I
Dark stormy sky’s above, shelters, trees by ones or twos, in the wild not far from city and people; and groups of people with bizarre looks and strange behaviors; all together forming certain surreal pictures, all but Li Jikai’s fancy “little world/small worlds” in his gigantic 2014 Wastepickers.
The most impressive ones are those “waste pickers” gangs: they have childlike looks and postures but are different in size; some are giants, some are toy-sized; totally disproportionate non-like “humans”; their faces are “odd”; some are in gowns of the Republic China period, some have huge and distorted limbs; although in clusters, they are separate individuals, each acts in his own way with no care of the other: some are reading books, some are lighting the fire, some having hair cut, some steering boats, some are carrying rags and bags, some shaking their hands with shock, some are on hands and knees looking at something... more of them are daydreaming, standing, sitting, lying with nothing to do. Apparently it is not specific “living situation” that binds “waste pickers” together but the “deserted fate” naturally flowing in what they do.
There are mainly three parts in Wastepicker’s “scene”, i.e. night sky, houses, groves from afar and proximate rugged wild where the “waste pickers” are. The dark night is surging and unpredictable; to those “waste pickers” this is not real impending threat but the sky of destiny knowingly treacherous but impossible to escape; and the distant view of scattered buildings, dark groves still or swaying and occasional wire poles are apparently metaphors of the “society” which is a little bit withered but not fallen. However, for “waste pickers” they are indifferent setting rather than loving attribution. In the foreground, chilly and rugged wild is home to resilient and adaptable “waste pickers”, but just temporarily: clearly “waste pickers” have no territory and they are more like vagabonds and waifs abandoned or self-exiled.
Besides the “figure” and “scene”, there is more than “scribble style” in Wastepicker: on the big canvas the most conspicuous thing is the snap line sketches in various shades streaming all over the paper; casual bold colors rarefied and look like illegible scrawl; arbitrary water stains and irregular strokes everywhere: it seems that the artist only pursuits dynamic, natural and interesting expression instead of revealing the inner experience. But seen another way, it is the tone, the style, the free, simple scribble that penetratingly sketches the waste pickers’ sorrow of destiny in their bones.
II
Li Jikai spent his college and graduate school years in Sichuan Fine Arts Institute (SCFAI) which has a special influence and status in China’s thirty-year-exploration of contemporary art; from “Art of Scars”, “Stream of Life” to “Southwest Art Group”, to “Political Pop”, “Gaudy Art”, “New Painting”, artists from “SCFAI” always get ahead and take the lead or actively participate in art trends as decisive roles. To Li Jikai who was a student at that time, this tradition, the flowing art vein not only serves as a “role model” but also creates a free, open atmosphere for “creation”, leading him to the art exploration of his unique “inner experience” early.
From 1996 to 2004, Li Jikai shows very complex interest in rhetoric as a student: Chungking Express and Drifting Clouds are different abstract expressionism; Bravo!, Sound, Scenery are graffiti; Fragments series are expressionism; Angel’s Garden, Photo Frame, Dream, Night Garden are surrealism; Next to Happiness, Daydream, Wing-Flower are pictorial-ism... More paintings like Cake, Swimmer, Portrait in Twilight can hardly be described as -ism or certain style; in the process of arduous exploration as “In the Crowds I’d Searched a Thousand Times for Her”, not only can we see Li Jikai’s highly sensitive to the complex forms of contemporary paintings, but also an subtly evolving spiritual path, from unaffected teenager (Drifting Clouds, Sound, Bravo! ) to sensitive, lonely, emotional youth (Angel’s Garden, Dream, 2000.8.4, Portrait in Twilight) and to the rebellious “Heyday Flowers” (Next to Happiness, Daydream, Wing-Flower) engraved with mark of the era.
From 2001 to 2004, Li Jikai wandered between two contrasting teenager figures: on one hand, in Daydream and Taming Eagles there are dignified little monsters, horns on the head, with wings and tail; they haven’t reached adulthood yet subtly display a strong constitution and a heavy heart; on the other hand, Next to Happiness, Wings, Vomiting in Flowers depict weaker children. Eventually, along with the opening of “World on Table” series, Electropathy, Because of You, Time to Vomit, even weaker “Heyday Flowers” crowd out little monsters and become the leading characters in the “little world”. As time flashing by, the artist’s “inner self” grows weaker, which seems a perplexing paradox.
However, the seemingly paradoxical evolving process precisely reflects Li Jikai is highly sensitive to his generation’s unique “inner self”: weak, injured, exhausted “Heyday Flowers” are exact “spirit images” of the younger generation of Chinese artists. Before 1989, the “spiritual image” of elites is dignified, pensive, enduring “big souls”; entering the threshold of 1990s, the typical “new generation” is boring, joking “rude boy”; the “cruel youth” generation is lonely yet sharp “interrogator”; but the younger generation after mid-1970s bearing the same loneliness and melancholy, their “soul image” is an “enclosed child” wearing the “mask in games”. If more “new generation” estrangement, enthusiasm and spiritual suffering of “youth cruelty” is to be found in those “little monsters” with horns, then, these delicate, pensive and self-entertaining “heyday flowers” highlight the unique rebellious youth “deep down in their heart” within Li Jikai’s generation.
III
In this sense, it is “World on Table” series that officially open Li Jikai’s “little world”, an obscure metaphorical world. Cold hard tables, vast emptiness, fleeting lightening, all describe a sudden and absurd nightmare with a playful tone and in childlike images; crabby behaviors of “children” imply complicated struggles in mind: delightful because danger is unnoticed, shocked witnessing the collapse of ideals, and bored, hesitated waking up from a dream......
The obscure, playful tone and complicated spiritual struggles are further expressed in Li’s creations later on: Vomiting in Flowers, Broad Daylight both focus on the rebellious emotion of “heyday flowers”; Wooden Horse and Snail, Waiting Time Flows ponder over sheer boredom waking up from a dream; My Mushroom, My Home, and Refraction render fear towards the absurd world... But the most striking one is the unadorned picture Can’t Sleep, Can’t Get Enough Sleep: There is no subtle metaphor or refreshing imagination but only cold looks to the cold feet.
In the same period, Bubbles, Air Barterer, Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide express childish hustle and bustle with indulging scribbles. Psychologically this inner hustle obviously shows the other side of the above boredom and shock, and it’s the “malicious catharsis” about the sudden direct confrontation of an absurd world for these “children”. But to Li Jikai more important and meaningful side of these works may be the change of rhetoric. He has found a match for his free painting language and obscure spiritual experience of “heyday flowers” while letting out childlike mental hustle all over. And if he has found out in the vague pictorial language of “World on Table” the exact language to express the subtle emotions in “heyday flowers”, then he apparently gets the visual code for reorganizing various complicated language and elusive, enthusiastic inner experience.
So in the next two and three years, Li Jikai presents stunning creative forces. On one hand, he passionately create several different image groups. Dolls and Ruin, Teenager and Door in the Wild, Teenager and Pebbles, Scenery and a series of diversifying “Teenager Portrait” from different angles Li explores his “little world”; on the other hand, in these works he fully shows his talent, his outstanding language in painting and increasingly mature art presence. No matter it’s his frank dripping, free style smearing, natural sketching, or delicate painting, different languages are always agreeable with the spiritual atmosphere. Not just Growing Season, Jagged Wood Forest but many elaborate and are grand in picture, and small works like City Day and Night, Note look deep and meaningful, and interesting.
Compared to the responsive Broad Daylight, Bubbles with all kinds of specific “waking moment”, the others are more focused on the description of heroes’ “daily mode” in the “little world”: endless mental torment in sure absurdity. In “Dolls and Ruin”, lonely, pitiful “dolls” stand in thorny wild or sit in the bleak ruin; they absently watch mushrooms bursting, or sadly holding eggs full of mildew, or surprised at observing overgrowth of thorns long and short everywhere. Teenager and Door in the Wild depicts desolate wild, door frame standing in the wild and “teenager” lost in the door frame. But what’s touching is not the lost look than the disguised anxiety behind the horrible scene with heavy strokes of flying clouds, falling stones and floating stains. Teenager and Pebbles uses a lighter and tender painting language to give a more normal picture of “teenagers” lying or sitting on the pebbled wild (or river shoal); people in this scene are still sad and lonely but silent thought replaces passionate expression.
Other works of Li Jikai in the same period like Portrait, Fire, Surf can also see such delicate spiritual descriptions: Melancholy in Kid with Scarf, confusion and lost in Bone Flute, stun in Puddles, Loneliness and Coldness in Fire, and Bonfire, disappointment in Smoke, vicissitudes of life in Trickle, Huge Mammoth and Skull... All of these has no “innocent and naive” youth spirit but a panoramic frightening daily basis of “little world”.
IV
Around 2008 Li Jikai’s “little world” changes profoundly. First of all, the language interest changes. Many creations this year experience an emphasis on bright, tough, clean visual sensations like in the Broken Doll, Dew and etc. These works seem wittingly transferring the former stage of free, sensitive style expression to a more concise and brilliant mechanical visual effect. The pictures show hard facts but the artist’s feeling and emotions retreat to the shade of hard “facts” in “broad daylight”.
Another change is found in the feature of “teenager” and the atmosphere of paintings: in View of the Falling Night, Web and Child Sitting Uptight, “teenagers” are all with huge limbs, sending forth a bizarre feeling that they are unconsciously deforming; and about the space and atmosphere, no matter it’s the nervous, narrow View of the Falling Night, Web or fictitious, empty Flow, Child in Reading, they all carry a historical touch of vicissitudes beyond time and space. It seems that Li Jikai’s “little world” has turned from “self venting” inner experience of the “heroes” to gazes upon existential condition and life journey of the “heroes” from an empathetic/sympathetic third view.
Then in the following days, Li Jikai explores on this sympathetic view and thought from several different angles. Lantern, Night Walk with Lanterns, Forest, Night Is Falling merge “youth memory” with “on-site experience” via nostalgic youth “memories”. In typical “youth stories” like lighting wild fires, playing lanterns, riding on dried trunk, wandering in the country road, the shocked and lost looks obviously originate in modern societal “on-site experience”; Heart, Brain, Bones Decaying, Wild, Floating then present limitation and humbleness of life in the illusion of death. What striking most about these works is not the deep thought over life but the floating suffocating innocence within the breath of death. They haven’t grown up, but their heart is so sad so dull.
After fierce encounter with illusions of death, Li Jikai’s “little world” is covered in a cold vertigo hue. From Greenhouse in 2012, he seems fancy a watercolor painting language that is composed of monotonous color, light touches and heavy ink lines. This unique language not only renders more complicated inner experience with all kinds of psychedelic images, lost, lonely, or resolute; moreover it presets a heavy, dejected undertone for those images outpouring youthful thoughts.
Thick Forest, Night View, High-Rise Landscape describe living condition of the “little world” in a symbolic way. Thick Forest and Night View present a rugged world full of obstacles in a metaphorical way with giant pebbles all over the ground; Building and High-Rise Landscape use square shape buildings standing unexpectedly in the ruin to show inhumane characteristic in the “modern society”; In Crow the big black crow towering above the building, along with the decaying setting, grey, dark tone, and swift and fierce brush strokes as storm and tempest, spare no effort in painting a glowing picture of the inhumane society’s bizarre and changeful atmosphere.
But the 2014 Wastepicker series see the merging of the above diversifying complex “life experience” and “social imagination”. However, differing from World on Table’s distinct post ideological perspective, Wastepicker’s social perspective focuses on the “modern image”. And the mystic, absurd and endless inhumane images not only reflect the limitless miserable destiny of the “waste pickers”, but also make the scribble brushes stream frozen dismay.
V
The 1990s is a pivotal time for Chinese art to gain its unique “contemporariness.” Together with the quick transformation to market economy, consumer society and an overwhelming pop culture, Chinese contemporary art quietly reforms from “contemporariness of cultural feeling” to “contemporariness of inner experience”: sensitive modern artists, critics no longer satisfy with “contemporary patterns” and they try to uncover the special and complicated psyche of Chinese society based on their personal inner experience. Then there come the vein of contemporary art, centered at alienation, rebellion and deconstruction as the core, from “new generation”, “cynic realism”, “political pop” to “Gaudy”, “Youth Cruelty” and to “New Cartoon.”
Although he also paint “child”, Li Jikai doesn’t look at himself as a so-called “New Cartoon” artist. To him, “pattern and style matter not so much as to desire of narrating,” and the latter roots in his constant transform. In fact, behind his enormous imagery spectrum and various language styles, there is a hidden evolving trail of inner experience becoming more and more complicated.
If the weak, lonely and self-centered Heyday Flowers shows the “mental image” of Li Jikai’s generation, the visual language that tangled with candid, childish teenager spirit and fretful, desolate life experience indeed profoundly express the special emotion and attitude of this generation’s artists; then from his childish “heyday flowers” to lonely and miserable “child” and “toy” dwelling in endless spiritual torture, and to the “teenager” spectrum of mal-development and malformation filled with sorrow and confusion of destiny. His painting languages, ranging from brilliant scribble to delicate, sleek images with lofty meanings, and to the unrestrained expressionism, some have bright, cold, hard mechanical texture, some are ink and wash with hasty and unspoken words; and the recently finished Cotton, Road, Wilderness are more unaffected freehand new expressionism; from his complex language veins can we not only see active artistic imagination and sparkling language talent but also observe the transformation of rebellious “heyday flowers” in a more complicated and profound life experiencing context.
Consciously or unconsciously, the evolution of Li Jikai’s artistic creation from specific epoch memory to gradually diluted disappearing marks of an era actually echoes with the special development of Chinese contemporary art. Since the 1980s, generations of Chinese artists of the post-50s, post-60s, early post-70s, and much younger post-70s artists have acted out a unique spiritual vein of Chinese contemporary art and each with a different “contemporary experience.” Inspired by progressive western concept and culture, and with a strong characteristic of “New Enlightenment,” this vein shows complex Chinese spirit, emotion and attitude in dept when several generations experience a sharp transform from ideological “traditional to post ideological “modern society.” However, the “New Enlightenment,” in the grand picture of a more complicated new age, centered at social attitudes constructed on the reflection of ideological period can hardly face the social enthusiasm recollected in the more changeful global picture after the “post financial crisis.” No matter it’s good or bad, success or failure, China is gradually step out of the “xenocentric” age since the “Westernization Movement” and tries to reopen its own page in history. At this moment, tearing down “contemporary feelings” with “rebellion” and “deconstruction” as the core, regenerating and expressing private deeper “inner experience” in a more complicated social, cultural and spiritual context have become the spiritual subject that Chinese artists met again.
VI
To a miscellaneous wold gradually formed over the last decade, any analyses, no matter how systematic they are, will appear too simple and partial. Compared with the linear trail that I try to reveal, Li Jikai’s “little world,” be it the theme, language or the figures, spirit of his works, presents itself in a far more intricate and complicated form. He may use a variety of languages and figures to create different spirit of “children” in the same period; he may spin and spiral on the same theme, image or language style in the same period. Fundamentally this mix like entwined grape vines gets along with inner logic of linear development, but too many threads and clues indeed make it hard for the audience to accurately detect the innate evolution of the “little world.”
However, his Lake and Reflections of Light in 2013 gives a very special “novel” feeling to lots of old friends. Different from the same period chill and depressed Wave, Whitecap, Moonshine, the romantic picture with grand bearings apparently reveals more warmth of humanity. Deep dark night, lonely quiet lake, lonely boy in a lonely boat, all of these are but illusions of a lonely heart, yet the boy’s romantic feelings swaying in the sky, the childlike life miracles and curiosity floating on the lake. With no excessive inner bitterness portrayed in the hero, the positive self exploration in perplexity stands out and shines. In the “little world” filled with anger and sorrow of the “weak and small,” Lake and Reflections of Light melts the lonely, hesitate inner experience with warmer and more natural humanity, more positive life attitude, displaying a poetic life experience beyond modernism nostalgia. Furthermore, Li Jikai’s series as Cotton, Road in 2015 and watercolor sketches as Scenario, Scenery and the unfinished, untitled “sketches on paper” all prove that this deeper and poetic experience yet fleeing inspiration is now growing and sprawling fast in every corner of the “little world.”
2015.08.25
