Li Ning — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

Nov 15

Nov 15 Li Ning

The Art of Li Ning

- By Jonathan Miles (Tutor and Supervisor of PhD, Royal College of Art. Writer. Art Critic.)

Within a darkened space a man stands with a toy doll. The painting is still but it Poses a question of what came before and what might emerge latter. Something Is strange, the doll, the cartoon tee shirt, his look but at the same time silence pervades the space and a mood persists of withdrawal. As if to hint further the painting is called ‘Stranger’.

The space of the imagination is occasioned by a push and pull of the light and the night.

In the painting ‘Party’ we are taken into the in-between of both of these registers. Is what is being depicted by these toy-like beings the exhausted aftermath or the anticipation of an event to come. The image appears flaccid as if overtaken by a sensation of a pause.

Within both of these paintings there is a sense of visual arrest or even a malaise of Indeterminacy. We are thus invited to linger within these spaces and ask questions as to what provides the animation for them. Is a return being posited, a return to the immanence contained within childhood reverie or is a space to do with enactments with non-human forces or at least the deposits of these forces within the imaginary?

Then in ‘Delirium’ we are taken more deeply into the night and with this the animation that night brings. There is nothing that is ordinary to the scene, the painting itself has a density both as a discrete space but also as an image. The attention shifts constantly from figure to figure, from colour to colour and from space to space. There is within this a memory of Baroque painting but a sense of Baroque visuality that is heavily disguised. Afterall it is with the Baroque that the mixing of light and night becomes such a distinguishing feature of painting and with this we can understand that this body of work carries within a play upon art historical memory.

As we are being drawn even further into the dark of the night, then explicit reverie finds its place. In this ‘Secret Garden in the Forest Night’ there is a release of the fantastic with all references to the everyday expelled. This is the space of the interlude, or the make believe that is a mixture of low culture animation codes with a touch of surreal investment. From this we are witness to the instability of pictorial codes governing the overall aesthetic inclinations that addresses the loss of pictorial or indexical certainty within our late time.

The question posed is, given the erasure of the day-time index of reality, what space is left to be occasioned and we might find the answer with the painting ‘A Room of One’s Own.’

Here the light of a new day starts to push aside the deeply etched shadows of the passing night. It is time to wake up and face the day. The bedroom is the place were economies of the night and day start to cohere together and aesthetic encounters are formed.

This is an art that allows its own schematic principles to emerge, it is tonally subdued, and its gestures are formed within the space of the interior. What emerges from this is a drifting sensation born out of the uncertainty afforded by the retreat of the day and with this the index of the real.