Li Shan

signed in Chinese and Pinyin and dated 1994, framed

Private Collection, Asia

This work is generally in good condition. There are minor budges around the top left corners. Please note that it was not examined under ultraviolet light.
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Li Shan
In Search of His Own Expression

Li Shan's Rouge series, which takes Mao Zedong as its theme, cannot be overlooked in any discussion of contemporary Chinese art of the 1990's. In many exhibitions of the 90's, the series was categorized as Political Pop alongside with the works of artists such as Wang Guangyi and Yu Youhan. However, if we compare Li Shan with contemporary Political Pop artists, we find that Li Shan's art does not simply turn political figures Pop, but is in fact a process of discovering the "Other" and alternatives. It also symbolizes the beginning of the Chinese people's open and creative experimentation. The lots on offer from the Rouge series (Lot 852 and 853) respectively showcase two unique styles of the series. After Rouge, the artist began to paint animals throughout his career. Contemporary to Rouge, a work from the 7 Days of the Week series (Lot 851) was a foundational work of the late style and an indispensable component of Li Shan's aesthetics.

Born in 1942 in Heilongjiang, Li Shan is older than most avant-garde artists active in the 80's and 90's. His upbringing and artistic vision are different, and he has always maintained a very personal style in the midst of contemporary artistic trends. He enrolled in the Shanghai Theatre Academy in 1964, studying stage art. After graduation and until retirement, he remained in the academy as a teacher. In the 1960's, still a student, Li Shan was already insisting in creative freedom. Aside from learning Russian painting in the classroom, he secretly studied Impressionism and other modernist works. But his works received constant criticism. During the Cultural Revolution, he was even publicly denounced, and was sent to a countryside cadre school to raise pigs and receive re-education through labor. After the Cultural Revolution, he began to participate enthusiastically in the artistic movements of the 1980's, including the 1983 Experimental Painting Exhibition and the 1985 "Concave Convex" exhibition. Primitivism and Expressionism preoccupied his paintings in the 70's and 80's. Some of his semi-abstract works were landscapes. Others, such as the Beginnings and Spread series, articulated primary figures with simple lines. The color palette was primarly black, white, red, and brown, full of primal vitality. Aside from oil painting, Li Shan also experimented many times with other media, including performance art. Among the most famous was his performance Washing Feet in the 1989 China Avant-Garde exhibition. Li, wearing a shirt printed throughout with identical facial portraits of President Ronald Reagan, raised his feet for two hours in a basin also printed with Reagan's image. Li Shan called his work "Pop + Installation + Performance," and it was an important demarcation in his artistic career. After the 1989 China Avant-Garde exhibition, Li Shan's artistic vision changed drastically. "After Washing Feet suddenly everything became clear. I must return from grand cultural and historical topics to the present, return to the people with whom I have relations presently, return to my own experiences and encounters. This is why the appearance of political leaders, of political ideology, of group movements, of the symbolic rouge began to appear in my paintings. The introduction of rouge-related motifs was inevitable." In such circumstances, Li began to create the Rouge series in the autumn of the same year and take Mao as a main theme. "It was not until the Rouge series that I found my own expressive means."

Begun in 1988, the Rouge series first featured gender-neutral, white-skinned figures. Lotuses crawl along their faces. The figures may hold a lotus flower and smile seductively. Afterwards, Li Shan applied this figural depiction to Mao Zedong and made a name for himself in the 1993 exhibition "China's New Art, Post-1989." Rouge Series (Lot 852) is the best expression of Li Shan's style of the early Rouge period. We see Mao Zedong in a revolutionary uniform, his face whitened and applied with rouge, his hand holding a blossoming lotus flower. The background is the Shanghai Bund. The white face derives from ancient dafenzi, male cross-dressers who titillated and entertained the rich and powerful. In early-90's Shanghai, the figure of dafenzi recalled to the homosexual communities active on the Bund at the time. Using the economically open Shanghai as a backdrop, Li Shan exposed the repressed side of the Chinese. At the same time, although Li Shan claimed that in using Mao as subject he "did not have any particular intention to satirize or mock ideology," the Rouge series feminized a Chinese political totem, relieving the people's conflicted emotions towards him. The underlying spirit of the Rouge series reflected the Chinese people's helpless maladjustment to Mao's image in the new generation.

From 1993 to 1994, Li Shan based his paintings on images of a younger Mao, made them even more gender-neutral, and placed them against brightly-colored backgrounds. This gave birth to the widely-praised classical form of the Rouge series. Another lot on offer from Rouge (Lot 853) is a representative work precisely of this period. Against a blinding pink background, Mao smiles ambiguously and suggestively. Li Shan's work reflected the ambivalent relationship between Mao and the generation of people who experienced the Cultural Revolution. Western viewers could more easily categorize Li Shan's work under a certain style or a certain -ism, but Mao's complex connotations cannot be easily labeled. Li once said, "Let's call it a personal history! In 1989, I believed it was time to look back on this period under Mao's authority. Mao for me has cultural significance, but not political significance. In this era, this history relates to me in a unique way. Without Mao Zedong there would be no Li Shan."

Li Shan purposefully eludes the overly political interpretations of his works. 7 Days of the Week, a group of seven paintings exhibited at the "São Paolo Biennial," manifests his important aesthetic transition from political figures towards animals. "Geese began to appear in my paintings because I wanted a simple motif. Because people have already given chickens, ducks, and other animals many metaphorical meanings and praise, I chose geese." The meaning of this motif Li Shan has never discussed explicitly, but the work's title 7 Days of the Week is suggestive. 'Goose' is homophone with 'I' and hence the artist's metaphor for the entire Chinese people or even all humanity. The seven paintings in the group each represent one day of the week. A goose holds a lotus blossom in his mouth. Some compositions feature one goose, others a pair of geese, which may have their fronts or backs against each other. All the geese look almost identical. Their collective image seems to hint at the mundane, routine existence of most humans. After the Rouge series, Li Shan abandoned human figures in favor of animals and even plants and gradually searched for expressive space beyond the canvas. 7 Days of the Week is thus very important for the artist. The work (Lot 851) on offer comes from the same series of works exhibited at the "São Paolo Biennial" and is an important document of a major redirection in Li Shan's creative career.

In 1998, Li Shan established a Bio-Art Lab and Workshop in New York that focuses on genetic modification technologies. In 2005, in the Reading series, Li Shan combined humans and insects in synthetic digital images, raising questions about biotechnology. In 2007, he went a step further. He planted genetically-modified pumpkins and released a document called the Pumpkin Proposal. Addressing life itself and refusing to constrain himself to the realm of pure art, Li Shan thinks in ways that often surpass his contemporaries, and is a super-avant-garde Chinese artist.