TONG GALLERY+PROJECTS is honored to announce the opening of “Edge Site Line”, the solo show featuring artist Li Mingchang. In recent years, Li Mingchang tends to probe personal predicament via painting, to explore the generalized edge that painting could refer to by combining gray narrative with obscure brush. The exhibition will present more than a dozen works newly created easel paintings, and it will open to the public until 14 July. 

“The more you discuss, the faster you will accelerate the semantic outflow. Yet, compelled by the alternating and cycling of semantics in time, one is often bound to reach a critical point and to reconsider the illusive daily life. Some time ago, I incidentally found an old painting of 2014, in which several blurred figures are doing the minesweeping with detector in the border area. I changed this painting and gave it a new title ‘Edge Site Line’. I think, ‘Edge Site Line’ indicates not only physical or geographic meanings, but also various tiny confrontations in daily politics, including our body and consciousness. Furthermore, back to the experiment of easel painting, don’t we know the difficulty in touching the edge of painting? Uncertainty and sense of crisis is everywhere.” 

- Li Mingchang

The "canvas" that does not end - Li Mingchang's painting practice 

Author: Hu Bin, Deputy Director and Professor of the Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts 

In recent years, there have been many articles discussing painting in the contemporary art world, and at the same time, these articles have constantly reminded the difficulty of discussing painting. These difficulties are deeply felt by every artistic individual who is truly confronted with painting. 

I would like to take the artist Li Mingchang as a case study to gradually expand on these issues. I have noticed at least three phases of Lee Myung-chang's work. One stage was around 2011, when horses, nudes, and drapery were the symbols that often appeared in the picture at that time, with strange shapes, hazy and ambiguous colors, full of individual absurd narratives and imaginations, with a strong magical meaning. This so-called "magical realism" is so popular among young artists, but because of the curiosity of the image and the careful contemplation of the changes in the color layers, his creation still has its own characteristics. However, he soon grew tired and entangled with this flood of petty pleasures, and he wanted to get out of the relatively fixed emotional style. After that, he entered a period of more hesitant exploration.  

When Lee Mingchang appeared in another new form, it should have been in 2015, when he created the series "Gentleness and Labor". Perhaps he hopes to sharpen out that "delicacy" with complicated labor, whether it is the labor tools and behaviors presented, or the repeated brushstrokes, which make the picture have a certain simple body temperature. He uses his stoic character to promote the relationship between the form of the picture and the landscape, as well as the overlapping and emergence of somewhat chaotic visual tastes. However, labor is actually just an excuse, juxtaposed with "gentleness", in order to express the formal problems of the form and image that he "wriggles" on the canvas, and the reorganization and transformation of visual resources. Of course, this process undoubtedly contains a certain kind of poetry and concept, but the two are not superficial and internal, but are themselves integrated into the artist's "struggling" action of crushing and connecting in the face of the picture. 

At this stage, he has gradually established his own way of working, that is, using the canvas as a battlefield, which mixes the relationship between the self and multiple factors, including the painting itself, as well as those outside the painting, constantly colliding between conquest and counter-conquest. In this year's solo exhibition "Frontier Line", he has made this way of working more fully. Most of these new works are based on the old works from 2014. In fact, it has been a habit of him in recent years, when he is a little tired of advancing the inner relationship of his works, he will stop and wait for the stimulation of new factors. Many of these old works are related to his interest in traditional images and ornamentation, which already constitute a kind of "classical" taste. In this re-entry, he has carried out a large-scale coverage and remodeling, the intention of the picture is to become ambiguous in the layer, and in terms of form, the intervention of some hard-edged color blocks also breaks the integrity of the original picture and stimulates new vitality. The canvas became a never-ending theater in which he was constantly rehearsing new plays. "Frontier" is actually a metaphor for the various critical states we encounter at the moment, physical, conscious, or everyday politics, of course, as painters, all this has to return to the canvas, exploring and moving forward in a difficult experiment that is "full of unpredictability and sense of crisis". 

The difficulty in discussing the current painting lies in capturing its inner dynamic mechanism, where should its focus be, what does it undertake or what is it fighting against? It seems to accept everything, but it also seems to resist all habits. Just as the artist Li Mingchang is an individual in the contemporary era, all kinds of factors have accumulated in him intentionally and inadvertently, and he naturally has his own interests, such as eccentric and bloody films, fragments of Chinese antiques, various reconstructed historical narratives, and many images from art history. He doesn't face it with a playful mentality, but there is also a certain survival experience in it, such as he once said: everyday fears need to be counteracted in another way. In the process of absorbing, extracting and transforming infinitely complex factors, he gradually generates his own set of creative logic. In fact, the same is true of some contemporary artists, who do not purely study form or schema, nor do they use painting as a medium to convey so-called concepts or refract social reality, but their language has both "Esperanto" elements and individual-based "locality", and they stir up multiple factors with their own logic, rather than engaging in bounded and opposing divisions. From these individuals, we can see the self-consistency of painting, but this self-consistency is often only a temporary balance, and the trivial efforts of these individuals can hardly suggest a certain problem-orientation on a larger scale. But I think that perhaps it is in this "entanglement" that we can gain more fresh strength in this individual "struggle" that has no support and does not show itself as a "pioneer".