John Moores Painting Prize China Biographies: Part 2

Li Qing 李青: 2020 Prize Winner

Li Qing figurative and hyper-realistic painting style brings an air of Surrealism to the exhibit. She studied in the Sichaun Fine Arts Institute for more than 11 years and predominantly centres her work around memories within her environment. Her work reflects her childhood living in a small industrial city with many towering factories and office buildings.

Much of her early memories floods her work today with the depiction of aged and isolated architecture, bringing this connection to psycho-geography, with the way we connect emotionally to the space around us.

The simplicity of proportion and form within her pieces, create these perfectly haunting scenes of dormant buildings. Imbued with realism and imagination, her pieces exude an air of psychologically mystifying feelings.

Li Qing (2023) "The Pool" [oil on canvas] 40x60cm

Light becomes a key feature to her work, by illuminating her scenes with artificial light from buildings or gentle reflections from water; reinstating this mysterious gaze. We can connect many feelings of order and solitude, freedom and confinement, from this transcendental experience of Lie Qing’s work.

Yang Wei 杨威: 2020 Prize Winner

Yang Wei was born within the industrial city of Shenyeng in northern China. His work is very self-reflective of his environment and uses mixed media, found objects drawing and painting to connect his work to his experiences and memories.

Much of Yang Wei's experience of Shenyeng is of loneliness and isolation and he uses this to fuel his works that are not limited to certain forms. For Yang Wei his art is relatively free from specific mediums or doctrines, he sees materials as a form of language system for his work.

Yang Wei (2010)"Broken Bridge and Night Lights" [Video and light box installation], varied dimensions

At its core, his work is bred from life experiences and memory.One particular piece that holds dear to Yang Wei is the installation called Broken Bridge and Night Lights. For him this piece is so personal as “I can bring this work everywhere as it is on my body.” The tattoo reads, “Please forget me, Mom and Dad”, it is a very intimate piece that explores the relationship of the artist and his family. Yang Wei was intentional about the whole process, through capturing the tattooing session on video for his installation. The placement also bore critical meaning as for him "the clavicle is the boundary between the mind and the body".

Li Qiangqiang 李强强: 2020 Winner

Li Qiangqiang's work makes a critical discourse around the question “What is human?”, he explores the theoretical deconstruction of the human body.

His winning piece “Man, Man, Man, not Man”, exposes the westernised medical philosophy that the way to understand and treat a person is the cut them into slices. Li Qiangqiang uses this concept to underpin his own experience undergoing a CT scan and visually construct this in a self-identifying piece.

The initial question comes from the idea that when a human is deconstructed into pieces, are they still human? This particulary highlights the mindset of western medicine, how often we examine and treat patients by cutting into them. Preventative medicine is considered more of a foreign practice within the western world compared to other cultures, however in recent years it is becoming widely accepted as a form of treatment and therapy.

Li Qiangqiang (2021) "Cut yourself open"，[Acrylic on canvas] 300 x 300cm

There is a degree of interactivity with his piece, as you can squeeze the black pump that is positioned at the side of the canvas to stimulate the beating of a heart. As though you are bringing life to art.

When creating this piece, he began painting himself as a whole and then began to unfold onto a flat plane and slice into pieces, as though the human is turning into a liquified state. A key feeling from this that we begin to question is "what is the essence of human beings?" that goes beyond the body.

We can see how Li Qiangqiang reflects and dissects his own body visually to question our existence as a species and what relationship we have to ourselves and humanity as a whole.

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