Li Tianbing

Galerie Kashya Hildebrand, Zurich

This work is in generally very good condition overall. There are no apparent condition problems with this work. It was not examined under UV light.
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Born in 1974 in Guilin, the capital city of China's southern province of Guangxi, Li Tianbing first discovered painting as a child with traditional Chinese ink painting techniques.  In 1997 he moved to Paris to attend L'Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts, from which he graduated with highest honors in 2002.  He has continued to reside in Paris, although he frequently returns to China and has recently begun to exhibit his work internationally. 

Although he is still a young artist, Li has already produced a substantial body of work in a surprising variety of contrasting stylistic idioms.  Li believes artists should avoid repetitive production of signature styles:  "I always struggle against this idea," he says. "Style for me is a way to see the world, the world changes, our vision changes."[1]  The present work, entitled Autoportrait rouge avec Livre (Red Self Portrait with Book, 2007, Lot 9), is part of the My Other Childhood series, in which the artist deploys old family photographs as models and reimagines himself as a child, in some with a fictional brother and in others with tiny toys in bright colors that he did not possess.  The series follows on his previous Beizitou - One Hundred Children series, in which lone children are portrayed in a similar through more closely-cropped manner in remembrance of China's one-child policy and the deprivations of that era.  The title is ironic in that beizitou is a tradtional Chinese motif in which groups of joyful babies are depicted at play as a sign of prosperity and happiness.

In the bleak gray tones of old black and white photographs, Li instead pictures typical children in typical Chinese settings as he revisits today his own past, adding colour and imagination to the somber childhood that was his. In both of these series, the artist's rendering of the photographic calls attention to the passage of time and to imperfections in the past's conservation; meticulously painted surface 'defects' suggest the weathered photographs were long forgotten in a damp place in which the images progressively degraded.  The tension between the photograph as documentary evidence (the registration of memory) and as a physical, constructed (even fictional) object is highlighted in Li's work, which provides a poignant entrée to both the times of his own childhood and his recent aspirations for how things might have been.

In Autoportrait rouge avec Livre, the artist depicts himself at approximately seven years of age wearing a small but still oversized military uniform, looking towards the camera with an intent but questioning gaze that seeks direction.  Li's father was in the military, usually stationed at a military base rather than present at home, and as a child Li occasionally played dress-up with his father's professional attire.  The boy holds an open red book, inevitably bringing to mind Mao's Little Red Book and the authoritative control asserted over culture and identity by the state.  The tone of the red book is complimented by light pink colorations that glow on the child's facial features and the school satchel that hangs around his neck like a harbinger of future responsibilities.  Beautifully painted with exquisite surface details and pregnant with the complexity of an ambitious autobiographical project, the work is a fascinating example of this talented young artist's rapidly developing work.

[1] Cited in Randy Rosen, "To Arrive Where We Started And Know the Place For the First Time," published in conjunction with the exhibition Li Tianbing:  Beizitou - One Hundred Children, Zurich, 2007.