Notes
Li Shan has been considered to be at the forefront of the emergence of Political Pop within Chinese contemporary art during the mid-1990s. But unlike his contemporaries in the Political Pop movement, Li was born almost a decade earlier in 1942. His personal experiences and ideological perspectives have influenced him in a way which allows him to be included in this movement, but also allows his oeuvre to be truly singular. Li's oeuvre is an exceptional reflection of the paradoxical relationship between Mao and his legacy with the generation who endured the full force of the Cultural Revolution. While it is easy for Western eyes to shove Li's canvases into one 'style' or 'movement', many graced with the iconic face of Mao, the true complexity and intricacy of this relationship cannot simply be conceded to one, deterministic label. Li, himself, asserts: 'Call it personal history. In 1989, I felt able to look back at this time [growing up under Mao]. This is why, for me, Mao is a cultural symbol and not a political one. I derived so much from that time, from that period of history. I would have been nowhere without Mao.'
For Li, his art is the vehicle in which he can reconcile his personal experience of the past and of the present, the contemporary, and in doing so, implicates the collective experience of both. While other artists of the 'Political Pop' movement reappropriate the image of Mao in an irreverent, almost sacrilegious manner, Li's work cannot be divorced from his personal history, one which was drenched in a divine understanding of Mao. Mao is an essential part of Li's personal iconography, a collection of symbols and ideas which reach far beyond the newly-objectified image of Mao, easily transformed into material for consumption. And while Li's paintings carry a satirical interpretation for the viewer, they are inherently a multi-faceted representation of personal loss, growth, and resolution: a heavy and profound symbol. The inclusion of the image of Mao in Li's artistic vocabulary cannot be degraded to a mere re-invention of the 'Great Leader,' but rather a visitation into a past that is now no longer existent. By the mid-1990s, after embarking on a more abstract route in his oeuvre, Li concluded that perhaps those works had been 'too ambitious for the time, too loaded,' he began his most famous paintings to date: the Rouge series. Li affirms his change in direction: 'It wasn't until I began the Rouge series that I found my true personal expression.'
The beginnings of the Rouge series can be traced back to as early as 1988, with the earliest works from this series comprised of disembodied white heads, encircling clusters of Li's iconic lotus flowers and tendrils. The title of the works refer to the red face paint often seen in a theatrical context on members of Chinese opera troupes, but in Li's paintings they suggest an ambiguity of sexes, a confusion which inherently transgresses societal norms in China. In his artist statement, Li explains his artistic choices: 'My use of sex derives from my interaction with society. I am not trying to educe a moral evaluation of sex per se within our culture or to pass comment upon the relationship of sex to moral values. I am motivated by the delicate balance that exists between perversity and power. This is the rational behind the Rouge series...Power must have an object over which to wield its strength.' The overt, sexual gestures evident in this series carry a symbolism that reaches beyond the taboo of sex and sexuality, alluding perhaps to the impotence of society post-Tiananmen or what critic, Leng Lin, calls 'spiritual confusion' in China.
Sotheby's is very pleased to be offering a work from Li's late Rouge series, Rouge Series (lot 603), an exceptional synthesis of his earlier works from the series exhibited through the inclusion of the lotus flower, a Li Shan trademark, and his more recent iconography of butterflies. This work is a quintessential Rouge painting, addressing notions of homosexuality, demonstrated through the two butterfly-eared men holding hands, their faces turned away from the viewer, as if embarrassed by their sexuality. Li again plays on the tensions which rest on the fine line between power and helplessness: two men, whose gender dictate a sense of strength and power, are seen as restricted and confined as their hands fall by their sides as if their clothes are too binding, too close for comfort. While his earlier work utilized vivid, bright pinks and red, signifying health and happiness, these later works are composed with softer blues and mauves, colors which seem to suggest that these figures are, in fact, bruised by their inability to express neither their individuality nor their sexuality.personal history.
Born in Lanxi, Heilongjiang province, the northeast of China, Li left Heilongjiang University in 1963 due to his acceptance at the Shanghai Drama Academy, moving to Shanghai where he has lived and worked since 1964. However, as Li enthusiastically started his studies, the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, causing the academy to eventually close as students were made Red Guards and their energies needed for revolution. Li, graduated in 1968, in the chaotic political climate of the Cultural Revolution, and found himself painting for the stage design department, hardly fulfilling his dreams of becoming an artist, and simply, unable to in the socio-political atmosphere bent on 'destroying the old society'. Understanding the context in which Li was exposed to art and created art, allows the viewer to see, that for the artist, his work is not intended to be political, it is a personal journey into the past and to smooth out the scars which have been left behind. And though many cannot help but envision Mao as a political symbol, a signifier of revolutionary zeal and authority, he has played an inextricable role in the lives of Li's generation: there is no way for distance or detachment to come between the two. Li's paintings move beyond the sphere of typical 'Mao' paintings, they hold a truly profound history of one artist and his own admiration and abhorrence to the man who redefined all that is China.
