Li Songsong Paintings And Exhibitions At The Saatchi Gallery
Li Songsong, a young artist in the 70s, has been in recent years investigating the relation between public images and their transposition onto canvas. In the shift to painting these pictures, which are mainly old photos related to historical characters and facts, he hasn’t protracted the cognitive style as for some previous artists’ practice of criticizing, exposing, questioning, or satirizing and propagandizing about a certain historical period, but has used a kind of imagery enacting an objective approach.
In other words, in the use of the historical image-material that interested him, Li Songsong hasn’t made any seemingly solved judgment of the historical value, on the contrary it is just from a visual point of view that has to be sensed the objective, simple and direct power of history as shifted or transplanted onto canvas.Li Songsong deliberately plays down the potential implication of the images he chooses for his pictures eliminating his personal feelings from these images by adopting an arms length procedure for his work.The painting of the soldiers digging the trench, for example, was a picture he saw by chance. He felt attracted to the process of looking at photographs. When he look at pictures in a book
Li Songsong painting was based on a magazine image of a scene from the war against Japan War in the 1940s, depicting some Chinese soldiers carrying a Japanese airplane they had shot down, carrying it to Chongqing, a Chinese city in southwestern China. The captured airplane was a sign of triumph and a great source of pride to the Chinese. The artist has divided the image into two halves and purposely painted them with a few variations. For instance, the right half of the painting was blown up a bit more than its left side, intentionally revealing the artist’s manipulation of the image and his suspicion of the ideological connotation of such images and their authenticity.
The relation between photography and painting brings forth quite clear shades of a new historicism, not making history look like a truly existing objective whole, but a topographic map made up of different pieces of historical texts, that is to say that history is that of a certain culture being edificated in its articulation. This change in the concept of history indicates that the artist’s representation of historical memories is not purely objective and neutral, but conceiving contemporary cognitions and experiences within its articulated structure; what it points out is not past but precisely contemporary. In other words, the artist by means of historical images is here re-narrating the recount of history and with the aid of narration we can get from the hazy mist of history a clearer image of ourselves, surveying the state of our own existence.
If you want to know more about Li Songsong paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of Li Songsong. View Li Songsong artwork online at The Saatchi Gallery - London contemporary art gallery.Li Songsong
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