I

From 1994 to 2007, Li Zhanyang’s sculptures follow a path of critical realism. A graduate from the sculpture department of the Luxun Art Academy, Li’s education was the basis for his realist approach and inclinations in his early career. After graduating in 1994, Li taught at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Art in Chongqing. With his drive for knowledge, he conducted field research of frescoes at famous Chinese grottos in Dazu, Sichuan and in Shiyang in Anyue, and set foot on remarkable cultural relics of the historical “southern silk road”. Meanwhile, he found the dazzling nightlife and the vivacious everyday life of Chongqing refreshing, which aroused his interest in and attention to realism. Li’s in-depth observation and his desire to express the mundane became his creative drive. In his post-graduate studies at the Central Academy of Fine Arts from 1997 to 1999, Li began to incorporate the practices of Chinese ancient grotto sculpture and modern folk sculpture such as the “Clay Figurine Zhang”. While creating his own work, he contemplated the concepts and methodology of contemporary art, from which he developed his own artistic language, mode and artistic value. His work Big Lido from 1998 caught the attention of the Chinese art academic world – the work condenses characteristics of his earlier artworks. The voluptuous figures in action packed scenarios are piled together as a mountain. Each composition is reminiscent of clay sculpture.

Li Zhanyang projects this world with honesty and wit. Living and fully immersed in China’s rapid social transitions, Li tries to seek truth in the everyday that often seem surreal. His sketchbook is full of images of vivid street scenes that became the basis of sculpture series, Life’s Myriad Forms. In this work, all artistic forms and narratives seem to have shed their original form. Experiencing real life is Li Zhanyang’s way of being aware of life. He’s apprehension of life is not tainted by cynicism towards the life and reality before him. Confronted with gushing waves of his quotidian life, Li Zhanyang has always made actions and experiences a priority. He exposes himself to all types of public and privates life scenes at the grass-root of society in order to enrich his knowledge, as well as allowing him to accumulate a sensible understanding to unknown experiences. This is the necessary “groundwork” for his creative process. Li’s selection and representation of real life abide to the creative model discussed in the academic Chinese art world – art originates from life yet transcends life. The tendency to gather in Chinese society has always been apparent in Li Zhanyang’s sculptures. However, he did not fall into a stylistic trap. Instead, the artist stayed close to reality and let the power of his senses to clash fiercely, until he unexpectedly marched into the field of contemporary art.
 
Li Zhanyang lived in France for six months in 2000, where he came into direct contact with European contemporary art. This early experience with international art system made him brainstorm. Li was faced difficulties in joining the international artistic world, which made him assess his strengths and weaknesses. Li, in his mind, felt more reliant on his own experience and the Chinese cultural heritage he accumulated. He wants to construct his own artistic body of thoughts by continuous self-affirmation. In 2001, Li Zhanyang presented the work Night Scene in Shancheng to express people’s urging desires. The work displayed his audacity and poignant attitude in exposing the unhealthy realities in Chinese society, immediately challenged the audience’s psychological strength, and incited the attention of certain auditing department of the central government. LI’s Crowded Bus, 2002, and Train Station, 2003, are two series that portray a dense crowd, people sprawling like ants, and offer the audience a sense of oppression. Li Zhanyang has always been aware of his surrounding. The drastic changes from the progress of China’s modernization causes him to be visually aware and sensible. Sculpture was initially the artist’s response and reaction to reality; however, his unique observations of social phenomena, especially his frank expression of human nature and its weakness, inform his own visual reality.

Since 2002 Li Zhanyang adopted cartoon-like style in Opening Ceremony, Huang Jiaopo and other works as a way to engage with and humorize urban culture and street life. He also adopted a comical and exaggerated didactic approach to represent the benefits and darkness of humanity. Li Zhanyang polished his narrative style over time and creates an antagonistic relationship between the groups of his sculptures to render a dramatic conflict. Li continues to build on the ubiquitous social attitude of insatiability, which allows the artist to make works with his own blueprints projecting lives of the contemporary Chinese. The general population has suffered from anxiety, jealousy, spiritual mental idleness and various other health issues as a result of the drastic social change in China. Li’s work purposefully exposes the various symptoms of the social conditions and forces his viewers to reflect upon such reality. In Traffic Accident, Christian of Huang Jiaopo and other works, Li’s narrative style reveals a painful reality, as if our spiritual wound has been peeled open. Viewers cannot avoid the meticulous details in his. In order for his audience to formulate their own opinions, Li Zhanyang suspends his own attitude and evaluations and allows his work to transcend the creative mode of critical realism.

In 2004, Li Zhanyang’s manic expression of bodily desires and eroticism opened up other possibilities to expand his individual sculptural language. Moreover, his creative passion was entering a peak period. He began to depart from the limitations of miniature sculptural style. In his work Plum in the Golden Vase he adopts actual dimensions of people and objects. The work’s site specificity also expanded the artist’s sculptural concept, which reflects on contemporaneity. In Plum of the Golden Vase, a self-portrait of the artist looks at xi Menqing and Pan Jinlian with disdain. This stance positions the artist to examine his own work form the viewer’s perspective, which demonstrates the artist’s practice of reverse psychology. While Li Zhanyang strives to change the way of artistic expression and exhibition, he considers the manner in which artworks are viewed. Therefore, whenever he lowers the standard on the narration of his artwork, he allows the content to be straightforward. Furthermore, the poignant reality and implications of the works are incise and provocative. Monks and Nuns, Wu Song Murdering his Sister-in-law,  and Tang Monk and the Demon are all works with audacious and impactful narratives and erotic expressions and are theatrically contradictory and conflicting. Li Zhanyang appropriates ancient stories and criticizes the present. He subtly unveils the taboos embedded in the reality that endangers humanity. In the history of civilization, there has been a consistent conflict between social taboos and human instincts, which often causes the artist’s to focus on sexuality and bodily desires in order to stimulate a passion for life and imagination. The satisfaction of breaking taboos encourages Li to explore the dark corners hidden in civilized societies. Whether it is extra-marital affairs, incest, masturbation, exhibitionism, or voyeurism, Li has examined and presented them through his art. These so-called narrow-minded, filthy and repulsive behavior and mentality unfold in everyday contemporary society and demonstrate the unevolved animal instincts of humanity. In the 2004 surreal rendition of Days Above the Cloud and his 2005 solemn Circumcision, Li Zhanyang adopted a ceremonial-style narrative to meticulously polish and contemporary art. The original work of The Rent Collection Courtyard at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Art in Chongqing and Cai Guo-qiang’s re-rendering of it provoked wide international response, all of which indirectly stimulated Li Zhanyang’s thoughts. Therefore, Li Zhanyang’s work was modeled on the actual figures in the Chinese contemporary art world and theatrically re-enacted the group of figures of the Rent Collection Courtyard. This method of basing his work on the experience of others and existing principle in order to open one’s own ideas allowed Li Zhanyang to construct a comic piece, by which he wittily criticized the contemporary Chinese “art world”. Rent – Rent Collection Courtyard became a signature piece with an international façade. At the same time, it was a work that posed limitations to his previous freestyle creative mode.

II

In April 2008, Li Zhanyang moved into a studio in the quiet art hub in Beijing’s Tongzhou district. His work focused on the move from Chongqing to Beijing. Away from the noisy crowd, Li no longer had the privilege to pay attention to urban street life. Instead he was able to reconsider his own plight while looking for solutions. The artist lives in his studio in the suburbs with a sense of distance to the city. His former tendency of thinking about gatherings and being involved with China’s social transition suddenly dissipated. It was a time when the artist contemplated introspectively to culminate his own artistic transition. He still responds to the external provocations of cultural changes manifested through social conditions, yet his focus shifted to the internal need of his own artistic logic. He felt that he should not only take on his own social responsibilities, but also be faithful to his identity as artist and strengthen his own pursuit of creativity. Since the beginning of social reforms, China’s social landscape of ubiquitous individual desires has slowly become the a past in Li Zhanyang’s art. With his experience in a number of international exhibitions and his exposure to novelties at an international level, the artist became more interested in exploring how to promulgate and configure the traditional Chinese artistic spirit.

Once settled in Beijing, Li Zhanyang abandoned his usual creative mode from when he lived in Chongqing and adopted different means in an effort to renew his practice. However, Li has not disgarded his focus on the awareness of life and humanity. It is only that his approaches are more diversified and dynamic. Furthermore, irrational characteristics are also infused into his methodology of deliberation. Li Zhangyang attempts to bid farewell to reactionary creativity to build up his own imagination. Thus, like fermenting an aged wine in a new bottle, Li reviewed artistic symbols he was familiar as a point of entry to experiment. At the end of 2008, Li Zhanyang appropriated a figure from a classical topic and created Liu Hulan. The heroine Liu Hulan has been a classical figure reinterpreted in Chinese modern art history.  The artist adopted the fish-eye angle to execute and plan a fan-dimension scenario. The layout of a compact space and its architectural oppression correspond to the dense bystanders that recede into the hazy gray environment, which alludes to an inauspicious psychological anticipation. At the center of the sculpture, Liu Hulan’s moment of martyrdom is presented without the artist’s judgmental input, but is portrayed as a gory, terrifying murder scene. As such, Li Zhanyang aims to insert a viewing psychology to subvert traditional ways of viewing art. Before Li Zhanyang’s Liu Hulan, every viewer overrides the sculpture that the artist has pre-designed, so the snapshot of a human massacre can be examined from all angles. This work challenges the viewer’s psychology of irrelevance – an approach the artist adopted to scrutinize humanity. When confronted with historical, factual inhumane invasions on life, who can completely isolate themselves?

After Liu Hulan, Li Zhanyang no longer intentionally dove into the mundane outside world, but tried to uncover his own mind, even adopting methods to analyze his dreams to excavate his subconscious in order to seek and capture artistic logic from within. For Li Zhanyang, self-scrutiny in comparison to that of society and others seemed more real and effective. His own psychological reality, in comparison to the fragmented mundane reality, is more tangible and apprehensible. The artist’s own thoughts set the standard for a reality that trompe d’oeil artistic standards or principles cannot conceal. Li Zhanyang focused on his own universe and unexpected dream world. And his artistic transitions were thus logical.
  
III

At his Beijing studio, loneliness and solitude accompany his practice that exhaust both the artist’s body and mind. Yet, his sensibility is sharp. The uncommon details in his everyday environment often captivate and inspire the artist. His sculptures The Captured Mouse and Toad are both works related to the lack of life around his studio. There were days that the dialogue with himself or his environment far exceeded the conversations he had with others. Consequently, what preoccupies the mind in daytime ultimately manifests in dreams at night. Li Zhanyang was often bothered by his dreams. In those dreams, there were often strange phenomena and ideas hovering over him. Yet, Li’s memory and recounting of his surreal dreams are amazing. Furthermore, the meaning of these dreams and insights were often applied to his encounters with people and incidents of everyday life. The fragmented and complex dream world became the artist’s other inescapable psychological reality. Li Zhanyang was not interested in dream analysis, either the so-called interpretation of dreams by Zhougong, or Freud’s Analysis of Dreams. Based on his instinct and stream of consciousness, he configured forms, colors, atmosphere of his dreams, then recycle them into his sculptural language. As for sculptural language, his dreams relate to specific spatial relationships between the artworks, cultural context, and surface distributions of sculptural components. Primitive impulse and inspirational source of dreams, for Li Zhanyang, who’s unafraid of artistic dilemma, is precisely what the artist needed. Whether or not a contemporary artist lives up to his title often depends on his ability to reinvent under both pressures from rules of the game and his own needs, to surpass his own past in finding a new path and step up to a new platform. Secondly, it depends on whether he’d be able to adopt a new path and platform in order to reinvent his own form and style. The external cultural pressure Li Zhanyang resists is the fierce conflict between international system and Chinese model. He’s driven internally by his spiritual dilemma and the body from his dreams. Those urging pressures make the artist more reluctant to face reality, but treats storing, contemplating and interpreting dreams as an artistic lesson. Therefore, from 2008 to 2010, dreamscape inspires Li Zhanyang’s imagination where his creativity self-sufficiently draws from its source.

Li Zhanyang’s sculptural language unprecedentedly began to veer away from realism. His 2009 work Tranquility has a metaphysical spirit. Although this work depicts a boulevard lined with trees that branch out and join together forming a canopy. From the front, Tranquility looks like a trumpet shape viewing window. The front is a dissection of the boulevard that forms a window with its trees and the road, and the small exit at the end of the boulevard extends to an endless spatial possibility. Masters of European classics often make the point of disappearance analogous to the end of the real world, or the entrance of another world. Li Zhanyang’s ideas are quite the contrary. At a conference held in Beijing in 2010, Li discussed the relationship between life at his studio with the work Tranquility. He explained that, “Tranquility originates from a road on which he walks every evening to go to dinner. Both sides of the road are wooded areas, the view is largely pitch dark, and the light marks the end of the road, street lights seem to symbolize hope. Every night, especially in the winter, this was the view he had when he stepped outside. Li Zhanyang considers his lonely world as the shore on the other side. At the end of the boulevard is the real world, the metropolis of Beijing with endless desires. This end of the shore is the tangible, the naked self, a self fully immersed in dreams; the other shore is a mundane life, where it nurtures uncertain hope with a certain spiritual glory. When talking about his work, it is common for Li to exchange the pronoun “I” and “you”. In fact, he also often interchanges the creative body with the viewing body. Before his own work, Li Zhanyang often subverts perception and jump into the point of view of the audience. Therefore, he also attempts to bring the audience into his role, position and point of view through the conceptual input of “the viewing window”, in order to allow the viewer to feel his loneliness and hope, as well as his darkness and light.

Tranquility is a figurative piece with abstract meanings. The window viewing experience it provides and the metaphysical spirit marks one of Li Zhanyang’s artistic transitions. Tranquility is also Li’s new spiritual path. His self-challenge, mysticism and immersion have all been stored within the artist and his own world that remains unnoticed in his artworks. His hope and self-actualization have always been realistically focused at the end of horizon. And this pitch-dark quiet path reveals Li Zhanyang’s process of self-saturation or even transformation. In this path, Li Zhanyang returned to everyday life from a maddening creative mode of happiness and sorry, then re-enters chaos and the dreamworld. This is his cyclical training to inculcate independent thinking and strength to his personality. Between reality and dreams, material and spiritual, Li Zhanyang continues to re-discover himself and readjust his thoughts and values. However, Li has never limited himself to either end of the path, but freely oscillates. He uses Tranquility to fully realize self-emancipation and rebuilding his artistic confidence.

2009 Barren Mountain is a bronze sculpture that is entirely subjective and abstract, a rarity in Li Zhanyang’s artistic career. The work displays an odd visual tension, leaving the viewers in awe. Li Zhanyang has purposefully kept and emphasized the natural quality of deformation in soft clay sculpture. In this work, the clay is easily manipulated, yet suitable for presenting figurative characteristics, which has been taken to another realm in Li Zhanyang’s hands. To configure, edit, shape on a whim, the artist let out the unspeakable obstacles in his mind. The tempestuous impressions and passionate forms are neither mountain nor waves and are like an unspeakable impulse, a chaotic and conflicted mind. Li Zhanyang has never denied that Barren Mountain was inspired by the nightmare of a passing relative. Obviously, this dream transcended the figurative and was abstract. For Li, since the development of artistic language does not follow any rules in its transformation, then perhaps the expression of the mind, with honesty, is the most suitable for revealing one’s own psychological reality. Therefore, the chaotic dreams, blurry memories nurtures Li’s uncommon abstract vocabulary. Barren Mountain has a sinister, murderous and gloomy ambiance. All wanton and unspeakable forms display a type of momentum, as if myriads of demons and ghosts are housed inside, among them endless struggle, entanglement unfolds. Rather than claiming that Barren Mountain represented Li’s murky nightmare with accuracy, it is better to claim that its accurate language portrayed an artist’s subconscious world filled with fear, desire, anxiety and terror. Abstract language allows Li Zhanyang to be graceful and free. All liberal compositions of movement and changes among these sculptures allow the artist to express himself to the fullest.

The recent artworks of Li Zhanyang explore to inherit and transfer traditional Chinese folk sculpture; stress sensual and showy revelry and make up grisly expression behind the dissipation. Li doesn’t utilize common realism method; instead, he brings in lots of illusions inspired from Chinese folk sculpture, eluding Athens academic style and stressing irrational modern beauty criteria.  The attitude of “vita activa” leads to the distinct creation of Chinese in contemporary. The dramatic crossover of Chinese society makes “anxiety and envy” become nearly a common symptom and sub-health such as spiritual empty interrupt people. The artwork of Li seems to reveal various morbidity of Chinese and force people to be faced with the reality. Actually, what Li wants to explore is not only the reality but also general human nature. As for an artist, Li persists in his responsibility to the society.

——Gu Zhenqing

Ai Weiwei (Ai): Li Zhanyang, is today November 14, 2007? Or is it the 13 th?
Li Zhanyang (Li): The 14th. It’s raining.
Ai:  I think the rain turned into snow. It stopped raining. The snow should be warmer. Zhanyang, where were you born, what year?
Li:  1969. 
Ai:   We share the same zodiac sign. You’re 12 years younger than me.
Li:  Right, I’m one cycle younger.
Ai:  Where were you born?
Li:  Near Changchun, Jilin Province in a small town called Datun.
Ai:  What did your parents do for a living?
Li:  My father built homes. He was a mason.  
Ai:  Did he work for a firm of builders? 
Li:  Back then it was called a property bureau. What exactly did that entail? Well, it was economic planning; everyone worked and lived in public housing. The property bureau oversaw the construction and maintenance of state-run units. Since it was impossible to work during winters in the Northeast, my father would occasionally get transferred to other units to stoke their boilers.
Ai: Interesting. He basically couldn’t work in wintertime.
Li: Your house reminded me a little of a boiler room the first time I visited.