Li Qing

Li Qing was born on 1981 in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, China. He is a graduate student at China Academy of Art and one of the representatives of this new generation. In Li Qing's work juxtaposition usually occurs between two similar subject matters or scenes but in difference chronologically. The tension or relation between the two is usually the resource of concept of the work. In China's art scene the juxtaposition of old and new, which reflects the remarkable social transition taking place over the last three decades, was/is popular.

Li Qing is making a simple and easily accessible visual world where audience may exchange idea and share a common feeling. Many of the prototypes of contemporary Chinese art were heavy in their subject matter in order to express artists' negative attitude towards the current corruptive system. Li Qing successfully presents a magic pictorial series of contemporary Chinese art. Simultaneously, psychological complexity toward the remarkable social transitions of China is easily understood. His art is a visual game but entwined with social information that reflects the vicissitudes of the society. The subject matter is ordinary, and unnoticed, some are like news photo for a propaganda purpose. He presents a picture that combine with images and reality. Grand rhetoric and heavy theme are non-exist. Li Qing is more interested with an ordinary scene that affects our perception to the world. Li Qing is a great practitioner of oil painter. With his bold brush stroke, exact impasto, and, he smartly turns the visual games and subject matter into his own painterly game, a pictorial world that reflects changing reality.

This pair of almost identical paintings by Li Qing is based on an image taken from The Scandal of the Century, a documentary film on the notorious marriage between Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Neither of the two paintings is a strict reproduction of the original image. Instead, the artist has deliberately inserted six slight alterations into these two paintings, the most noticeable ones being the two star-shaped knots vs. two round-shaped knots on the red cloth in the foreground. Wedding is part of a larger series consisting of matching images in pairs, which the artist started in April 2005. The differences that the artist designed for every pair of paintings often rise from the irreproducible nature of experience and memory, the derivatives of conspiracy and disclosure, the delicate division between reality and forgery, and the relationship between painting and source image. As the viewer is coaxed into looking for the distinctions between the two paintings, the artist questions the principle of painting which dictates that every stroke can't be repeated.

Conclusions: Li Qing is among those group younger artists. Their emergence in the art scene will be symbolic to Chinese art world and the entire society at large. For the artist his visual game is perhaps a play of pigment and stroke, but his audience there is something significant behind the game.

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View Li Qing paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Li Qing artist. View art online at The Saatchi Gallery - London contemporary art gallery. Li Qing.