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Artists'
Profile
Li
Tianbing
Li Tianbing
fell in love with photography when he was a teenager back
in the 1940s. He stole a cow from his family and walked
for three days until he arrived in the city, where he bartered
the cow for a UK-made camera. Ever since that day, he has
been taking pictures for residents in neighboring villages,
using that same old camera. Wedding days, political movements,
graduation ceremonies, changes brought along by reform,
folk customs and traditions are all subjects of Li's photography.
He is a legendary figure amongst villagers who sing songs
about him. The mountainous area in Fujian where he lives
lacks electricity. Because of this, Li develops and enlarges
his photographs with light from the sky that filters down
his chimney. In addition, his cow barn also serves as a
dark room. He opens the wooden door of the barn and exposes
his pictures with the light coming through the surrounding
bamboo jungle. His calculation of exposures is so precise
that it happens within 1/2 second. Li has taken more than
300,000 photographs using this method and upholds a Guinness
record in "taking the largest number of photographs
with natural lights and resources." Li arrived in Ruijin
to join the Art Long March. He photographed the first site
of the Long March and held his solo exhibition in the former
Soviet Post and Telecommunication Ministry.
Jiang Jiwei of "Maxim Mountain"
Quanzhou is in northeastern Guangxi Province and a Long
March site. A legendary old man has been carving text and
figures into a mountainside opposite his house since the
1970s. The mountain is covered with busts of Lu Xun, Lei
Feng, world leaders, commanders and foreign friends of China.
In addition, he has carved a great number of excerpts of
quotations by Chairman Mao as well as post-door-opening-and-reform
government policies. Every figure and quotation has been
neatly carved into the stone. It is difficult to image how
an elderly man with no background in art and little education
could possibly possess such formidable strength and stamina
to create so many statues and carvings out of stone. His
work is an altar of stone art. The Long March troupe conducted
a dialogue with Jiang and organized an exhibition to introduce
his work to the public.
Guo
Fengyi
b. July 1942, Xi'an, Shanxi Province
In her everyday life, Guo Fengyi is the loving grandmother
we would imagine her to be; in her paintings, she exists
in a realm that lies completely outside that of our modern
society. Through her brush, Guo Fengyi not only finds and
records a new understanding of her subject matter by capturing
its energy with her paints, but she also affects the subject
itself, refining and transforming its energy as she goes.
Guo Fengyi was born in July of 1942 in Xi'an, Shanxi Province.
In 1962, she graduated from high school, and by 1963 she
had entered into the workforce as part of the physical testing
and chemical analysis department of several major rubber
and adhesive plants. She was forced to retire in 1987 due
to illness, and began practicing Tai Chi as a means to alleviate
her sickness and strengthen her health. In May of 1989,
after two years of sharpening her awareness of energy and
balance through Tai Chi, Guo Fengyi had a vision so powerful
that she felt immediately compelled to take up her brush,
even though earlier she had had no interest in painting.
She soon began producing a large number of works.
Guo Fengyi's tools are those of traditional Chinese painting,
but her method is far from traditional. She begins by using
Chinese characters to write down her chosen subject matter
in the center of the paper. (This is an important step in
her working process. She once related a story in which she
jotted down one of the Monkey king's names "Sun Hou,"
in the center of her paper. After waiting for a long time,
no image came to her, and it was not until she changed her
words to "Sun Da Sheng," "Monkey King,"
that inspiration struck.) After an image comes to her mind,
Guo Fengyi picks up her black ink and using quick, repetitive
strokes, she begins capturing the energy of her subject.
Stroke after stroke, she works her way outward to the periphery
of the painting, turning the paper again and again, working
in one great breath of inspiration. Then taking her colored
inks, she works the painting over again, using her brush
to refine, polish, and even transform the energy of her
subject, both on paper and in reality. If she discovers
that her paper is too small as she proceeds, she merely
adds more. As Guo Fengyi works, it becomes apparent that
she does not paint as a superficial exercise. She does not
pause to step back and reexamine her composition. Her images
grow spontaneously from a myriad of colored scribbles. Her
work is produced in one breath of inspiration, one moment
of understanding.
Guo Fengyi's subject matter is as spontaneous as her method;
she paints whatever subject she wishes. In her early paintings,
her subjects derived from traditional sources -- mythology,
legends, religious stories, and historical events. As her
works developed, she shifted to landscapes and specific
locations for her subject matter, allowing her to use her
paints to capture the energy of a particular place. In her
most recent paintings, she has progressed even one step
further, creating paintings using the energy of concepts
such as "SARS," "9/11" or even "Black
American." She does not worry that she has not seen
or experienced her subject, she merely has to paint it in
order to know and understand it. She has said, "Before
I begin a painting, I do not know how to paint it. While
I am in the process of creating a painting, I do not know
what it will become. When I finish a painting, then I know.
I use painting in order to know." Through her visions,
Guo Fengyi is able to access an entirely new understanding
of a place, object, event, or idea.
Like her method, the composition and iconography of the
paintings themselves maintain a consistent form. Her paintings
are produced on long, vertical scrolls of paper that stretch
to a height beyond that of the viewer. Her composition is
always based on two halves - the top and the bottom - which
echo each other in form. Emanating from the center, her
iconography most often develops into two figures, one head
at the top of the page and one upside-down head at the bottom.
From these figures other heads may arise, or the bottom
head may evolve into something else. The figures themselves
appear iconic - feminine heads from which extend light that
twinkles with the scribbles of her brush, majestic faces
of animals with furry snouts, and ethereal forms donning
feathery headdresses that curve and sway with her strokes.
The result of her painting undeniably echoes her purpose
in painting; the forms in her art appear to derive from
insight that resides in a realm completely different from
that of our everyday world.
Guo Fengyi does not produce work in order for others to
admire her view of the world. In fact, she does not even
produce work merely in order to understand the world. She
produces work to alter the world itself. Through her paintings,
she first captures the energy of her subject in black ink,
and then refines and alters the energy itself through her
colored ink. The world that lives both within her paintings
and the world that exists outside of her paintings are equally
changed with the movements of her brush.
In August of 2002, Guo Fengyi joined The Long March with
her work entitled What If Woman Ruled the World? based on
the exhibition led by Judy Chicago at Lugu Lake on the border
of Yunan and Sichuan. She also participated in a dialogue
with Judy Chicago on the theme of gender at the site. Her
work is part of the 25000 Cultural Transmission Center's
The Power of the Public Realm exhibition running from September
18th through December 2003.
Wang Wenhai
Wang Wenhai was a guide in the Yan'an Revolutionary Museum.
He has been talking about Chairman Mao his entire life.
Inspired by artists who had visited the museum, he began
to create statues of Chairman Mao, which exemplify his knowledge
about and devotion to Chairman Mao and his worship, memory
and obsession of the era. He mastered the craft and sculptural
language of the folk art of northern Shaanxi folk art by
himself. His works fill his studio (formerly Zhang Side
Memorial Hall) and home. In his art, he lives with Chairman
Mao. Wang Wenhai is a highlight of the latter part of the
Long March. His association with the Long March began over
a year ago. One of his projects was in collaboration in
Beijing with Sui Jianguo, a famous sculptor and participant
of the Long March.
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