Li Songsong Paintings at the Saatchi Gallery - By: Saatchi.Gallery

years investigating the relation between public images and their transposition onto canvas. In the shift to painting these pictures, which are mainly old photos related to historical characters and facts, he hasn’t protracted the cognitive style as for some previous artists’ practice of criticizing, exposing, questioning, or satirizing and propagandizing about a certain historical period, but has used a kind of imagery enacting an objective approach. In other words, in the use of the historical image-material that interested him, Li Songsong hasn’t made any seemingly solved judgment of the historical value, on the contrary it is just from a visual point of view that has to be sensed the objective, simple and direct power of history as shifted or transplanted onto canvas.This painting was based on a magazine image of a scene from the war against Japan War in the 1940s, depicting some Chinese soldiers carrying a Japanese airplane they had shot down, carrying it to Chongqing, a Chinese city in southwestern China. The captured airplane was a sign of triumph and a great source of pride to the Chinese. The artist has divided the image into two halves and purposely painted them with a few variations. For instance, the right half of the painting was blown up a bit more than its left side, intentionally revealing the artist’s manipulation of the image and his suspicion of the ideological connotation of such images and their authenticity.

This thinking about the relation between photography and painting brings forth quite clear shades of a new historicism, not making history look like a truly existing objective whole, but a topographic map made up of different pieces of historical texts, that is to say that history is that of a certain culture being edificated in its articulation. This change in the concept of history indicates that the artist’s representation of historical memories is not purely objective and neutral, but conceiving contemporary cognitions and experiences within its articulated structure; what it points out is not past but precisely contemporary. In other words, the artist by means of historical images is here re-narrating the recount of history and with the aid of narration we can get from the hazy mist of history a clearer image of ourselves, surveying the state of our own existence.Li randomly downloaded a news picture from the Internet about the National People’s Congress held in the Great Hall of the People in the same year that he painted this work. He chopped up the source image into ten segments, painting each segment to complete the image, and at the same time stretched the image vertically so that it appeared distorted and disproportional. While consciously distancing himself from the images by following his own rules of production, he keeps reminding us of the presence of the artist by creating this disparity between his reproductions and their source images.Photography is considered an art of reproduction, but recently different artists have been entailing a re-reproduction of this copy-craft through painting, an attitude that in China has already developed on big scale. By means of Li Songsong’s solo show, what we are trying to do as curators is to deepen the analysis of this new trend; Whether the diverse kind of old photos are narrated within the expression trail of the artist and how, together with the narrative rules related to the forms of representation and the common practices within the different choices. Or reflect few main ways used by the artists of these years to comprehend and visualize history, thus the differences and similarities of those ways.

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