Written by Chen Jiaying
Editor's Recommendation:
Aike is currently presenting Li Ran's solo exhibition "Who Are You," which concludes this Sunday. The following is a review written for Li Ran's exhibition by the ARTFORUM Chinese website.
Li Ran, "Who Are You", installation view, AIKE, Shanghai, 2019
Each year, at a specific time, art's strangers from afar gather together in a city, where the world's theater circulates amidst clinking glasses, reflecting faces and bodies that appear defiant and vibrant, reminiscent of Li Ran’s figure paintings. Each year, as the plays pause, there is always a reorganization, with new casts stepping in. Since moving to Shanghai in early 2018, like all creators who traverse from city to city, Li Ran has been experiencing the changing textures and historical memories of different places. Although Shanghai has undergone tumultuous urbanization reforms and shifts in thought throughout the last century, its profound history of the concessions has been now superficially repackaged into "Bund Style Street," "French Concession," and "New West Bund." In a corner of the West Bund, the exhibition "Who Are You" employs two video works and a series of oil paintings on canvas to construct an irreducible object—the portrayal of “people".
Moonlit Night, 2019, oil on canvas, 120 x 90 cm
The space is loosely divided by curtains into two sections, allowing the audience to enter and exit via two pathways: on stage/off stage, backstage/foreground, you are who/who are you—with no question marks, the structure allows for a fluid interpretation among multiple readings. The recognition of the object of theatrical imitation is also an inquiry into the self-subject— the layered structure of the exhibition precisely metaphorizes the artist’s investigation into the history of stage design; the imitation and transformation of artistic styles, and the identification and anchoring of self-identity, leave behind an origin that is difficult to trace amidst the predicament of circular reasoning. The dual-channel video Persona Swap (2017-19) organizes Chinese stage design, costumes, and performances from the 1950s onwards into a facet of art history. Starting with the 1958 event of Soviet expert V.V. Terekhov delivering a course on stage makeup at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, Li Ran uses photographs, documents, staged scenes, and monologues to narrate the evolution of stage art from 19th-century European "illusionism" to "conventionalism" (derived from the Russian "условность") to "realism," indirectly reflecting a segment of art history intertwined with nationalism.
The display of the oil paintings serves as a palpable case study in the history of art. In the 1950s, following the establishment of the People's Republic and the cultural revival, the art of the liberated areas merged Soviet Realism with the representational realism advocated by Xu Beihong. At the same time, during the Cold War, the Soviet model was introduced to various socialist countries, and the influence of Western modernism was blocked. This was the external environment when V.V. Terekhov arrived in China. After the disruptive decades of the sixties and seventies, China once again used Western modernism as a reference point, embarking on a long and fruitless quest for answers. Since the end of the 19th century, the debate on Chinese and Western art theories has continued, and we are still struggling to construct a "Chinese contemporary art system." It appears we have never escaped the conundrum of modernity, which is also reflected in the dubbing tones of Li Ran's translated films.
Li Ran, "Who Are You", installation view, AIKE, Shanghai, 2019
"The mirror serves as a benchmark for measuring the authenticity of naturalism... This is a cunning object, whose seemingly indifferent reflection ultimately fails to reach our vacant interior." The 'other' created in the mirror by the performer is also the 'other' that emerges during the creative process in art. In the dual-channel video Somewhat Abstract, Somewhat Realistic (2019), it embodies a model manipulated at will by a makeup artist, where the blurred division between host and guest, self and adversary encapsulates the fusion of "abstraction" and "reality" into a struggle between self and other. The distance between realism and truth, self and other, is depicted in the grimace of the makeup artist and the model's ultimate resistance, eventually blurring between the oil paintings and the stage set up by the artist in the space. If "conventionality" is the inherent nature of all art, then the "multiple assumptions" of film and television are but the last straw that crushes us and thrusts us into the hyper-real; behind the mirror lies dimness devoid of light, after illusions become reality, who are "you" really?
