Li Daiyun

The potential for subversion in Li’s work reminds one of the satirical contradiction of the laughing faces in Yue Minjun’s iconic paintings, often reproduced in an exaggerated comic-like style with roots in Chinese social realist painting. But more importantly, her work’s tacit quality is reminiscent of the silent or silenced nature of Zhang Xiaogang’s family portraits, which also deal with questions of identity and the constructed nature of memory. If Zhang’s work illustrates the outcome of the process of constructing and elaborating on remembrance to create fictional or semi-fictional images, Li’s painting presents the raw material of memory as vague and pixelated but also amplified and monumentalized. The base material and composition, sourced from old photographic stills, are nonfictional in nature, yet they provide even greater room for fictional interpretation and imagination. Li trades the specificity and the descriptiveness of image with a self-imposed limit blurring nonfictional information (of the photographic sources), which serves as a lubricant for or an enabler of fictional meaning in her work. This fictional aspect has the possible effect of making available an extremely large open-ended room of possibilities. The creative nature of this opposes and defies the silencing imposition of rigidity and conformity by the repressive forces of the sociopolitical status quo.

 

In each awakened person who belongs to a repressive system, the balance hangs on a thin red line between overt political gesture that may prove to be suicidal in the present moment and the free thought in the internal self that reserves radical action with right timing, to ultimately right the wrongs of the present and the future.

 

In this sense, Li’s investigation of the past memories could ultimately point towards not only the status quo but also the future possibilities of radically altering an already radically-transformed China. This time, the direction of transformation is possibly opposite and against repression. History may repeat in a cyclical manner, but also it is a linear continuity, with one event leading to another with the responsibility of one actor on another. Constantly in negotiation with the possibilities of the self, it suffices to conclude or ponder that Li could be speaking out in total silence of her paintings. 

 

In a private interview, Li states that she seeks to avoid confinement or attachment to any propaganda or ideology. Her design for painting is to speak of visions that cannot be fully captured with words or other mediums of expression. Having lived abroad since the mid-2000’s, Li claims that she is not a traditional or true Chinese; rather, she is a global citizen and a free soul, rejecting any label or affiliation. 

 

Is this her true perspective and identity, or is it her way of speaking under cover from a repressive system? Or is our fixation on her Chinese identity and political situation a mainly western imagination?

 

Contrary to how Li is often introduced, it becomes evident that Li is neither completely Chinese nor is she completely western, if we are to take her word at its face value. (She states that she does not even consider herself a realist or abstract painter. She is simply a painter, period.) She is neither against nor for the government - only that she will do what is right by her conscience. Unlike a purely Chinese or Western person, she occupies a neutral middle ground. 

 

From her own words, I see an alternate vision of Li emerge, with herself always in transition between spaces, in a state of mind that is the convergence of liminalities. Only then, she says, can she be true to herself and sublimate her feelings and emotions into art, through the process of painting. Even the question of the nature of reality does not matter to her. She will live through existence regardless, whether it is real, a dream, or a simulation.

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Concerning the idea of simulation and computation, Li explains that her painting is the buildup of rules and systems, but the artist makes them to eventually break them. For her, larger paintings often allow more room and flexibility for her to improvise and to break the rules and systems that she has built for them. 

 

In a second, metaphorical conclusion, Li may be an artist who paints images improvisationally as a beautifully broken system. Specifically, this system is akin to a grid-based table of colors, but it isn’t quite a predictable grid. The process of pixelization, which Ethan Cohen has called, “Neo-Pointillist,” is similar to bokeh in photography (in terms of blurring specific detail), and it prevents the viewer from getting too close to the painting. Her painting then could be a balancing act, between the extremes of being too close or too far away. 

 

In essence, her paintings (which are of photographs) are similar to improvisational, street and abstract photography; the only difference is that her work involves making a series of choices, continually in the moment, whereas typical photography often lasts a fraction of a second to produce a raw image (prior to being developed or processed in the darkroom or on the computer). Poetically speaking, each of Li’s paintings is a series of moments… hundreds of photographs carefully overlaid on top of another. 

 

The final outcome of each painting for Li is the accumulation of those decisions made in the continuity of points of time. These decisions converge, creating an amplified signature in the meter that reads the signals of human consciousness that is Li’s. As one looks at a successful painting, the painting’s convincing qualities feed back into the consciousness, which observes the painting in a continual feedback loop. It is at this millisecond that her consciousness peaks to its highest state, which constitutes the moment of the final completion of the painting when she tacitly lets go of the brush.