Li Luming: ‘New Images’ through the Haze of History
Having graduated only two years earlier from the China Arts Research Institute, Li Luming made the following declaration during a heated debate at a symposium in 1989:
Some say that China today has no philosopher worthy of the name, only researchers who study such and such an area of philosophy, and that this is a tragedy for Chinese thought. But while China might not have philosophers who clearly present their own ideas, art can express philosophical ideas in a veiled way. Artists involuntarily play the role of philosophers today, and the art works are the medium through which the artists speak. If the day comes when China once again has its own philosophers, art will be allowed to shed its present guiding role. I fear that this will not be possible for some time, which is a tragedy for our current generation of artists.[1]
Li Luming was at that time working as a critic attached to the Hunan modernist movement. Two years earlier, when his classmate Gao Minglu took up the position of editor at the journal Fine Arts (Meishu) and promoted the modernist movement with his solid theoretical grounding, Li Luming returned to his native province and founded the magazine Painters (Huajia), a publication that specialized in presenting young modern artists. Following the first issue dedicated to Gu Wenda and due to the large amount of space devoted to new talent, Painters soon became one of China’s important contemporary art periodicals. The Hunan modernist movement, appearing as early as 1982 with the Leishi Painting Society, remained an important part of the Chinese avant-garde movement throughout the eighties. As a critic, Li Luming was an integral part of that movement, which he helped to develop through his articles. Naturally drawn into the journal’s circle, the artists of Hunan made an indisputable impact on the New Wave.[2] Throughout that period, and up until the exhibition he organized with colleagues from Beijing devoted to groups of young artists from Hunan in 1986, Li Luming’s theoretical practice and critique obscured his own work as an abstract painter.
In 1988, Li Luming felt driven to become a full-time painter, and through his series titled The Mangrove Clan (Hongshu jiazu), he advocated the ‘new image’ (xin xingxiang). Well versed in the history of art, he believed that history only recorded those artists who exhibited uniqueness in artistic language. Artistic language was the thing that opened up human experience and knowledge of the world.
His idea of the ‘new image’ was in obvious conflict with the concept of the ‘grand soul’ (da linghun) developed by Li Xianting, who in 1988 had just published his article ‘Our Times Await the Fervor of the Grand Soul’ (Shidai qidaizhe da linghun de shengming jiqing) under the pseudonym of Hucun, in the 37th issue of the Fine Arts in China (Zhongguo meishu bao). Li Xianting hoped that artists would draw on their suffering, anxiety and uncertainty, and focus on the spirit of humanity that was so hard to express. In truth, Li Xianting was tired of the talk of ‘purified language’ (chunhua yuyan) popular at that time, and argued that matters of the soul were the core of art, believing that it was dangerous for artists to emphasize language. Li Xianting suspected them of ‘regression by evading and covering up the psychological reality of the times’. Li Luming’s new images, though something distinct from ‘purified language’, certainly did not derive from the domain of the ‘grand soul’, because, for Li Xianting, ‘it is not the art that is important’.
Li Luming’s new images provided the means for sidestepping the imprecision of language, and his very idea exemplifies the precision with which he observed the lassitude that had engulfed the modernism of the ’85 New Wave. 1988 was a year of political and social crisis in China, and modernist essentialism seemed to be exhausted by the effort to interpret the new realities. Nevertheless, up until the events of June 1989, modernist idealism retained its vigor and a unified confidence in solving cultural, political and economic problems issues was retained, and it was believed that all that was needed was a bit more time and effort to achieve those ideals.
Li Luming’s series of works titled The Mangrove Clan and Planned Vegetation (Zhongzhi jihua) constituted his earliest experiments in applying his new artistic ideas. Li Luming during this period stressed ‘original creation’, a product of the liberated artistic thought of the eighties’ advocacy of individualistic principles. But towards the end of that decade, Wang Guangyi, inspired by Gombrich, had already refuted the possible existence of any such ‘principles’ (yuanze), and in 1988 had already transcended the bounds of modernism to enter the realm of post-modernism.
Convinced that the ‘new image’ would have to make an absolute break with all previous graphic forms, Li Luming was not initially influenced by post-modernism. His attention was drawn predominantly to the process of growth within life itself rather than to parallel borrowings from cultural resources. He recalled:
The thing I like doing most is, in fact, growing plants. It goes back to my childhood at the time of the Cultural Revolution, when my father had been denounced. Since nobody wanted to play with the ‘son of a dog’, I played alone. I raised insects and grew plants. Sometimes in the morning, the moment I opened my eyes, I would run out to see if my soy beans had sprouted. The process of growth, the germination of fruit, gave me infinite happiness. I was young. But even today I sometimes say to myself that one day, when I find a bit of free time, I will build a house out in the country and go back to growing vegetables. There is a pure happiness to be gained from that sort of activity. I like fertile things. My plants are always saturated with moisture, and are soft and pleasant to the touch.[3]
Experiences like these provide latent elements for Li Luming’s later art. Explaining the maturation of plants through images was a task he had set for himself. He continued these experiments until 1992, when his Planned Vegetation received awards at the Guangzhou Biennale. He was pleased by the critical acclaim and felt confident to continue his artistic experimentation.
The events of 1989 in Eastern Europe brought an end to the Cold War, but in China no part of the system underwent modification and an unchanging philosophy of inertia continued to prevail. In that context, Li Luming’s ‘new image’ experiments appeared to have been conducted within a laboratory, cut off from reality, but it was the reality that most concerned people. The first half of the nineties saw the rise of two trends that exemplified problems existing in reality. They were Cynical Realism and Political Pop. Although some critics interpreted these trends to be an expression of resistance to the system, Cynical Realism was an interpretation of the stagnation of history and Political Pop drew on the resource of historical signifiers. These movements were far different from the original intention behind Li Luming’s new images, which was to create truly ‘original’ graphic forms.
Could such new images, radically different from all preceding graphic forms, actually exist? The critic Peng De had the following to say in 1992 in his analysis of the issue:
Due to an utter rejection of past modes, the new image provides only two options: either one must go in search of natural forms or one must invent other abstract forms. This universe of the imagination we once conceived of as a vast natural reservoir, but in the wake of various explorations in abstract art, we are now left with only vague remnants. When one hopes to make every piece something never previously imagined, the result may be an easy slide into magic tricks.
Confronted by these two options, Li Luming ingeniously combined the two. He included abstract ideas in his natural, vegetable forms. In other words, he made these images artificial and mechanical thereby creating an effect far removed from reality, an effect that may constitute one of the last stages along the road leading to the establishment of the ‘new image’.[4]
Whether these images are drawn from the natural or imaginary worlds is of little consequence. To all intents and purposes, Li Luming exhibited no interest in expressive techniques, because the language of ‘expression’ unerringly tends towards eliminating the ‘image’. Peng De made particular note of this, and explains it through the attention Li Luming paid to the mastery and understanding of ‘meta-language’. The artists of the New Wave tended to move in two different directions. One was towards rational painting, the other to expressive painting. The style of many of the abstract painters tended towards expressive painting. As for Li Luming, the first direction allowed the content to be gutted by the concept, the second direction bordered on losing all sense of formal identity. He planned to achieve his goals through a type of composition which, though based on a concept, would maintain its specificity as an image. Choosing ecological issues as his point of departure, he created images on an actual basis, unlike many Northern artists whose slogans called for ‘rationality’ worthy of Plato or Hegel. At the same time, Li presented his evolving images through his understanding of the process of natural growth, in order to demonstrate convincingly that his images were different all existing graphic modes. He was hoping to prove the viability of his ‘new images’. Renouncing the notion of the ‘pictorial’ (huihuaxing) which he doubted had any significance in art history, he applied color in such an explicit manner that the signs of manual application could no longer be detected and he persevered in his determination to prove that the ‘new image’ was a conceptualized graphic image that, unlike Political Pop, was not simply a transformation of commercial art.
At the heart of this experiment, there was one conflict that needed to be resolved. Manual work threatened to pose a problem for the emergence of the ‘new image’. Apart from that, cut off as it was from society and politics, could it find a place in the history of art, and, more importantly, in the history of Chinese contemporary art? In the second half of the nineties, symbols and images drawn from the market economy had invaded the visual domain. This was inevitable. Digital images had just emerged and computers were becoming increasingly popular, so many new possibilities were opening up. For an artist who had set limits on the self, this was a great opportunity. Once Li Luming had broadened his range and his symbolism, not only did he end his confinement within the process of natural growth born in his imagination, but he also extended that notion of nature to human society and even to certain junk signs (logos). He used new digital images to develop his evolving images, thereby demonstrating that the concepts of ecology were closely related to human social life. Without making any changes to his original premise, Li Luming showed that, with the help of new technology, images very different from those made by hand could be achieved. Peng De observed: ‘By refusing to heed the siren’s call from various trends in the art scene, Li Luming persisted in inventing new images using widely disparate methods. He hoped, through his art, to demonstrate that the creative possibilities of painting have not been exhausted’. The growth of his new ‘plants’ began to include forms and elements drawn from society, such as figural photos taken from the internet. He no longer limited himself to the simple modeling of primitive ecology, and uses post-modernist methods including collocation, appropriation and re-organization. Intentionally or otherwise, Li also integrated elements from cultural ideology. He began to admit that the ‘new image’ was not a primal form of creation, but a concept with a meta-text and subtext. He had been influenced by the deconstructionist concept of ‘différance’. After having collected a number of ‘meta-texts’, he opened, filed, reorganized and re-connected them so that the body of his work resembled a kaleidoscope. Li Luming continued his work on Planned Vegetation, but what he was sowing was ‘rubbish’, the deformations of commercial society. In some sense he must have felt that these ‘plants’, so far removed from the natural ecology, were intrinsically related through the reality of the present day. From that point on, he turned away from the original creation that had been a passion for him and fixed his attention on historic and present experiences. When at the turn of the century, he produced the series of works titled Culture of the Body (Qinghua gushi) and Red Diary (Hongse riji), his abstraction of ‘growth’ had moved again from the imaginary towards a temporal understanding.
From the interaction between Cynical Realism and Political Pop around the mid-1990s a new beast emerged. In 1996, critics announced that the exhibitions Templates of the Masses (Dazhong yangban) and Gaudy Life (Yanzhuang shenghuo) marked the beginning of Gaudy Art (Yansu Yishu).
In 1999, Li Luming participated in the exhibition Oh La La! Kitsch! (Kuashiji caihong: Yanshu yishu) at Tianjing’s Taida Museum. Like many of the other artists hailing from across China, he contributed to the fragmentation, reorganization and dissolution of the symbolism of Cynical Realism and Political Pop. While continuing to experiment with the themes of the ‘new image’ from 1995 to 1999, he had simultaneously created the series Chinese Hands (Zhongguo shouzi), a reference to Chinese mudras, and from the imagery of traditional sculpture he selected the ‘hand’ as a specific form. These hands, that had once indicated events in the realm of the sacred, were now transplanted, torn from their ‘context’ and brought into contact with social, historic, political and commercial symbols. This system of collocation, drawn from Cynical Realism and more particularly from Political Pop, was different in that its new recognition smoothed out ideological dilemmas and presumed to present a scene of harmony. Wang Guangyi, Yu Youhan and Li Shan, the principal representatives of this type of pop art, borrowed from the methodologies and forms of mass culture to serve their historicized and politicized complexes. Their images unerringly exposed the reflections of an ideological anxiety. Like these artists, Li Luming did his utmost to avoid those political symbols that harked back to cold war games, and drew more directly on popular and folk culture as the source of his images, thus considerably lessening the antagonistic ideological tone.
Despite participating in the game of overturning traditional and political imagery along with so many other artists, Li Luming continued, with his Chinese Hands series, to work toward his ‘new image’. The softness and fullness already present in some of his earlier work, such as Planned Vegetation, reappeared, and his ‘brash’ canvases were thus not entirely devoid of personal graphic content. Consumer society propelled kitsch and other popular tastes to the center of artistic expression, but the surprising beauty of Li Luming’s compositions with hands, with their Buddhist connotations, succeeded spontaneously in satirizing consumer society. In this way Li Luming successfully injected irony, one of the elements of Gaudy Art, into his ‘new images’. His Chinese Hands had become a vessel in search of content, living objects in a kitsch universe. In setting out from a different starting point, Li Luming hoped to maintain a distance in his works from the omnipresent images of Gaudy Art. While maintaining formal links with Gaudy Art, he searched for the irony in historical concepts that moved between notions of tradition and nobility presented by the elevation of popular imagery to the level of direct allusions. From 1992, the year when his ‘new images’ were first exhibited at the Guangzhou Biennale, until the close of the century, where ‘kitsch’ had become the point of inception for his work, Li Luming added his personal touch to Gaudy Art in the most natural of ways. Chinese Hands was conceived in an ‘orientalist’ mode, but its flavor was ‘post-modern’.
We have already mentioned the changes that are reflected in the series titled Culture of the Body and Red Journal. Li Luming was using three-dimensional digital images in his expression of both the distant past and current history. His personal experience was influencing his artistic understanding, and this psychological logic, having already prompted him to shift and revise his point of departure, then forced him to turn to society, which in turn, took the place of natural growth as the principal theme of his art. He began to look back on the days of his youth. Starting in 2000, he began to organize ‘study sessions’ on political texts for artists: Serve the People (in Changsha, participants: Zou Jianping, Li Ke, Yao Yangguang, Zhang Xiaolin, Zhang Wei, Li Xiaoshan and He Weina); The Law on Marriage of the People’s Republic of China (in Beijing, participants: Zou Yuejin, Wang Jingsong, Qi Zhilong, Yin Xiaobin, Wang Mai, Feng Jiangzhou, Zuoxiao Zuzhou, Xiao Xiong, Li Bing and Wang Jin); The Law Preventing the Pollution of the Environment of the People’s Republic of China (in Beijing, with Zhang Nian, Sheng Qi, Cang Xin, Chen Qingqing, Wu Xiaojun and Sun Ping); Combating Imperialism (in Nanjing, with Guan Ce, Mao Yan, Li Jianguo, Cao Kai, Gao Ke, Sun Jiancun and Luo Quanmu), etc… These activities were related to the performance art and conceptual art popular at the end of the nineties, but most importantly they show that an obvious shift had been made in the point of departure of his ‘new images’. The artist had returned to society, and to political and social problems.
In October 2005, Li Luming had firm personal views on the ‘irony’ with which artists generally treated the imagery of the Maoist era at the end of the nineties. A native of Hunan like Chairman Mao, Li was dissatisfied with the way in which many people evaluated the Maoist period, and this signals a return on his part to questions of politics and society. In an interview, Mu Rong asked him: ‘Where did you get the idea to create Days above the Clouds (Yunshang de rizi) and Portraits of the Seventies (1970 niandai de xiaoxiang)?’ He responded: ‘I began thinking about the idea around 2000, when I realized that every artist, or most of them, approached the Mao Zedong era ironically and with a mocking tone. I found that strange. Contemporary art rarely goes along with the dominant current in society. In matters of culture, art generally has more individuality. Here we see mainstream society as a whole refuting the Cultural Revolution, and artists do so too. They only differ in their perspective! This is something that suggests unconscious collusion’.
Mu Rong: ‘Does that surprise you?’
Li Luming: ‘Yes. Why don’t artists have their own views on the subject? That is what prompted me to move into the area of ‘event-based’ art, to study the situation. I met with representative artists from all over China and organized a series of forums in order to have them study the writings of Mao Zedong. The result was they loved it. We did Combating Imperialism in Nanjing, Serve the People in Beijing… I had the feeling that their lives and their work were diametrically opposed’.[5]
It is hard to know for sure the state of mind of the participants in these sessions. Once an individual submits to the diverse influences of a performance, of conceptual art, of cynicism and political pop, the original idea behind or activity, whatever it may be, tends to waver. Regardless, Li Luming had returned to history and social realities.
In contemporary art, it has been commonplace for several years now to take images from the flow of history. The first such borrowed images were considered to be a farce or a joke. That was, in fact, the tone in which the artists chose to work. With Portraits of the Seventies, Li Luming tried a new approach, in which the image was no longer a subjective and conceptualized falsification. The artist’s stance was not mocking, ironic or hyperbolic. He was not twisting meaning to suggest history. On the contrary, he was taking the image in its original form, objectively, without adding anything, as we are in the habit of using historical illustrations. Yet the image, when it reappears amplified, is no longer the same, having undergone a metamorphosis. The apparent meaning becomes a historicist explanation.
Working entirely within his own memory, Li Luming continued through his Days above the Clouds, to faithfully restore historic images and, through this work, he was expressing doubts that had been nagging him concerning the manner in which art habitually represented the Cultural Revolution. Those who witnessed that period and still remember it are all in agreement on one point: at the time, people were full of enthusiasm and overflowing with idealism. In the memory of the artist, at least, there are still ‘clear blue’ skies as the tries to ‘re-live his youth’ through his work. But in his articulation of this idea, he also warns against the collective experience of history. He wrote:
For an artist, individual experience should always take precedence over collective experience. With collective experience, or what goes by that name, one must be on one’s guard, because if we become too immersed, we come under the control of latent forces and lose our freedom.[5]
There is a contradiction between Li Luming’s rationality and the basis of his work. On the one hand, he was saying that in mastering the true face of history we must respect the history of the spirit, and the abstract characteristics of the spiritual phenomenon. On the other hand, it is crucial to have a clear idea of historical facts if we wish to legitimize our judgments. Does making a synthesis of historic experience give us the power to select possibilities for the future? Li Luming answered the question in this way:
For an artist, there are no ideal social models. Every age has its problems, as well as qualities that deserve our serious attention. What happened before 1976 is a part of China’s historic and spiritual heritage. Is it not a little to quick and simple to reject it as a whole?[6]
But what legacy has time left us with? Here it would be easy to come back to the Hegelian proposition that what is real is rational.
Li Luming’s logic is not that of a politician or a historian. For him, it is his own experience that demands to be taken seriously, regardless of whether it is politically correct or not. For him, history is complex, and these questions surface and fade, only to resurface in his thinking, though lost and elusive within an infinite haze. In solving complicated problems, memories are our most dependable ally. Only they can help us find what we truly need and what we agree with. When Li Luming reveals the contents of his memory, he exploits digital computer images and places his historical stories ‘above the clouds’, and in a haze. With the passage of time, history becomes a haze, and when we experience the mood of that past again we succumb to melancholy, which for Li Luming is a type of romantic animism. According to the critic Zou Yuejin, commenting on the works in the series titled Days above the Clouds and Portraits of the Seventies, ‘the expressed concepts and ideologies are both a challenge and an echo of the post-Cultural Revolution period, in that they are also a critique and incrimination of the realities of Chinese contemporary society’.[7]
With Li Luming’s renunciation of irony and derision, in his decision to paint with sobriety the face of history as it appears in his memory we discover within the fog a landscape from the past filtered with sympathy and understanding. Of all the artists who have borrowed from historic imagery, he is one of the few who has adopted the position of a historian. He refuses to deny the existence of a past that has already happened. There were many problems in that past, but for him this is no reason to totally reject it. Moreover, in turning back to that past, the artist must also reject the use of contemporary images to provide a contrast, because he acknowledges that recovering history entails recovering its problems, and that is sufficient.
In the process of untangling what constitutes art, Li Luming has always planted new seeds. Once they germinate and begin to grow, he turns his attention to another growing project. It is an endless investigation, a perpetual examination of his perceptions and his intellect. For the time being, he draws from the historic realm, the sprouts that grow and flourish in harmony with the land and climate. As we watch them grow, we feel a sense of intimacy, and the artist’s work enables us to return to history and re-examine it.
Li Luming asserts that what he expresses is ‘the experience of an individual at the heart of the collective’. But every individual must come to a different understanding from the heart of the collective. The artist is adamant that personal memories are one of the many problems that haunt the fogs of history.
1 September 2006
Notes：
[1] Fine Arts (Meishu) No. 2 1987, p.18.
[2] The goals of the journal were clearly expressed in the order form for the first issue of 1985: ‘Turning towards the present and the future, we make the entire nation our field; our aim is to reject reversion and mediocrity, and to encourage reflection and innovation; our task is to promote the new generation; and our plan is to achieve a contemporary visual scene, both individual and plural’.
[3] Interview with Li Luming, 4 September 200.
[4] Jiangsu Art Monthly (Jiangsu huakan), No.3, 1991.
[5] ‘I Only Have Faith in Personal Experience’ (Wo zhi neng zhongshi yu geren de jingyan), 2005.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Zou Yuejin, ‘Li Luming and the End of Irony’ (Fanfeng de zhongjiezhe), in Li Luming: Days Above the Clouds, Hunan Fine Arts Publishing House, 2006.
Translated by Dr. Bruce Gordon Doar