Li Qing

Li Qing was born in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, in 1981. Li Qing’s paintings, installations, and video works seek rational rifts in similarity and contradiction, acting on the perception and acknowledgment of a viewer through circuitous and overlapped structures. His persistent painting practice no longer focuses on working within the four corners of the picture, but instead constantly expands painting’s external space and ways of seeing. The uninterrupted experimentation and sustained momentum across these various series are outgrowths of the themes Li Qing has been following since 2005: information and image in the technological age, the social mechanisms and power dynamics of viewing, the relationship between people, architecture and the city in globalization, the patterns and disciplining of aesthetics in the consumer age, constructing conflict structures and new forms of expression. The capture of micro-politics in everyday spaces and images, the analysis of ideology in aesthetic tradition, makes him reflect a special historical consciousness.

Credit:Li Qing Studio


Dark Magazines.magazines wrapped with brocades.dimension variable.2014-2025
Dark Magazine employs the traditional Chinese craft of “Zhijin (brocade weaving)”—a common Chinese household decorative item in 20th century—to envelop international art and culture journals such as Flash Art and Art Forum. These fabrics, printed with iconic Chinese landscapes like Huangshan's pine trees, West Lake, and the Summer Palace, once served as significant cultural symbols in the planned economy era, functioning as both home decor and ceremonial gifts. The black-and-white negative effect on the back side of the Zhijin, combined with the act of wrapping, creates a dual path for visual deconstruction: it abstracts the colorful imagery into a schema of shadowy beauty while simultaneously dissolving the functional identity of the magazines as vessels of knowledge. This can be seen as a visual representation of the inevitable information loss and semantic drift that occur in cultural translation.
The scenic motifs in the brocade form an intertextual dialogue with the exposed journal titles. As the international publications are encased within a local traditional medium, their textual meaning undergoes filtration and reconstruction by the warp-and-weft of the fabric, constituting a semiotic contest within a postcolonial context—one that hints at regional resistance amid the tides of globalization. The act of wrapping thus becomes both a reconfiguration of the materiality of archives and a restructuring of discursive power dynamics.
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