My fondness for observing human society began from a young age. I began painting in my teens and at that time I used to take a kind of commuter train into the city to study art. Consequently, a lot of my time growing up was spent at the train station. But sitting there for hours on end spelled serious boredom for a kid. Observing the multitude of people around me became my only source of amusement. When you’re bored enough that you are able to sit quietly and observe the world unfolding around you, you can discover all sorts of things that others are too busy to notice. In such an arena, nothing remains hidden from view – life reveals itself truly and openly. The 3rd tier passenger waiting room was an incredibly filthy and disgusting place. There, I saw prostitutes, thieves and police walking around brandishing leather belts (which they used to hit thieves or troublemakers)... the reality that unfolded each day in such an environment, compared to that in public broadcasting, TV, print and the media in general couldn’t have been more at odds with one another. The train station gave a much truer glimpse of life. At the time, I didn’t really understand why the reality I saw reflected on TV and in art exhibitions was so different from what I experienced in my everyday life. All sense of beauty, nobility and refinement that we learned in school soon vanished in such squalid surroundings. The air in the waiting room was foul and it was hard to breathe – Lei Feng, (the quintessential Chinese model of self-sacrifice and uprightness), it seems, was nowhere to be seen. I spent some nine years passing the time in that train station before I was miraculously rescued – when I was accepted into a good college .

　　Once in art school, I was strictly taught how to paint and draw in the realist tradition, yet I was unable to effectively explore anything in my work at an emotional level. I remember our physiology teacher telling us, “When you look at a model try to look at him or her like a block of stone – a stone with shape and dimension. Be careful not to focus or draw attention to anything physical or sexual. It’s the form that you must seek to portray.” But no matter how hard I tried, there was something about looking at a rather full-bodied, voluptuous female model that prevented me from really picturing her as a slab of rock. I was perplexed by this problem for some time, all the way up until I entered the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Even at that time I remember my teacher commenting that my works paid too much attention to the physical body instead of form. There was a time when I felt almost ashamed of myself, having studied art for so long and not being able to transform or improve myself. It seemed like everyone I knew who received higher education became civilized and refined whereas I remained vulgar. Others liked to attend concerts and things like that; I on the other hand liked to watch prostitutes with their patrons and basically those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. This is no doubt connected to my time spent as kid at the train station. As a result of my time there, there was no way I could approach sculpture with the saint-like purity that was expected of me by my teachers. Instead, my urge was always to explore out of the way places, secret places, in search of uncovering a truer picture of human nature.

　　By chance, I happened one time to go to the “Lido Bar”. The atmosphere inside was so pestilential and there were all kinds of rough looking characters – the whole scene triggered something in me – it reminded me of the train station from my youth. The only difference was that back then, that was the environment in which everyone lived; now in an age of decadence and consumerism, it had become a kind of lifestyle or choice. As the neon lights flashed, the room was charged with a kind of sexual, lustful energy and revealed a world that was dark and dirty. Amidst it all, in the indulgence, people’s desires just came out, there was no hiding anything. I too have a strong desire, I suppose: to represent everything I see through a kind of giant scene sculpture. I no longer worry about trying to stay true to a kind of higher form or so-called sculpting “language”. My passion is aimed at portraying those places that have atmosphere, at recalling all of the places and things I’ve seen. My task is to present something. Once that’s done, I can retreat into the background.

　　Li Zhanyang