Li Qing, Blessing Moment

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• Hou Hanru
   

30 years ago, many Chinese artists were excited by the unprecedented speedy urbanization across the country. Not only in metropolitan cities like Shanghai, Guangzhou, Beijing and Shenzhen, but also middle-small cities, and even countrysides, one was seeing incredible urban expansions and transformations, brilliantly resumed as Cities of Exacerbated Difference (COED), a concept invented by Rem Koolhaas and his research team, observing and theorizing the radical urban boom across the Pearl River Delta, and by extension, reaching out to the entire Asia Pacific Region. This trend was forming a key driving force in the process of globalization at the turn of the millennium. However, times have changed and we are now finding ourselves in an increasingly contradictory and complex situation: on the one hand, neoliberal capitalism has become the dominant norm of economic and social life across the globe; on the other hand, we are entering the most uncertain and violent geopolitical conflicts everywhere. In between, every society, no matter governed by any system – “democratic” or “totalitarian”… , is now facing a deep crisis upsetting the foundation of living together for different communities, classes and even individuals. The rise of “new technologies”, symbolized by all kinds of “social media”, has driven this precarious reality towards an unpredictable and uncontrollable, therefore, dangerous, “future”… 

Artists are among the most sensitive about this kind of major change of history. And they always try to testify and make sense of it with their particular perceptive faculties, imaginations and critical reflections. They are always the first who convey the voice of the society. Artists living in China represent probably the most audacious and experimental among them while China has become the most drastic land of social, economic and cultural mutation. 

To look for a sample of this “symptom”, it’s interesting to look at how different generations of artists witness and reflect on the evolution of architectural typologies in Chinese cities, and especially in junction zones between urban and rural areas, where urban expansion rapidly erased the boundaries of both sides. In this process, new houses built by newly enriched farmers represented their fantasies to live a “higher life” in folkloric versions of modern villas, signalled by various forms of “capitols” on the roofs… In the middle of the 1990s, Zhang Peili, a leader of the Chinese avantgarde movement based in Hangzhou, recorded in photography this phenomenon around his home area with excitement and optimism, mingling with playfulness and irony. In the mid-2020s, Li Qing, an artist 25 years younger than Zhang Peili, also based in Hangzhou, also recorded similar houses in photography. But this time, these originally “fancily made” villas are turned into “nail houses”, trying hard to survive the wave of demolition of the “old areas” as a new step of “urban upgrading”. Countrysides have now been reduced to the minimum and old villages have become “village in the city” awaiting the fate of ultimate disappearance… Now, younger artists like Li Qing, facing the “normalization” of urban expansion, are no longer excited by the dazzling city lights. Instead, they have grown a certain indifference and numbness: as Li Qing showed in his project for Fondazion Prada’s RongZhai in Shanghai (“Rear Windows”, 2019-2020), the neon lights appeared to be pale and sad… Li Qing, along with many artists of his generation, turns inwards to look for new “anchor points” to restart his “creative engines”.

At the same time, experimental art in China, and elsewhere, is also awaiting the most uncertain fate: Commodification of life and human relationships has changed the foundation of art making, its definition, function and values. It does not only change the main subject matters as witnesses of the life reality, including the transformation of the city towards a marketplace of consumerism, but also imposed a certain mode of perception, expression and communication based on the material and ideological logic of  consumerism. It’s in this process that painting is “returned” to the forefront of all expressions and expositions… We all know that painting has regularly been declared dead for the last 80 years – as the most conservative and even regressive art form – and then brought back to “new lives”. But for the last two decades, with the unprecedented “market boom” in art, its “renaissance” has become particularly spectacular and efficient… Making, showing, collecting and trading paintings are becoming a genuine source of wealth making – or, a real reserve for “safety bounds”, a refuge against all risks in this turbulent world. Painting are therefore hailed as the most “reliable” form of “artistic expression”. Again, the “art community” tends to agree on that it’s through the “window” opened (painted) on a canvas that we can learn to see the world in the most reliable way – it’s not only beautiful but also convenient to carry around and show off… 

In fact, we are now living in a truly “brave new world”. A digital autocracy-tyranny of the capital is disguised in happy faces named smart phone, “social media”, AI, bio-engineering. They not only take away jobs from us. they rip off our capacity and dignity as human beings with intelligence and moral values… This is an even braver world than the one imagined by Aldous Huxley. And the window in painting is indeed an opening towards such a “really brave new world”. Li Qing, with a critical mind, has shrewdly captured the key to open up such a “new perspective” towards the contemporary reality: he attempts to grasp and reproduce the “true pictures” of this mutating reality on canvas, painting all sorts of scenes from urban expansion to new norms of beauty defined by fashionable styles of life, or, more precisely, simulacres of real life, played out by “fancy people”, especially “influencers”. These scenarios are always played out against backgrounds with equally fashionable urban landmarks. 

However, Li Qing also knows that this would have never happened without history… the tension between the “contemporary” and history is what make sense for us to understand and negotiate with this mutating world. Hence, “historic relics” like old window frames collected from demolished buildings, including the “farmers nail houses”, are introduced to become the skeletons, or architectonics, of his paintings, and by extension, of his installations that tend to become “architectures”… In turn, this attempts of “architecture making” has “architecturised” his paintings. Now they are restructured with frames, overlapping different scenes and images, forming collages of unconnected elements – architectural images, human figures… However, filtered images derived from by “social media”, they are no longer images of the real world; instead, they are what the artist identified, inspired by Jacques Lacan’s theory, as signs of the “desire of the Other”.

Here, let’s look at how Jacques Alain Miller, one of the most influential experts of Lacan today interprets Lacan’s idea of desire:

What does Lacan show? That desire is not a biological function; that it is not coordinated with a natural object; that its object is phantasmatic. Consequently, desire is extravagant. It is elusive to anyone who tries to control it. It plays tricks on you. But also, if it is not recognized, it produces symptoms. In analysis, the task is to interpret, that is, to read in the symptom the message of desire it contains.

If desire is disorienting, it also gives rise to the invention of artifices that act as compasses. An animal species has its natural compass, which is unique. In the human species, the compasses are multiple: they are signifying constructs, discourses. They dictate what must be done: how to think, how to experience pleasure, how to reproduce. However, each individual's fantasy remains irreducible to common ideals.

Until recently, our compasses, however diverse, all pointed to the same north: the Father. Patriarchy was believed to be an anthropological constant. Its decline accelerated with equality of opportunity, the rise of capitalism, and the dominance of technology. We are exiting from the age of the Father.

Another discourse is supplanting the old one. Innovation is replacing tradition. Networks are taking precedence over hierarchy. The allure of the future is overcoming the weight of the past. The feminine is gaining ground over the masculine. Where there was once an immutable order, transformational flows are relentlessly pushing back all boundaries.

Sharing the conviction of  “ innovation is replacing tradition”, Li Qing represents his “subject matter”, or the objects of his imagination and fantasy, in such a perspective to embrace the “desire of the Other”.  Then, this “desire of the Other” drives us to a wide open but greatly uncertain future. How will we live in a future without a Father? Who will be Other who will define and control the future? 

For his personal exhibition in Seoul, Li Qing focuses on representations of the “beautiful” images of fashion models, saleswoman, middle-class vacationers, etc. posed in a “ritual” positions for “social media”. They are superposed by images of brocades – touristic souvenirs of Chinese tourism-diplomacy back to the age of “Economy of Planning” and some urban landmarks of today, such the Lotte World Tower in Seoul… In his paintings, in fact, these images are turned into empty signs, scarifying the very substances of their beings, to become mirrored illusions of the desire of the Others. They are offerings for the rite of passage of our world towards an unknowingly precarious future. This “rite of passage” is taking place during the Chinese Lunar New Year, a festival that both Chinese and Korea celebrate with hope of Blessing for the new year. To obtain the Blessing, how much do we need to sacrifice?

 

22 January 2026, Les Lilas