Li Chao graduated from the Mural Painting Department at The Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2007. This exhibition presents approximately forty oil paintings that he has created in recent years. Li Chao is a dynamic young artist, and his painted art uses realistic linguistic techniques to interweave, join and stack fragments of reality, memory and the images that flood our everyday lives such as human forms, animals, implements, scenes, violence, lust and dissections, presenting us with the texture of the language of oil painting and a context that is mysterious, chaotic and warped. This is what forms the bizarre, confused and absurd qualities of his artworks. 

Li Chao’s expressiveness produces a powerful sense of contrast, contradiction and suspense, putting time and space, historical and current figures, natural settings and psychological space in a dynamic relationship of superposition and reconstruction. Through mutated forms, this virtual reality penetrates the dualist opposition between truth and fabrication, revealing that his painting, having departed from the pursuit of “realness” in realism, has come to roam freely through limitless imagination within a new context, highlighting the uncertainty of the image itself and the intangibility of infinite change, and an imaginary space where anything can happen. Thus, within the schematic structure of his painting, there is a visual rhetoric of documentation and fabrication, transplantation and hybridization, providing us with a perspective that is at once direct and abnormal, leading to a mutual questioning and discussion between viewer and maker that transcends reality.

This is the key to the artworks featured in this exhibition, and the starting point for evaluating them. Li Chao has consciously cut out fragmentary images from real individual experience to find diversion in the expression of his experiences, cognition and tastes, as well as his subjective inner world. In this way, he is very truly conveying his perception and observation of the broken and wounded pieces of everyday life, making us ponder the anxiety brought by the real properties of existence in reality, as well as the bleak, depressing straits they put us in. Thus, the meaning in Li Chao’s painting is not found by seeking out corresponding relationships within reality, but through seeking out reality’s projection of him from within the abstracted reality that has been refracted within his inner mind.

Feng Boyi

Curator