Description
Collaborative Space is pleased to announce that it will hold a solo exhibition by artist Li Jiaqi titled "🔘Brightness🔘Saturation🔘Glossiness" from July 8th to August 13th, 2023. This exhibition will present over 20 paintings and installations created by him in the past two years."How do we process information? And how do we understand and provide feedback in an information society?” These are the underlying questions that permeate Li Jiaqi's artistic creations. Through deep contemplation during his creative process, he has developed a distinctive artistic language characterized by continuous repetition, yet each work being unique. Pieces like the "Television Box" and the seemingly gem-like but actually plastic "Keypad" reveal the temperament of the artist as an "optimistic pessimist." The extensive use of repetition and arrangement serves not only to emphasize the theme but also reflects the artist's contemplation and study of the questions found between truth and falsehood, virtual and reality, as well as praise and irony.
The theme of television once occupied Li Jiaqi's thinking for a long time. For decades, television has been the media center for home decoration and decoration. On one hand, this center undertakes the daily information reception function, and on the other hand, it also undertakes the face saving project when receiving guests. That's also why when some countries engage in acts of vandalism, there are always bandits carrying televisions rushing out of major shopping malls. During this period, whenever Li Jiaqi saw someone or something penetrating the TV screen in advertisements or movies, he would feel extremely excited and thrilled about the breakdown of this "curtain". But he restrained his emotions and calmly observed and depicted, fascinated by the high-purity sunlight and fake green leaf pattern on the TV box.
In the "Digital Relationship" series, Li Jiaqi abandoned the method of realistically depicting objects and instead gave these oval shaped buttons a more sublime form. He keeps adding special effects to the buttons. Like crystals, transparent pills, neatly arranged brightly colored button beads, combined with various star shaped dazzling lights and reflections, after collecting, preserving, and referencing dozens of American light rock album covers from the 1980s and 1990s, Li Jiaqi decided to give these buttons a cosmic gem like aura and the confidence and depth revealed by humans looking up at the deep space during the cultural brilliance of the last century.
At the same time, these shiny appearances still give viewers a crisp but fragile texture. We carefully package ourselves behind the screen, modifying our virtual avatars, changing our voices, and using AI to help with conversations and writing. How true or false is the communication between people in the information age?
In today's era of increasingly advanced smart devices, televisions and buttons appear to be products of the old electronic age. With the perspective of this era, Li Jiaqi also began to explore the traces of his past life. In economically underdeveloped towns, solid colored plastic toys, coin operated fiberglass rocking carts, and dazzling children's stickers are all things that can be seen everywhere on the streets. Li Jiaqi tried to remove some of these elements and colors and quietly incorporate them into the digital relationship series, so much so that he pulled down the "gem like sublimity" a bit, giving a sense of imitation and imitation of plastic. This is also the source of his inexplicable temperament in his works.
Li Jiaqi said that a friend commented on his work like this, 'This is not painting, he is doing graphic design.'. His love for graphic design has also led him to develop some 'obsessive-compulsive disorder'. Alignment, non deformation, and respect for the design of the characters themselves are all his silent requirements for himself in recent paintings.
Li Jiaqi once judged himself as a pessimistic person pretending to be optimistic and a realist pretending to be an idealist. He will continue to experience the joy of contradictory transformation between truth and falsehood, virtuality and reality, praise and irony in the near future.
Text/Baowen HE
| Period | 8 Jul 2023 → 13 Aug 2023 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Exhibition |
| Location | Beijing, ChinaShow on map |