Li Zhanyang – ‘Rent’ – Rent Collection Yard
Galerie Urs Meile | 26 April – 24 August, 2008

Li Zhanyang’s solo show is a worthy visit this season, he has modeled his collection of sculptures on an “instructional” collective artwork that was commissioned during the Cultural Revolution. Instead of featuring the landlords, rapists, suffering and poor of the original, substitutes high-profile characters from the world of Chinese contemporary art. His commentary, his drole means of representing these folk, and his skillful adaption of the original is intelligent and timely. Due to the historical and social nature of this work, it is best appreciated through accompanying texts, below are excerpts from the gallery press release and a translation of Ai Weiwei’s response to the artist.

text: Nataline Colonnello (the following is extracted from the gallery press release)

‘Rent’ – Rent Collection Yard (2007) is the title of the largest and most complex sculptural installation Li Zhanyang (born 1969, Jilin Province, China) has ever created. Taking eighteen months of production after nearly a decade of conceptual incubation, Li Zhanyang’s ‘Rent’ – Rent Collection Yard is a humorous and subjective look at the Chinese contemporary art scene. It is informed by the artist’s personal experience. Characters, both local and international, are brought to life. The 34 life-size coloured fiberglass figures of this installation are modeled after the likeness of various people familiar to the artist – among them international celebrities as well as some only known in Chinese contemporary art circles. They include Chinese and Western artists, curators, collectors, gallery owners, gallery assistants, and art students. The gathered subjects were chosen according to their public or professional roles. Displayed on a real stage they were designed to showcase each figure in a striking a pose – dramatic or absurd, some of them with imbuing mordant satire. Following six conceptual themes (Paying Rent, Foot Washing, Raping, Oppressing, Dying a Martyr, and History Observed), the sculptures are spread throughout three exhibition spaces of Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing. The congregation seemingly gathered or juxtaposed is part of a broader and fabricated narrative revealing latent conflicts and power relations – the dirt underneath the high-gloss surface of the art world. The artist places his fiberglass alter ego amidst the other characters, representing himself by gazing intently into the darkness of the spectators. And among the spectators, Li Zhanyang places two exceptional figures in the front row: Joseph Beuys and Mao Zedong (in History Observed). Beuys, one of the most influential figures in the modern contemporary art scene, is expounding on the dynamic and chaotic interplay in front of them with a wild and passionate gesture beside the icon and father figure of revolutionary China.

The work is a contemporary transposition of the story of landlord Liu Wencai. During the revolutionary era, Liu Wencai was a victim of political muckraking and depicted as a brutal exploiter of the peasants.

Liu’s historic appearance as a despotic oppressor was the origin for the monumental and sculptural masterpiece called Rent Collection Yard (1965) also known as Rent Collection Courtyard. Permanently exhibited in the rent collection courtyard of landlord Liu Wencai’s orchard (in Dayi County, Sichuan Province), this group of sculptures portrays the class struggle between the indigent farmers and the ruling landlords prior to the Chinese Communist party’s coming to power. Commissioned by the provincial government of Sichuan Province and realized by a team of local folk artisans and Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, professors and students, Rent Collection Yard consists of 114 clay figures crafted in a stylistic combination of folk realism and Western academicism. In his version ‘Rent’ – Rent Collection Yard Li Zhanyang transposes the format of the original sculptures in order to apply a realistic approach with elements derived from his own art education that is emphasizing in particular the revision of Baroque art that refers to the iconographic languages of humanism.

The following article is from the exhibition’s accompanying catalogue “Rent” — Rent Collection Yard, available at Urs Meile gallery.

Do As You Wish
text / Ai Weiwei
When I was not yet on personal terms with Li Zhanyang I could only call to mind his early sculptures: they weren’t too large, most of them were colorful scenarios with plots and characters. His later works were grand scenes filled with fearless gawkers; their colors and the textures were equally loud and bright.

These works reluctantly admit their relationship to reality; powerful technique and deft handling reveal interesting inclinations. A rich and colorful working style, nuanced details and lively scenes, the emotive nature of these stories, the supposition of events, and the folkloric narratives reenact the joys that humans seek, stories befallen with mishaps as well as the illusory hero . . .

In most circumstances, as observers we are aware that the thing in front of us is merely a pile of painted clay, although we are endowed with a god-like perspective to survey it and we employ our self-decency to nit pick over its finer points. These figures and scenes, their harmonious and non-harmonious optical variations, our appropriate and inappropriate admiration, and their provocative or decorative colors and forms, are truly influencing and stimulating our cerebral cortexes. The trap that the author has devised has seduced viewers into crossing the threshold into this awkward realm. Is our seducer falling for his own trap? This ominous feeling triggers a fascination with the bloody nature of greed.

Li Zhanyang has applied himself to the goings on of a corrupt and pornographic world, unequivocally publicizing sexuality and the entitlements of a debauched and shameful lifestyle. He is like a tour guide who has long been working in these rotten landscapes and who is fluent in the thick dialect of the market economy, obediently repeating its jargon as he pretends to be serious. There is always evil in ignorance, and luxury is always nestled within stupidity. He lectures earnestly, commits himself wholeheartedly.

These are historical stories and interpretations that have been repeated millions of times, they even sound ordinary and banal in the telling. But the lifelike power of these works is often unbelievable, the injury that is the veracity of truth has metamorphosized, it has already become a hallucination that refuses to disappear, an accessory to our subconscious, like a melody caught in your head that is impossible to eliminate, especially in that moment when you are more sober than anyone else.

The reality and the intrigues that Li Zhanyang is touching upon with his scenes and characters are always lucid and vivid. They clearly tolerate no suspicion––they seem even more conclusive than the facts themselves. Ultimately these panoramas compose Li Zhanyang’s sense of reality, his brilliant, half-obscene worldview unexpectedly becomes the decisive way in which we view the world. The mind thinks and the hands act, with cunning perspective and obvious technique, while over and over he calculates his personal affairs. This scenario is something like a dust-laden Lohan in a temple, leaving behind an image difficult for either the spirit of man or beast to forget. On this long journey it cautions them or gives some heart-warming wisdom.

Today, people have finally become accustomed to accept this simple consensus: you are what you see, and what you see and hear is a part of you, a very reliable part of you. Owing to this, you have a relationship difficult to imagine with the outside world. This relationship is much more significant, more eminent than in previous eras. This causes us to become easily an almost forgotten part of history, turns us into characters in a fantastic legend, becomes the reachable portion of a far-fetched fantasy. Everything begins its metamorphoses with you; we could say that everything begins with you. The interesting thing is, you belong to it, you become you in its eyes, become you in its eyes in your own eyes.

Looking at it this way, Li Zhanyang’s moral cultivation seems satisfactory; his moral virtue will accompany all peacefully living beings through the phantom mist that is this boundless universe.

24 January 2008
Translation: Lee Ambrozy