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15/12/2006

Li Songsong

Galerie Urs Meile, Luzern

Hypnogenesis

Li Songsong (b. 1973, Beijing) is widely considered one the most important painters of his generation. Since graduating from Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1996, Li's paintings - rendered with a lush impasto and often based on photographs of China's modern history - have been featured prominently in important group exhibitions throughout the world. "Li Songsong - Hypnogenesis" offers Beijing audiences a rare opportunity to see a powerful selection of Li's new, large-scale works.

"Hypnogenesis" charts the artist's recent evolution as he develops exciting new ways of working with both form and content. Resisting the formulaic, Li has sometimes sculpted the dense surfaces of these paintings from acrylic paint (rather than his customary oil), and has worked on both canvas and polished aluminum. While continuing to draw from archival photographs, Li has also begun mining other sources, ranging from popular films and family photos to aerial surveillance imagery. The results are surprising, fresh and consistent with the high level of quality indicated by Li's previous paintings.

The exhibition's title, "Hypnogenesis", refers to the process of inducing or entering a hypnotic state - relinquishing control of one's critical faculties. Li's latest body of work explores this phenomenon from a variety of perspectives, addressing the mechanisms that lull us into unquestioning submission and cultural amnesia. "China's Past" (2006) satirically depicts a still from the blockbuster epic "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", mocking the narcotic effects of popular cinema. Similarly, "Qingling's Children" (2005), a portrait of Madame Sun Yat-sen flanked by school children dressed in their "young pioneer" uniforms, points to the Communist Party's mesmeric indoctrination of China's youth; "Cuban Sugar" (2006), based on a photograph taken at an emergency United Nations meeting during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, reflects on the mass panic induced by this notorious chapter in Cold War politics.

Just as the content of these remarkable new works probes at the circumstances underlying cultural somnolence, Li's approach to painting deliberately distances him from his subject matter, enacting a form of auto-hypnosis and willful forgetting. Randomly dividing a single photograph into a series of rectangular areas, the artist paints each part separately, offsetting each segment with subtle contrasts in hue and tone. Li focuses exclusively on the formal elements that comprise each particular fragment, rather than the image as a whole. The results estrange both the artist and viewers from even the most familiar images, inviting us to see them as if for the first time. As the artist has remarked, "No matter how you paint, it's impossible to obscure the historical reality? But maybe my paintings can raise questions about our ways of looking at things."

Galerie Urs Meile
Rosenberghohe 4a - Luzern
Free admission

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