Any order seems to aim at perfect fairness, but it can’t escape the trap of rigidity; this is true for painting as well. So why should one still want to paint? There are a multitude of answers to that question, and everyone has its own; like our present world, there is a beginning but no end. Li Jikai’s answer is just one among many, but he proclaims it with his art, striving to be clear and explicit.
After he obtained his master degree at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in2004, Li Jikai silently immersed himself in creation in Wuhan, and he enjoyed very much his life in the studio, clinging tenaciously and firmly to his ideas. From the beginning he has been anti order, inasmuch as painting was concerned, of course. But for the artists born in the ‘70s, among whom scepticism was widespread and who tended from the origin to have some contempt for any rule, the background was a sense of depression and frustration brought about by the dramatic social changes. Especially for the youngsters who just came out of school, the difference of life when climbing down from their superior “ivory tower” to “ordinary citizen” was like a cruel memory of youth that they couldn’t just chase away.
In Li Jikai’s early works, the inherent academic rules of painting were coldly cast aside, and he endeavoured to highlight his own existence. It was a closed world revolving around the « I », a narrative knocked out from a solitary « I » and things unrelated to it. Li Jikai even strengthened this type of narrative series with a fictive object related to the « little boy », to the point that it looks a bit like « speaking his on language ». And with this « obsession » with his « own language », the “puppet” that represented temporarily the “little boy” eventually became the main character of the narrative, making imagination more imaginative and “self-language” more self-language.
Li Jikai’s next step was to think about how the proffer a « huge fabrication ». He started by fabricating a more grandiose scene, and to immerse his “ego” in his “daydream”. The orders of the real world and that of painting were deconstructed at the same time, just like everything in dreams is an anti order as opposed to real life. In the beginning, Li Jikai just looked like a timid inexperienced youth, hesitating, but as soon as he had tasted sweetness, he unconsciously lost discipline. Wanton painting, inordinate lines, and flowing traces included in « dreams » appeared suddenly to form a well organized composition.
In fact, from the « little boy » who « speaks his own language » to his « dream », there is an internal logic, in that Li Jikai wants to highlight not only « my (his) » existence but also the existence of « my (his) world ». “My world” is an anti system against the real world, and therefore “I” no longer mirrors (reflects) the real “I” but rather the master of “my world”.
The side effect of Li Jikai’s deconstruction of painting is the « fragments ». On the surface, « fragments » are an anti order towards the principle of the integrity of painting, but now they seem to have become his « perfect tool ». They can be those randomly dispersed stones on the canvas, the chaotic groves, broken pieces of wood, but also those colour traces flowing everywhere, or disorderly scrawling lines freely popping up before you and attracting the eye, or even the emotions for the painting, the observation of the viewers, forming an ambiguous yet structured sentiment.
These fragments seem scattered all over the picture, but just like in polyphony each sound is independent yet part of a whole that forms a great harmony, that is to say that Li Jikai has reached a new integrity countering the initial integrity, and thus constructs his own order.
The Li Jikai of today is no longer the immature “little boy”, neither is he the helpless “puppet”, nor the hesitating, shy young boy full of “dreams”, and even if the “boy”, the “puppet” and the “fragments” appear on his canvases, “dreams” are still that painting’s main subject, his strokes are more confident, and the harmony between the narrative and the emotions seems to be more satisfactory.
It would seem that Li Jikai is really starting to be bent on telling a true story, one about himself, and no longer that of people with a virtual life, just like those two eyes in the painting that are wide open and are no longer blurred. And the “boy” and the “puppet” on the canvas are no longer drifting in daydreaming, but seem rather contented with themselves.
The treatment of the « fragmentation » has become more organic and free, it has texture, sense of reality, emotion as well as integrity. Restlessness, anxiety, doubt, etc., all these things from the past seem to be reversed with the help of the painting, or perhaps they remain in the memory, but then again those cruel memories, through the hourglass of time, tend to fade into sadness. The significance of the painting is that it becomes at that moment a medicine to cure this sadness, which is perhaps the essence of Li Jiaki’s ways of expressing his “egoism” in his creation.
But Li Jikai never thought of abandoning ever his creative liberty, and for an artist still under forty, everything is actually just starting. His anti order has already become some sort of creed of his creation, and there is no turning back on this. Around 2009, he tried to make a work in three dimensions, he loved the coloring effect of resin propylene on sculptures. In this exhibition, he also shows some recent works with pieces of porcelain, and he not only tries painting freely on it, confusing the public over the notions of « achievement » and « unachievement », and getting familiar with the methods of baking ovens, striving to maintain some sort of handicraft character. Perhaps the future Li Jikai will walk even farther, looking once again at his own new self, to the expectations and surprise of everybody.
2012 . 08.09
