In the overcrowded and helplessly congested cities of China, anyone could witness a car crash or be involved in one - it is everyday business. In 2005 it happened to Jesus Christ, who was hit and killed by a taxi in Chongqing while trying to cross the street. A terrible coincidence. Once out of the car, the shocked driver turned out to have the tiny constitution and the facial features of Li Xianting, one of the fathers of contemporary art critique in China. Local street vendors, with their ramshackle handcarts brimming with vegetables, anonymous passers-by mixed with famous people from the art world, such as Harald Szeemann and Ai Weiwei – all pressed round the site of the accident, trying to get a look. Slumped down in despair, almond-eyed Mary Magdalene was there as well, day wearing the slipshod clothes of a housekeeper or a waitress.

　　Irreverent, dramatic and grotesque, the expressionistic, vividly painted bronze or fiberglass sculptures of visual story-teller Li Zhanyang are “not that sort of highly conceptualized works made by many other artists, since mine come from a purely instinctual inspiration, from a desire,” the artist states.

　　During the early 1980s, as a teenager living in the northeastern countryside with nothing to do after classes, Li Zhanyang became an attentive observer of the fast changing reality of contemporary China.

　　Fighting the boredom of his daily three hour wait before the next commuter train home, he would dig with his eyes into all the typologies of people thronging the waiting room of the train station. It was in those years in which China was experiencing the first effects of the opening toward the West, as well as of the policy “One Nation, Two Systems,” that the artist started savoring the subtle pleasure of voyeuristic discovery, bit by bit and day after day, witnessing the different parts, connections and conflicts, games and truths making up the restless, destabilizing and carnival-like social picture of today’s China.

　　“Traffic Accident,” “Boss Vomiting,” “Opening Ceremony,” “Angel and Boss,” “Train Station,” “Playing Mahjong,” “Enjoying Hot-pot,” or even the bewitchingly kitsch “Tiger and Beauty” - a work inspired by the typically Chinese habit of posing at the zoo for photographs with the tame (or drugged?) Siberian tigers - are all sculptures in which the subjects are caught in conflicted, equivocal, or simply awkward situations that stimulate the viewer’s curiosity and imagination.

　　Always unsatisfied with his own works, which he moulds and re-moulds by hand for several years until they reach their final stage, Li Zhanyang is interested in showing only a moment of his characters’ complex lives, a moment in which a desire or aspiration, regardless of its moral acceptability, rules human behavior.

　　Even in those sculptures which are not drawn from real life, such as “Robbery,” a work referring to the movie “Once Upon A time In America,” or “Wu Song Killing his Elder Brother’s Sister,” a sculpture illustrating a renowned episode of the Chinese classical erotic novel “Jing Ping Mei” the opposition of basic drives (in this case sexual and destructive) is left unsolved.

　　In both the formally simpler works and the larger sculptural groups made of hundreds of figures squeezed against one another, the scenes staged by Li Zhanyang reflect the theatrical and sometimes surreal essence of existence.

　　It is by peering into the psychological maze of one of the world’s greatest Powers, where nowadays the fight to climb the social ladder is relentless, and where appearances, showing off, spectacularity and money seem to be the predominant values, that Li Zhanyang gets the amusing and inexhaustible material for his creations, which become realistic records of another huge change in the history of China.

Beijing, August 21, 2006