REVIEW | LI QIANG：Where The Pile Lies Forgotten

The Writing on the Wall
Browsing the Library Series of Li Qiang

I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again…

Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library” (1955) 

Allow me to confess that it took me less than five minutes to say yes to contributing this essay on Li Qiang’s stirring and deeply original Library Series once I had seen a batch of images on my screen. A book collector and author, like Walter Benjamin, I am also an avowed sucker for art that ropes in language, and I am also on a personal quest to yoke together Chinese and Western aesthetics in a dialogue. So this body of work actually realizes two unfulfilled curatorial dreams of my own, an exhibition linking visual and verbal art and an exhibition pairing Chinese and Western aesthetics. I doff my cap to the intrepid curator Eric Ding and the Sojourner Gallery for finding yet another important artist who ushes the timely buttons to send the elevator of the viewer’s thinking to the top floor where the view extends for miles, and centuries. This is a perfect example of what T. S. Eliot called “tradition and the individual talent,” because Li, a native of Jiangsu, is at once an avant-garde interrogator of received cultural heirlooms and an historically informed interpreter of the archaeological layers of the past, both Chinese and Western (one of his most powerful early works is a riff on the Laocoon, that seminal touchstone of artistic complexity in the Vatican).  Li goes big: He deploys a maximalist’s baroque extravagance to envelope us in monumental installations of almost overwhelming sensuality. We should also give credit to Li for welding his own armatures, a significant part of the ensemble, like the steel lecterns under Gerhard Richter’s analogous lead books, or the great Siah Armajani’s room-sized reading nooks such as his Edgar Allan Poe’s Study (2008). Li summons such an abundance of visual information – the word plethora seems to have been coined for just this occasion – that it immerses us in much the same way that a massive Jackson Pollock drip painting surrounds us. A later incarnation of this immensity, often on the mural scale, would be the intricate larger works of Julie Mehretu which summon their own Babel of information. 

This exhibition delves the irresistible theme of the library. Li’s “book walls” can present a daunting façade, like wandering into one of the multi-tiered libraries of Oxford or Cambridge where hidden stairs or a ladder are needed to read the third-floor terrace spines. As devoted readers know, the steps are worth the trip. Here is the artist’s own account of how the library series came into being:

The creation of this series of works began in 2009 and has lasted for 15 years. At that time, the Internet was just beginning to rise, and traditional print media began to decline. Against this background, I began to create in the form of "book tearing," because for hundreds of years, what we have seen and heard, pictures and information have all come from books and magazines. In that paper media era, books contained the cultural characteristics of the time - the thoughts and warmth of humanism. Today, many books and magazines are like the old clothes we wear, which have become a pile of garbage and forgotten things. My creation is to preserve some cultural traces of the past era and memories of human civilization. So I made library works. At first, I wanted to use a pile of old magazines to tear a face. Now I hope to tear a face into a pile of books. But there should be people in this pile of piles.

The edge-to-edge, packed visual information of Library Plan, one of Li’s epics, rewards this closer examination. The wit of textural appropriation is masterfully married to his confident visual sense, perhaps attributable to a common foundational strength that I recognize from so many Chinese artists who are close friends and collaborators. They all master calligraphy early in their training. When the meaning of the characters or letters is this tightly bound to the visual properties (balance, gestural energy, contrapuntal rhythms, the proportions of negative to positive space, black to white) then the correlation of writing to mark making strikes a balance. As Li reveals the painterly potential of the printed Chinese characters or the English alphabet. It is worth noting that Li started as a printer, and nobody knows the magic of ink hitting paper (“dot gain” is one of my favorite bits of jargon) like a master printmaker. During our interview, he offered an observation about his process that is both philosophically provoking and technically revealing: 

My work was completed with scissors and hand tearing. I found the colors I needed from the pictures and information that originally existed in the magazine, then tore off or cut off the excess colors. This process is a process of subtraction, not traditional collage art. The physical structure of the magazine itself and the formation of the new image are intertwined and interdependent. The magazine is the magazine, and the book is the book itself, not the material and color. The magazine only expresses itself, and even the image is to serve the cultural nature of the paper media era.

As Li reveals the painterly potential of the printed Chinese or Roman characters, the nuances of fonts, we are invited again to savor the material culture of the book, the art of type design, the “bone structure” of Chinese characters as complex as the Durer-esque precision of the type designs of Aldus Manutius (did you know that Durer visited Venice in the time of Aldus? Consider that historical confluence!). Like Jasper Johns with his alphabetic paintings (based on stencils), which similarly part the semantic meanings from the structural qualities, Li privileges the form of the character or letter, but there is another silhouette that matters here. The male and female figures in an earlier work entitled Skin, for example, share an almost Seurat-like posture, or the familiar Xian warriors in their ranks, those austere faces staring frankly from Li’s large-scale walls as though they were carved in limestone, a Chinese translation of Mount Rushmore. This is, I hope I can say this with impunity, a risky stratagem for a Chinese artist because the terra cotta warriors, checklist items on the international traveler’s sightseeing list (the salient term here is lao wai) can be perceived by more seasoned Sinophiles as cliches, in much the same way Andy Warhol could take aim at the ubiquitous portrait of Mao Ze Dong, or Jim Dine would aim his parody at George Washington. There is not a whiff of nationalism in Li’s aesthetic, or of dissent for that matter, so that the matrix of the familiar faces from Xian function in a similar way as the letters or characters. Li’s work Under the Surface taps the archaeological excitement of the famous dig near the Yellow River, but I cannot resist the temptation to correlate this densely layered work with one of the breakthrough paintings of Willem de Kooning’s career, Excavation (1950), a masterpiece at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that is partly based on his fascination with Mesopotamian antiquities. Like Li’s subtle figuration, de Kooning called his accumulation of heavy paint and gesture the “slipping glimpse” way of suggesting forms (such as the figure of the woman) yet maintaining the essentially abstract idiom that the critics of the time demanded. The phrase is an excellent way to talk about Li’s shadowy portraits in this exhibition as well. Famous faces are glimpsed through the web of rhythmic fragments, peering out through the busy surface the way a Giacometti portrait emerges from the many revisions he used.

I spent time preparing for this exhibition by examining earlier work by Li. During lockdown, he entered an ascetic period in a mountainside studio surrounded by stone walls in Changping, just outside Beijing, and among my absolute favorite works of his, Every Branch Leads to Another, stems from this phase of his career. It has the gentle lyricism of classical Chinese landscape painting. Its title reminds me of one of  Robert Browning’s most pensive poems, “By the Fireside,” which begins:

How well I know what I mean to do
When the long dark autumn-evenings come:
And where, my soul, is thy pleasant hue?
With the music of all thy voices, dumb
In life's November too!
I shall be found by the fire, suppose,
O'er a great wise book as beseemeth age,
While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows
And I turn the page, and I turn the page,
Not verse now, only prose!
I shall be at it indeed, my friends:
Greek puts already on either side
Such a branch-work forth as soon extends
To a vista opening far and wide,
And I pass out where it ends.

The Poet of Grey

As a putative “expert” on color theory (aside from Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky, nobody is really entitled to that honorific), with an abiding passion for the interaction of colors in the studio or on the palette, I found Li’s palette to be particularly interesting because, at least from a distance, these works appear to resolve into a subtle silver. This tonal harmony, a smooth concord, recalls one of the epiphanies of my research into the Impressionists and their bold color choices. If you spun around in the Monet and Renoir galleries of the Musee d’Orsay or Metropolitan Museum you would see a grey blur, the whirling perception of the brilliant purples, golds, reds and greens. Shades of that marvelous grey are also the signature tones of Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, Robert Rauschenberg’s “hoarfrost” series of Dante prints and some of those early tree paintings of Piet Mondrian I just mentioned. The fundamental bass tone of grey, extracted from all the bright inks of a magazine, is a totality of the color wheel when it is spun. When I ran a magazine, I loved going on press, watching thousands of sheets of snap-coated paper shoot out of the huge Heidelberg printing presses, controlled by craftsmen who knew just how much cyan, magenta, yellow and black to add to blend a skin tone, like the dots meticulously added by Seurat or Signac to a divisionist painting (they did not call themselves pointillists – the word divisionist goes with Li’s theory of subtraction. The white of the papers in these works cuts the colors just as a large dab of lead white paint is blended on the painter’s palette. I see this mastery of color in his Cover of Newsweek works in the current exhibition, combining the signature red of their masthead with the photographic elements of the collage. 

In a work such as Tree, the tracery of the branches is woven from thousands (literally) of strands of paper, in homage to a marvelous book published three centuries ago that remains an influence on many Western painters as well as Chinese, the Mustard Seed Garden Manual of Painting as it is known in English. Designed to build an artist’s technique brush stroke by brush stroke, it devotes dozens of pages of woodblock prints to variations on the theme of tree branches and how to capture the way they interest in real space. Even more pages are dedicated to the depiction of bamboo. Like the etudes of Chopin and Liszt or the Well Tempered Clavier of J.S. Bach, there is a ritual nature to the repetition in the Mustard Seed Garden Manual which accords well with the repetitive qualies of Li’s work, the almost systematic (but not mechanical) accumulation of form and texture as well as color, that dot, dot, dot pulse of a Seurat.

Nearly every critic who has written about Li, and there have been some very distinguished writers who have analyzed his work, has related his method of breaking down the original continuity of a magazine photo in his re-compositions, a progress he himself calls subtractive. The word that recurs often in their essays is Deconstruction, a theoretical method that ruled the graduate school where I earned my doctorate, along with most of the other universities from Paris to New York to Chicago to San Francisco. There was something sexy about the French origins of Deconstruction in the linguistics and critical theory that came out of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan, two marvelous writers on art I will quickly add, but there was something sly about those texts as well. This was such an exciting approach to literature, tearing it into tiny bits (morphemes, fragments, even the punctuation) and challenging all the formal tendencies of critical approaches to poetry before it. It was also hopelessly obscure so it was mocked by many frustrated readers for its ruthless dismantling of the “organic” structures of great works. Deconstruction was a victim of its own complexity, because this reputation for the un-doing of aesthetics was unfair. As with the very close examination of painting or printmaking (I love to get down to the surface of a lithograph or etching with a loupe), the way Li wields the scalpel is in its way a loving tribute to the material culture of the book and the magazine, fostered by his own background in the print studio. One of the hot-button terms of Deconstruction was “palimpsest,” that layered phenomenon so beautifully found in the way one poster or handbill will cover another on a city kiosk (anyone acquainted with the history of intellectual life in Beijing will immediately think of a certain brick wall by a bus station that became iconic). The American photographer Aaron Siskind had a gimlet eye for finding the beauty in these walls filled with fragments of forgotten paste-up artists. Li’s work often builds these vertical structures, in a way that would have delighted the literary theorist Gerard Genette, who titled his best book Palimpseste. Those of us who took Deconstruction seriously, by the way, were rewarded with that “immunity to rhetoric” that Bertrand Russell advises a member of a democracy to foster, and I find that same questioning sobriety to be present in Li’s work.   

Postscript

For all the pleasure I found in these works as a connoisseur of book and magazine design, I will admit as well that there was a subtext of anxiety too. As those in my late stage are accustomed to the threat of our excess inventory being “pulped’ in lieu of expensive warehouse storage, so the destruction of magazines and books , rather like their burning, is a recurring nightmare. The apocalyptic prospect of my millions (at this point in my career it is no exaggeration) of words in print going through the shredder is as humiliating as it it is inevitable. I might find solace, I suppose, in the apotheosis offered by an artist like Li transforming my destroyed books into a timeless sculpture, a museum piece. Ars longa, vita brevis and all that. I never did like the disposable aspect of my journalistic efforts. When I was writing for Fortune magazine a close friend and hockey teammate who was also a Wall Street hotshot in mergers and acquisitions once told me in the locker room that he read my magazine when he was on the toilet. So the possibility of finding artistic immortality even as a collage element (who wrote the headline in Le Figaro that is enshrined in Picasso’s Cubist masterpiece Ma Jolie?) is comforting. This may be, however, overly optimistic, because there is an aspect of the ephemeral involved in Li’s work. As with the fragile reeds and delicate elements affixed to a Richter painting or the fading celluloid of the photographic works of Doug and Mike Starn (displayed on similar steel armatures). As desperate as we all may be to attain permanence, whether on a library shelf or framed on a museum wall, Li somberly reminds us that anything on paper is fleeting., Even these words, committed with sincere enthusiasm to the page in the eager anticipagtion of an elegant printed catalogue at the Sojourner gallery, will doubtless find their way to oblivion, unless Maestro Li upcycles his own book into a future work.

Charles A. Riley II, PhD
New York, 11 November 2024

About the Author:

Charles A. Riley II, PhD is the editor-in-chief of Hamptons Art Collector magazine and an internationally known curator who is working on several coming museum exhibitions that bring together Chinese and Western artists. The former director of the Nassau County Museum of Art, he is the author of 44 books on art and cultural history including a recent monograph on Picasso as well as Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Art. He is a professor at Clarkson University who resides in Manhattan and in  Cutchogue, Long Island.