LI SONGSONG
May 6 – August 5, 2011
NEW YORK, April 24, 2010—The Pace Gallery will present the first solo U.S. exhibition of Chinese
painter Li Songsong. The exhibition features eleven new large-scale oil paintings, with works
measuring up to seventeen feet wide. Li Songsong will be on view from May 6 through August 5 at
534 W. 25th Street, with a public opening for the artist on May 5 from 6 to 8 p.m. A catalogue
accompanying the exhibition will include an artist interview conducted by curator and critic Leng Lin,
president of The Pace Gallery, Beijing and founder of the Beijing Commune, and an essay by Barbara
Pollack, a leading writer on contemporary Chinese art.
Li Songsong’s impasto paintings transform photographs, film stills, and other found images into grids of
subtle color. Drawing from images that address charged moments in recent world history or contentious
current events and snapshots that are more personal and idiosyncratic, Li dismembers and reassembles
the image into squares of lush paint in tones ranging from pastel to somber, with some brushstrokes
cutting through two or more inches of oil paint to reveal other colors hidden below. By removing the
image from its original context, he maintains a distance between the content of the image and the final
painting. The transformed image—divided analytically into rectangular fragments, reworked with multiple
layers of paint, pocked and daubed with unexpected colors—becomes abstract and expressionistic, both
obscuring and neutralizing the original content as it explores the imperfection of memory.
Li explains that the key to his paintings lies in the formal interpretation of
the image, as well as the dissonance between content and style: “It’s like
telling a story packed with violence and gore with a huge smile on your
face. It’s how the stories are told that attracts you, and that’s the art of
it. Everyone knows the story. The important thing is the way that you
tell it.”
He approaches each fragment of the grid individually, moving
methodically from left-to-right and top-to-bottom and finishing one square
before moving on to the next. In the catalogue essay, Pollack notes that
Li’s method of gridding echoes not only that of contemporary Western
painters like Chuck Close, but also those used for the paintings made
during the Socialist Realist period of the Cultural Revolution, which were based on a grid imposed on a
photographic image that was then enlarged, square by square. But while portions of the giant portrait of
Mao in Tiananmen Square are readable in isolation, Li’s abstract mosaics only become figurative when
grouped together so that the eye can reconstitute the smears and furrows of paint into a recognizable
image.
Li Songsong was born in Beijing in 1973. He graduated from the Subsidiary School of the Central
Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 1992 and received a B.F.A in oil painting from the Central Academy of
Fine Arts in 1996. In 2002 Li Songsong became one of the first Chinese artists to establish a studio in the
798 Arts District of Beijing, which is now the home of The Pace Gallery, Beijing. Li Songsong was the
subject of the solo exhibition Abstraction at Pace in Beijing in 2009, and was also included in the gallery’s
inaugural exhibition in 2008 and the 2010 exhibition Great Performances. The artist has been included at
in numerous international exhibitions at institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;
MoMA PS1, New York; the Saatchi Gallery, London; Ullens Center, Beijing; the University of California,
Berkeley Art Museum; the Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; and the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg,
Germany. His work was also part of “Through the Looking Glass,” a special project for the 2007
Moscow Biennale.
For more information about Li Songsong, please contact the Public Relations department of The Pace
Gallery at 212.421.8987. For general inquiries, please email [email protected]; for reproduction
requests, email [email protected].
