Presenting: Li Liao, 3-Part Video Compilation
A Slap in Wuhan, Single-channel digital video, 2010, 5’09”
A Single Bed No. 1 (Optics Valley), Single-channel digital video, 2011, 24’02”
Spring Breeze, Single-channel digital video, 2011, 126’39”
About the Artist
Li Liao was born in 1982 in Hubei, China. He graduated from Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, with a BA in 2005. Li aims to expose the social complexities in simple environments that appear rote and mundane by asking pressing questions about expectations and reality in his multi-media installations and performances.
Artwork Introduction
In A Slap in Wuhan the artist stood in the entrance of the Optics Valley Pedestrian Street with his eyes closed, waiting for a volunteer whom he had found online to come slap him. The artist kept his eyes closed until the volunteer left. The end.
In A Single Bed No. 1, the artist cleaned up an area the size of a bed on the floor of a public space. He slept there until he woke up naturally or until someone else woke him up. This performance has been enacted four times in total, in the following settings: Optics Valley Pedestrian Street, an enclosed ATM, on the grass by the lake, and a small playground.
For Spring Breeze the artist loitered outside an office building in Wuhan. Li asked someone working in the building to chain him into a bike lock at the start of the day, and to release him when they finished.
Find out more about the artist here.
For the occasion of the Screening, Arthub invited curator Chao Jiaxing to write about Li Liao’s art practice. Chao took the opportunity to integrate parts of an interview with Li into her analysis of his three part compilation. The works and correlating text address the role of the audience as activators for creative change, as well as the intentions and societal implications of artists working in the contemporary today.
You shouldn’t assume that Li Liao merely draws from the raw materials in his private life as the main motif for his art creation. Though artists often express, “life is art; art is life,” this simplified sentiment leaves us wanting.
Li Liao’s creations are often categorized as conceptual performances, but it seems that they emotionally originate from the stresses triggered by daily life. The artist admits that, “[he] doesn’t read or follow art news that much, but that most of [his] information comes from life experiences, and as it relates to art, his insights come from those around [him].” The artist’s creations become a controlled transference of his emotions as they occur. Thus the audience is persuaded to view power control as the critical point and focus within the work.
Li Liao hasn’t taken any courses in performance or conceptual art, but he has enough experience to transform his emotions into controlled productions. Therefore, Li is a clear example that creativity does not always originate from formal learning environments. Because the artist’s journey to cognitive realization and comprehension has not unfolded in conventional spaces, there will be numerable misinterpretations of his work; he will use these readings to further create non-traditional narratives. Is this a bad thing? Li hopes that his works surpass the conformity of artistic creation today.
Imagine: negative emotions always come from our instinctive dissatisfaction with external entities. These kinds of emotions drive Li Liao to translate observable phenomena into performative artworks. Because these performances transcend our daily experiences in intensity, they trigger reactions of sudden discomfort from viewers. For the artist, provoking these reactions is one of many ways to challenge current social norms. Though his artworks are indeed simple and direct, with a focus on physical sensations and experience, there is always an unidentified tension for the audience to interpret. Any viewer, who chooses to investigate his works deeper, in an effort to find hidden internal structures, will either fail or be lost.
The audience’s unconscious critiques and interpretations are grounded in their individual upbringings (stemming from their social and conceptual understandings). Obviously, viewers with professional [art] backgrounds will interpret Li’s work from perspectives tinged with learned criticism, so based on their analysis it may seem like all of the artist’s works include social commentary or conceptual methodologies.
Li Mu is another well-known Chinese artist whose work is interestingly dissimilar to Li Liao. In Li Mu’s early creations, he practiced happening art as a tribute to the late conceptual artist Joseph Beuys. In later artworks, he used his hometown Qiuzhuang to showcase reversed critiques based on cultural colonialism and misinterpretations. Their art practices both have simple and direct motifs; additionally, neither can avoid the impact of audience observations. Contrastingly, Li Liao doesn’t deliberately avoid audience’s direct interpretations, because he thinks that their lack of understanding is a problem of technical proficiency and an absence of experience. His non-traditional art is just beyond the boundaries of recognizable social and conceptual realities.
This leads us to Arthub’s (online) Screening, presenting: A Slap in Wuhan (2010), A Single Bed No. 1 (Optics Vallery) (2011), and Spring Breeze (2011). In the first video work, Li Liao stands in the middle of Optics Valley Pedestrian Street in Wuhan, Hubei, with his eyes shut, waiting for someone he recruited online to come and smack his face. Li keeps his eyes closed until the volunteer leaves. The artist’s intention is to bring virtual reality back into the real world in its most authentic form. The partition between online and material spaces lies in the misted moments between our eyes being open and shut. Like returning from a distant consciousness, when your eyes open the retinas begin to process the realities surrounding you, before buffering and reviving—thus, in a lion’s two seconds* you’re able to experience images anew.
* This is a common phrase used by Li Liao, which refers to the average time it takes lions to ejaculate.
Another representational artwork is A Single Bed No. 1, which was made in 2011, after The Slap in Wuhan. This artwork has been performed four times in total, once on the Optics Valley Pedestrian Street, in an enclosed ATM, on the grass by a lake, and an open space in a residential compound. In A Single Bed No. 1, the artist circles a bed-size space on the ground in public and sleeps on it, regardless of the people around him. On camera, you can see people gathering around, giving him strange looks, laughing and whispering judgmental statements.
Li Liao describes his art creation at that time: “I had a ridiculous idea, then I just went for it. In normal life, you always see people sleeping on the bus and by the side of the road, or beggars sleeping on the overpass. So I wanted to see what would happen if I slept in the square. I didn’t have many chances [to exhibit in gallery spaces] at that time, so I used society as my platform.”
We can find the essence of Li Liao’s future art creations in these works; gleaning subtleties that pervade public spaces, accentuated by Li’s efforts to expose the contradictions between his actions and society. He was propelled forward – in opposition to conventional society – by his own cultural reflections and the knowledge he had gained from others. During the performance, two possibilities existed: he could sleep until he woke up naturally, or other people could wake him up. Therefore, his bed at varying points fluctuated between the private and public.
Looking at the work today, you could say that the performance is an early example of Liao’s practice that has since been refined based on creative adjustments, but I would rather defer to his explanation: “Artworks have many possible interpretations, a reality that is difficult for artists to control. If [the artist] provides one clear explanation then the fun disappears.” From his explanation, we can extrapolate that performance art has the ability to construct new understandings of creation. The audience is forced to form their own perceptions during the process of observation.
These two artworks occurred before Li Liao moved to Shenzhen, when he was still living in Wuhan. It’s important to consider the artist’s status at that time: he was a typical young adult male with a girlfriend, just before he started to create artworks about the contradictions in domestic life. This kind of domesticity is always found in capitalist societies, which are inherently fraught with contradictions based on discipline, structure and clustered experiences. Li Liao often acts as a challenger, taking advantage of his status in the world by using the people around him as an artistic medium.
Similar to Li Liao, the French artist JR intentionally creates “art for the people” without explanations. Conceptually, by considering the audience’s position, the work of Gu Dexin and Li Liao take this idea even further. Gu explains: “I think that the audience’s self-interpretation is very interesting…I want to offer them a space without language barriers.” Thus from a micro political perspective the audience functions with a dual purpose, acting as both a medium within art, as well as diffusers of art. Despite their differences, both Li Liao and Li Mu capitalize on this duality, by realizing contemporary aesthetics in local areas, with the help of art “amateurs.” For Li Mu this includes his family and normal people from his local village.
Interestingly, by working in such environments Li Liao draws attention to the distinctive class differences within society, which are a result of varying levels of education. Because of these dissimilarities, viewers’ comprehension becomes distinct from one another. The conception that there is one right way of viewing art is a sort of cultural hijacking. Instead of conforming, wouldn’t we rather become reactants that are allowed to construct new forms of understanding?
The presentation would not have been possible without Klein Sun Gallery. We would like to thank the artist and his gallery, as well as Chao Jiaxing for their willingness to participate in Arthub’s Screening Program; we look forward to future collaborations.
The project with Li Liao will also present at
Exhibition on the Table, Arthub’s IRL extension of the screening program at CREATER SPACE, Shanghai. The Program which inaugurated this past summer defies notions of artistic accessibility—ensuring that viewers are exposed to new media art in a variety of formats. We hope that by cooperating with fellow not-for-profits and video artists from across the world, Arthub can help tear down barriers between the community and the exclusionary world of contemporary art.
Check out Arthub’s full 2016 Screening Program
here.
Artist Introduction (extended)
Li Liao was born in 1982 in Hubei, China. He graduated from Hubei Institute of Fine Arts, with a BA in 2005.
Li aims to expose the social complexities in simple environments that appear rote and mundane by asking pressing questions about expectations and reality in his multi-media installations and performances. An argument with his father-in-law, for example, inspires a video in which tension builds in an entirely organic direction, offering a glimpse into a complex and authentic relationship that defines the artist’s life.
His most prominently featured work of art,
Consumption (2012) is an installation piece that scrutinizes the disparity in assembly line labour and mass consumption, displaying a lab coat, ID card and iPad that the artist used during a month-long period of employment at the notorious electronics manufacturer, Foxconn. The work was featured in UCCA, Beijing, New Museum, New York, and Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, where it was part of the Hugo Boss Asia Award show.
Consumption was also featured in
The New Yorker and
The New York Times.
