Li Songhua Profile for
Visual Production
Angie Baecker
Due Thursday, November
15, 2007
Between Signifier and the Signified: The Art of Li
Songhua
Despite linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure’s attempts to define the relationship between
the signifier and the signified as one of ...
Li Songhua Profile for
Visual Production
Angie Baecker
Due Thursday, November
15, 2007
Between Signifier and the Signified: The Art of Li
Songhua
Despite linguist
Ferdinand de Saussure’s attempts to define the relationship between
the signifier and the signified as one of equation, the connection
between the two has since been shown to be considerably more
tenuous than de Saussure first asserted. Where de Saussure argued
that, like two sides of the same coin, the signifier and signified
enjoyed a direct association allowing the invocation of one to
immediately summon the other, critics like Derrida have pointed to
the essential instability of language and cultural context as
compromisers of this one-to-one relationship. Although
Beijing-based artist Li Songhua’s oeuvre varies widely in theme and
in medium, Li’s work also shares a common interest in exploring
this same divide between the signifier and the signified. By
manifesting this disconnect, Li’s work questions and describes the
impact of new technologies on culture and art production, and the
volatility of China’s cultural and national
identity.
In 2003, Li Songhua
performed a work at the Guangdong Museum of Art titled
“Teleprocessing Painting,” in which he invited a fellow artist and
two models to participate in an exchange of images and actions: Li,
in Guangdong, painted an image broadcast to him via RealOne Player
of the model seated next to his friend in Beijing. Meanwhile, his
friend in Beijing painted an image of the model seated next to Li
in Guangdong. Whereas traditional fine art instruction trains
students to paint from life, both artists ignored the models seated
in their immediate vicinity in order to paint from an image of life
mediated to them by digital technologies. Emphasizing the
disconnect between digital reality and physical reality,
“Teleprocessing Painting” also suggested the eclipsing of bodily
presence by digital presence, a performance that inverted
traditional fine art practice by taking the signifier rather than
the signified as subject.
Li revisited these
same themes a year later in a performance titled “Teleprocessing
Painting 2.” This time, Li compressed artist and subject into the
same body, inviting only one other participant in the performance,
a female painter friend located elsewhere in Beijing. Using MSN
Messenger to receive the image of his subject and to broadcast his
own image back to her, both artists painted in the nude,
simultaneously serving as models to and painters of the other. But
instead of painting upon a traditional surface such as canvas or
paper, Li and his friend painted in oil on mirrors, systematically
covering their own reflected presences with an oil painting
inspired by the digital reproduction of their performance
partner.
The perpetual
negation and assertion of identity in “Teleprocessing Painting 2”
is layered and complex, involving the intersection of virtual
reality, traditional fine art roles, and the often overlooked but
ever-present physical self. By eliminating secondary models and
implementing existing popular instant messaging technology, Li
combined not only artist and model into one physical body, but into
one virtual presence. Simultaneously engaged as models and
painters, Li and his partner negotiated the image traditionally and
digitally. More importantly, their work went toward the concealment
of the most obvious reminder of their corporeal selves, the images
reflected to them in their respective mirrors. By obscuring their
reflections, “Teleprocessing Painting 2” again suggests the
dominance of projected personalities—in this case, personalities
projected in oil paint or via instant messenger—in the face of our
constant, actual and mundane physical presence.
Where
“Teleprocessing Painting” and “Teleprocessing Painting 2”
decentralized the locus of the self, works such as “Tail of Dragon”
and “Masturbating Buddha” destabilize traditional Chinese culture.
In “Tail of Dragon,” a lavish cut of sumptuous maroon cloth
descends from the ceiling, hanging in a rope tied into a knot at
the end. The luxury of the cloth’s elegant folds echo with
associations of classical drapery, and yet a golden sliver of a
dragon’s tail belies an untold, sinister narrative invoking the
curtain’s original function—concealment—with the knot suggesting
its potential as a weapon. The dragon’s form is not outlined
anywhere in the work, the tail serving as synecdoche for the entire
body. The dragon, much like the panda, is often invoked as a symbol
of China, but here, this function is compromised by insinuations of
many ambiguous other roles: is this creature a cunning escapee, a
pest, a victim, or a fantasy?
Similarly, Li’s
sculpture “Masturbating Buddha” takes another ubiquitous form
associated with Eastern culture, the Buddha, and destabilizes its
meaning. Picking up on the discrepancy between the generally
accepted notion of the Buddha’s male identity and the feminine
features he is usually portrayed with, Li’s alabaster white
sculpture blasphemes the notion of the Buddha’s purity by depicting
a serene-faced Buddha masturbating into a dragon’s open mouth. The
Buddha’s self-pleasuring gives his placid face new connotations,
undermining the holiness and purity that the Buddha’s image
traditionally signifies.
Li leaves no fair
target unaddressed, though. Where “Tail of the Dragon” and
“Masturbating Buddha” undermined the stability of traditional
Chinese culture, Li’s 2005 video work “Keynote Speech” is a sly and
conceptual commentary on China’s national identity. In the work,
Li’s five-year old son delivers, in its entirety, one of Hu
Jintao’s more bombastic speeches on the economic development of
China. Speaking with gusto and solemn gravitas, the parallels
between Hu Jintao’s delivery and the five-year old’s are readily
apparent: both speak with complete seriousness, confidence, and
even sincerity. But Li’s son’s delivery is more transparent—there
are moments of fluid discourse, but also moments where he visibly
stumbles over words, mouthing their enunciations and showing signs
of fatigue as the video progresses. At points, Li can be overheard
in the background, correcting pronunciation and coaching his son
on; elsewhere, Li’s son wonders out-loud what a certain word means,
looking up at his father for approval.
Li seems to delight
in the unscripted moments that personalize the speech in a way that
Hu Jintao’s never would be—when his son reaches up to scratch his
ear, for example, or when he completely buries his head in the
papers in front of him. By replacing Hu Jintao with a five-year
old, the performance reduces the personality of China’s president
to that of a bobbling head, stripping him of his august perch by
hinting at the leader’s disposability. Even more subversively, the
video suggests a country still in its early stages, making
overtures of distinction in the face of obvious youth. By replacing
Hu Jintao with a competent five-year old, Li strips the speech’s
original performance of its signifier, allowing the resulting video
to track the changes in the meaning of the
signified.
Finally, Li’s 2001
installation “Passing Through the Monday” lays bare the
transformative qualities of an empty signifier: in this case, cash.
Behind a curtain made of laminated 10 yuan bills, two videos of
anonymous hands counting out money play on loop. In order to enter
the installation, visitors must pass through the curtain made of
money, upon which another video of an anonymous person counting out
money plays. The image of this monetary transaction is literally,
if briefly, imprinted upon the visitor’s entering body, a
transfigurative process that speaks to the open-ended opportunities
for transformation offered by money and its
transaction.
Li Songhua’s works
therefore do not merely explore the division between signifier and
the signified, but actively untie their connection. Like “Slanted
Mirror,” an installation of mirrors fixed upon variously slanted
surfaces, Li’s works offer up a mirror that at once reflects and
refracts our own image back at us, while at the same time splicing
single perspectives into a myriad, as in the sculpture “Double
Eyes.” By unraveling the associations fixed to traditional and
virtual mediums, Chinese culture, and China’s national identity, Li
expands our limited understanding of the association between the
signifier and the signified in order to further our knowledge of
the self.
