Li Dafang 李大方
From ArtSpeak China (ASC) Wiki
Li Dafang is a painter. Born in 1971, Li lives and works in Beijing.
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Date & Place of Birth
Li was born in 1971 in Shenyang, Liaoning province.
Childhood and Education
Born in Shenyang (NE China) into a family of intellectuals who experienced 're-education through labour' during the Cultural Revolution Era, Li Dafang grew up in a little council flat assigned by the government to the workers of state-owned factories. In his childhood memories, the blunt reverberations of the neighbors' ceaseless stumping up and down on the narrow, badly lit wooden staircase; the pea-green dais upon which sat the teacher's desk; the innumerable drawings doodled on sketch paper when he gave himself over to fantasy during lessons; the blotches of fountain-pen ink on blotting paper; the desolate, chill wastelands of Liaoning Province; the large, mysterious and clackety-clacking machine plants in the countless factories of one of the most industrialised areas of China.
In the 1950s, Liaoning, was designated as a major centre of heavy industry by the government to produce the country's first steel, machinery tools, locomotives, and airplanes following the founding of People's Republic of China in 1949. The switch to a market economy in the late 1970s, however, drove most of the area's large-scale, state-owned manufacturers to bankruptcy. As a result, many factories and workshops were abandoned and became dilapidated, stacked with sad, silent machinery: a sight well known to the artist, who was born in 1971, and a visual motif to which he would continue to return in later years. In fact, some of his paintings have an unambiguous industrial flavour. Clip (2009) is framed in three levels of green wood, which extends the perspective of the canvas and gives a certain degree of formality to a scene of dilapidated and hollow Soviet-style factory buildings. Dried yellow grass covers its front yard, where a tiny figure crouches with his or her back facing the viewer. Otherwise, the site appears to be undisturbed and gloomy. On the triptych canvases of Bai Xiao Guang (2009), the two concrete pillars that form the gateway to a compound of office buildings bear evidence of a shut-down business: engraved names of the company are missing many characters. A monstrous concrete structure has landed onto the road inside of the gate, yet the few individuals standing outside the entrance surrounding the mouth of a long tube seem to be distanced from and unaware of its presence.[1]
Art
Li Dafang is an artist who belongs to his studio, where he paints hour after hour, day after day. He has developed a daily routine for work to which he happily and faithfully adheres. This mode of production, with long studio hours and intense concentration, is effective, and it stands in contrast to certain recent trends in artistic production - inspired by the market craze for contemporary Chinese art in the past few years - characterized by the separation of the conception of work by the artist and its actual execution by hired help.
Li Dafang's work is manual, persistent, time-consuming, and process-based. More importantly, the level-headedness of his working style gives form to a highly distinctive visual language that is impossible to replicate. He painstakingly applies each single stroke, line, and dot onto the canvas. Their accumulation creates precise and detailed depictions such as a tree, woods, a bush, and their surroundings. Sometimes the density of his strokes is such that it creates a blurred effect. The inexhaustible variation of his brush strokes, which cover the full spread of his canvases and leave no space untouched, contributes to the unique appeal of his paintings.
Li's works are specifically regional. They are related to the geography of where the artist has come from. He was born and grew up in Liaoning Province, in northeast China, where the high altitude and long, harsh winters have created a rough and grey landscape. He lived in Beijing for the first time between 1993 and 1997, and for the second time in 2003. Since then, Beijing has become home. Li Dafang's paintings breathe in the dry dust and cool climate of north China and absorb the geographical, social, and cultural temperament integral to this region. The realistic landscapes and imagery of his paintings are unmistakably northern: unkempt bushes and forests, cityscapes, roads, vistas of fields and open lands, the deep colour of the earth, the stocky appearance of buildings, and industrial leftovers. In Small Ogive (2009), the painting is placed atop a three-stepped, deep green stairway and depicts two lush, tall pine trees standing so closely together that they are merged into a symmetrical shape. Behind them, a field overgrown with grasses stretches towards a distant horizon with blurry images of trees. In the foreground, a man dressed in a blue outfit carries a boat on his back and stands among a group of blue buckets. It's an indistinct scene with an uncanny scenario, yet, at the same time, everything looks so familiar. The sites and scenes in Li Dafang's paintings tend to be removed from the urban side of the contemporary city, but they are sights familiar to those who travel frequently to the city's forgotten corners, where it meets with rural areas, or to those who witness transitory moments of urban and economic development. They are often considered lesser places, safely residing between the real and the fictional in the space of Li's paintings.[2]
Exhibitions
Among many other exhibitions around the world, Li's work was included in 2008's "Halflife of a Dream: Contemporary Art from the Logan Collection" displayed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. For Li's full exhibition history, click here.
Gallery Affiliation(s)
Li is represented by Galerie Urs Meile in Lucerne and Beijing.
Acquisitions & Auctions
For Li's auction record, please click here.
References
- ↑ http://www.galerieursmeile.com/nav/top/artists/text/default.htm?view_ArtistItem_OID=49
- ↑ http://www.galerieursmeile.com/nav/top/artists/text/default.htm?view_ArtistItem_OID=49
