Li Zhanyang

　　I was born in the suburbs of Changchun city in Jilin Province in China, 1969. When I was growing up, the market opposite our house left a deep impression on me. When the market gathered a tide of people came surging, bustling in. In the winter, people in the North-east of China wear thick padded cotton coats, they talk loudly, spewing out clouds of white steam. They look like penguins, shuffling across the snowy ground. The people there were honest and generous, typical minor peasantry. When I was fourteen I drew a picture of the market on a large scroll. That was the first time I used art to depict the world before me. It was then that crowds and scenes became my earliest objects for observation. I have always been interested and sensitive to the depictive and panoramic qualities of groups and scenes.

　　In 1989 I was admitted to the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Art, in Shenyang, Liaoning Province to study sculpture. Five years as a graduate student there failed to ignite any desire for creation in me. All that time, the grey clay was my only object for exploring the possibilities of modelling, it made me fed up, but the tedious training would at least lay a solid foundation for my future creations.

　　I arrived at the Central Academy of Arts in 1997. The hustle and bustle of the capital Beijing was infectious. In the busy crowds that passed to and fro, and the high pace of fast food culture there I was able to observe the true face of consumer age at that time. Because I myself was in the position of a peasant entering the city, it was these phenonmena more than anything else that inspired my creativity. In that period I completed the series “Lido” and “The Myriad Life”, revealing the strengths of scenic sculpture. I represented scene after scene in a depictive and descriptive way, each scene reflected the novelty of the restless consumer age and materialistic desires. The over-stimulation and unrestrained approach to sex, resulting from long years of sexual repression in China’s closed society was also implicit in the works.

　　In 2000 I went to France for the first time, and made a swift survey of several European countries while I was travelling. I wanted to understand European culture better, and compare Eastern and Western culture. What really moved me was that behind contemporary European culture there stretches a long, grand history, whereas in China, our traditional culture is already gradually disappearing. Our contemporary culture watches the dying of its traditions whilst it drifts separate from them, like falling leaves detached from the whole.

　　As for my works, although they are Western in style, this does not necessarily solve the problems I face in absolute terms. I am using Western languages to discuss the problems of China; I don’t have a clear methodology. My earlier works usually had a very clear storyline, they focused on the surface. As everybody knows that the world’s a bit of a mess, all I had to do was to recreate scenes of the lascivious, the disordered, and that would suffice. Such an attitude reduces the possibility for deeper consideration and exploration of the questions at hand, it is too simplistic. A piece of artwork does not do just enough, it must endeavour to be individual and preserve it’s own unique qualities.

　　I often think that art is like a disease, you get hooked on it like a drug and soon you can’t live without it. Therefore you must continue to pursue it, and in the process of continual pursuit you will establish new ideas. Only new things can be personal, everything old belongs to someone else already.

　　Recently my works have shown a rather significant change: they move from consideration of the outward to the internal, from perceiving social phenomena to a more rational consideration of the fundamental questions of culture. These considerations are rooted in unsolved riddles that constantly bother me. Our models of heroes are established at an early age, so why do we feel seduced by the pursuits of the bad guys. We know that Ximen Qing (in Jin Ping Mei) is a bad guy, yet we cannot resist following the course of his plotting as he seduces Pan Jinlian into infidelity. At the same time we cannot imagine how a strapping and healthy example of a man like Wu Song could be utterly unmoved by the seductive beauty of his sister-in-law, Pan Jinlian, whom he punishes. With these serving as my primary inspiration, I went on to make the works "Wu Song kills his Sster-in-law", "Once Upon a Time in America", "Tang Seng the Monk Visits the Kingdom of Women", "Two-wheeled Cart" and "Reincarnation".