Lot 439: Li Songsong (b. 1968)

Li Songsong (b. 1968)
Big River
signed in English and Chinese and dated 'Li Songsong 2001' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas
51 1/8 x 74¾in. (130 x 190cm.)
Painted in 2001

Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong.

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 17.5% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.
As one of China's best recognized and most talented young painters, Li Songsong has built an international reputation through his sophisticated combination of sensuous painterly techniques and his appropriated historical and political imagery. Born in 1973, Li came of age in the post-Mao era of reforms. The imagery and effects of the communist legacy are for him part of the historical archive, not of lived experience. His treatment of historical imagery perfectly embodies the emotional and ideological distance his generation feels towards the revolutionary era. The images he adapted during this period were all part of China's collective memory. His paint handling, his selections and his omissions, serve as metaphors for the ambiguous and often contradictory feelings the Chinese populace has towards the past. His 2001 canvas, Big River, depicts a military operation along China's famous Yangtze River. A band of soldiers wait along the shore, presumably on the brink of engaging in combat. Li however paints them in a fairly static mode, and they appear more like silent witnesses than combatants. Painted on the grand scale of history painting, the soldiers are all focused on a murky horizon. The figures seem paused as if on the brink of some unknown breakthrough, we hold our breath with them as if in tense expectation of a dramatic denouement.
The Yangtze holds a special place of the Chinese national and military imaginary. It was the site of numerous military campaigns in the modern era. Perhaps most significantly, it was the People's Liberation Army's advance across the river in the spring of 1949 that precipitated the Kuomingtang's departure to Taiwan and the founding of the People's Republic of China under Chairman Mao. While the foregrounded group of figures are plainly comrades of those forging ahead, their seemingly passive detachment emphasizes the distance between them, highlighting a slightly ominous tone, as if they are witnesses rather than participants with foreknowledge of the vast ramifications that the campaign would ultimately have on generations to come. Li has evacuated the intense physical drama of a military campaign and instead highlighted the emotional aspects. His treatment of the subject is almost filmic in its scope. Excerpting what might appear to be an anonymous military scene, Li simultaneously brings us back to the heroics and sacrifices of a moment in time, while also underscoring his generation's ambiguous relationship with a communist history that grows increasingly remote with time.