She / He · The Lijiang Period

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The Lijiang Period

The Context of Retreat

In 2006, after returning from the Rijksakademie, the artist closed “Lijiang Studio,” actively stripped away his public identity, cut off his sources of income, and withdrew into his private painting room in Lijiang, entering three years of self-exile. This was not a retreat but a radical inward turn — an archaeological retracing and healing, through painting, of the previous decade of conceptual art.

The Choice of Materials: The Contest and Reconciliation of Oil and Ink over Time

In his choice of materials, the artist deliberately chose two traditionally mutually exclusive media systems — oil-painting grease and ink — and carried out a conflictual fusion of them directly on canvas. Mixing ink into oil paint is not an immediate technical reconciliation but a way of letting the materiality of the two media unfold a long contest on the canvas: the heavy covering of the oily and the permeating flow of the watery tear at each other; the slow oxidation of the grease and the swift diffusion of the ink form a dislocation on the scale of time. The canvas becomes the battlefield of two aesthetic traditions — European volumetric modelling and Eastern planar breathing, Western material accumulation and Eastern emptiness left blank — devouring and awaiting each other in every stroke.

The radicality of this choice of materials lies in the intervention of “time” as a third medium. Grease and ink do not reach reconciliation at the instant of making, but carry on a hidden dialogue on the canvas for weeks and even months — the oil layer gradually drying and contracting, the ink continuing to seep through the ground, the two substances slowly adapting to and compromising with each other as time passes, finally reaching a kind of “wounded reconciliation” at the cracks, the sediment and the diffused edges of the picture. The picture therefore presents a “texture of time” — ink colour showing through at the crazing, ink layers settled beneath the oil film, unexpected crystallisation at the edges — and these are scars left by the war of media after the washing of time, not “effects” deliberately controlled by the artist.

This choice is a materialised extension of the artist's consistent aesthetic of violence and conflict, but the end of the violence is not destruction; it is reconciliation compelled by time. The confrontation of media is precisely a metaphor for the subject: the tearing of the double personality, the irreconcilability of identity, the friction of globalisation and the local, all find their most honest material correspondence in the unmixability of oil and water, and time finally grants this irreconcilability a form of sorrowful co-existence.

Three Series

“Self and the Void” — the fusion of the dissection of a double personality with surreal escape. After his return, the tearing of identity became extreme: the cool geometry of the “international artist” and the violent flow of the “descendant of Chongren Li'en” contend on the same canvas, corresponding to the friction of globalisation and ethnic memory. In the mid-2000s China was in a period of violent friction between deep globalising involvement and anxiety over local identity; “Lijiang” had already transformed from a frontier old town into an international tourist sign, and the artist's inner division is precisely a micro-epitome of this structure of the era. When the tearing reached its limit, the series turned toward the surreal void — mountains folding, time inverted — providing a vessel in which irreconcilable identity could breathe. The void is not evasion but a necessary phase in the upward spiral of self-analysis.

“Figure Portraits” — a Freudian counter-transference experiment. The artist places the sitter in the position of the “analysand,” himself being at once painter and analyst, presupposing no composition, letting the sitter's character and unconscious “lead” the brush.

The thirty-year fold of time and space with the Dongba He Xiudong is especially crucial. As a Naxi priest, his personal life history and the cultural history of his people were activated simultaneously in dialogue — the young and the aged He Xiudong intervene in each other on the canvas like ghosts, making painting a double field of ethnic-identity archaeology and self-confirmation.

More socially penetrating is the inclusion of Lijiang's underground sex workers. The commercialisation of the old town produced a great number of young women from poor mountain families, who were crushed by the tourist economy and thrown into the underground, their existence systematically erased. The artist bought “the time of being depicted” and “the right to interview” with cash, paradoxically appropriating the logic of commodification as a transaction in portrait rights. In the studio, psychoanalytic dialogue, deep interview and painting proceeded in parallel, facing not the label “prostitute” but specific individuals. The complexity of the counter-transference lies in this: the artist, as a man, a payer and a holder of cultural privilege, has a gaze nested within structures of power, and the radicality of the methodology lies precisely in not evading this disparity but taking it as the developing agent of the dialogue. The documentary recorded the whole process and remains sealed and unpublished to this day — not self-censorship, but an ethical assumption of the fact that “exposure is a second exploitation.” The artist did not appear in the posture of a “saviour,” but as a gazer equally contaminated by structures of power, completing together with the sitters a complicity concerning “the impossibility of looking.”

“Still Life, Everyday” — the monastic gaze. Sitting still for long periods before clay jars, the oil film on tea water, the mould of the rainy season, waiting for self-consciousness to settle and disperse, brushwork suppressed to a minimum, pursuing “the equality of existence.” This is the existential anchor between the whirlpool of the double personality and the storm of counter-transference — the still objective world supplies the minimal confirmation that “I am still here,” and every still life is a brief entry into stillness.

The Renunciation of Commerce

Amid the rush of dealers from three cities, the artist recognised the market's violent translation of his methodology: the tearing of the double personality simplified into “expressionist emotional release,” the ethical weight of the sex-worker series labelled as “Oriental erotic aesthetics,” the monastic gaze read as “a contemporary revival of Eastern still life.” In 2009 the artist terminated all collaborations, destroyed the negotiation records, and cut off more than a decade of commercial channels, defending his sovereignty through economic self-harm.

Ghostly Presence

The sex-worker series in particular remains sealed to this day, becoming an “unexhibitable thing” that the market cannot digest — a silent refutation of the claim that “contemporary art must be visible,” a silent resistance to the claim that “the artist must be confirmed by the market.”