistic discipline for young aspiring artists and where the largest number of successful oil painters is still trained. If we think that oil painting did not exist in this country before the end of the 19th century, we can understand how sensational this new phenomenon in fact is. As an art historian of Chinese modern art, I pay attention to lineage, by this meaning the relation existing between students and teachers, and which approach can be identified in the art of a certain artist in reference to the place where he or she was trained. The Sichuan Art Academy was founded in part by artists returning from Yan’An, the guerrilla base in Northern China that Mao reached in 1935 at the end of the Long March and which he and his troops left in 1948 to reach Beijing and establish the People’s Republic in 1949. During the so called Yan’An period (1936-1948) the preferred form of art of the Communist republic was woodblock, not oil painting. Through its wartime validation woodblock then acquired a revolutionary status that made it the most revered genre during the first years of the People’s Republic: while oil was the language of rulers and established elites, woodblock and all forms of print media became the true language of the people. During the 1950s and early 1960s the Sichuan academy surged to fame at a national level for its printmaking production, stimulated by the presence of many Yan’An returnees artists in its faculty. More than oil, a new and intimidating import technique, woodblock provided a venue where some aspects of traditional visual practices could be channeled into a modern artistic language. With its focus on the use of lines and its natural predisposition to flatness, this genre was better equipped to continue some of the constitutive elements of the tradition of ink painting. Oil, on the other hand, being mainly conceived to render space and volumes, was less suitable to develop the traditional Chinese visual heritage. Moreover, while oil was a completely new technique embodying a totally different philosophy, woodblock already existed in China since earlier times. In reference to Li Jikai’s work, I would actually like to argue that contemporary artistic expressions in China appear more creative and original where woodblock, not oil painting, exerted some kind of influence.
In Li Jikai’s work the century-old dilemma that tormented generations of Chinese artists, i.e. the inherent opposition between Western and traditional painting practices - a debate which in the 1950s was called ‘the nationalization of oil painting’- seems to have been finally resolved. Or at least this artist seems pretty nonchalant about it. Fully in control of the oil painting medium, Li plays with it with the relaxed attitude typical of his generation, unaffected by its once sacred quality and the rigor of its technical basis. As in the genre of ink painting, he spills paint on the canvas without an apparently pre-established agenda, producing effects that are graphically striking in their hybrid character. This results is a series of works possessing an enhanced graphic value, often highlighted by the flatness of his figures and the monochromatic value of his compositions. By scratching, cracking or dripping the painterly surface (see for example Ray of Light (2009) and The Boy and Mushrooms (2009) Li reaches a line-textured effect that seems to be indebted to printmaking practices.
While his teachers grew up looking at propaganda posters, Li is often associated with the cartoon generation, young artists around the world – primarily in Japan – whose formative visual environment largely consisted of cartoons and animation. The combination of a surface-liquefying technique with the cartoon-like precision of the image of the young boy is nonetheless disconcerting. In The Boy and the Mushrooms (2009) for example, the even surfaces of the pale blue background and the flesh color of the mushroom top contrast eerily with the dripping heap of the mound where the child sits: there is always the feeling that something is wrong, or does not fit, but it is impossible to pin down what exactly that is. After tempting the viewer to a random search for specific patterns of derivation (is that Pollock? Shi Tao? Kiefer? Yoshitomo Nara?) Li’s paintings do not meet any specific stylistic attribution: all the above mentioned styles could actually apply to these works and yet none of them ‘just’ fits. Quite extraordinary is the ease, not to say the carelessness, with which Li Jikai appropriates all these other languages, and yet succeeds in producing something that exceeds the mere sum of all of them.
A disquieting aspect of these painting which is successfully echoed by their indefinite stylistic character, is the introspective quality of their subject matter. Who is this child? Why is he so lonely and unhappy? How much does his status reflects the artist’s mood and his attitude towards life? And are these even legitimate questions to ask? Judging from a statement published by the artist under the title ‘The source of my art’ they are not. Li Jikai says that he does not really care about having a plan or a direction, that he has learned to accept his own hopelessness, and value his own psychological state as it is. The impossibility of a condition of maturity and self-confidence is then the focus of these images. The child looks as if he could be happy: he is nicely dressed and looks well fed, so we can not make him the victim of some kind of social inequality or exploitation. And yet he reminds us of a ghost, or even a little zombie sometimes, like in Reflection and Empty Net (2009) where he looks as if emerging from, or being sucked in, a mesh of cobwebs, staring at us as if he was dead. Or like in the painting A Boy (2009) where the subject is actually another painting, a cracking portrait that makes the boy look like as if he was not there anymore. But we can’t really know for sure and that is not even the point, anyway. It is then the uselessness of these representations which appears to be Li Jikai’s main statement about accepting his own hopelessness and his desire not to be bothered by major plans and grand missions: like a Chinese Peter Pan that only wants to be left alone.
Leiden, March 2010
