Li Jiaqi: Simulacra of Reality and Illusion

Description

Li Jiaqi: Simulacra of Reality and Illusion

Guest | Li Jiaqi

 

Author | Di Siqi

 

Li Jiaqi is immersed in electronic artifacts and keen to explore the underlying phenomena behind them, including social relations, capital, commercial advertising, and cultural export. His recent series Digital Relations is a body of paintings expanded and transformed based on the structural form of telephone dials. In contemporary digital life, our relationships are sharp, fragile, dazzling, cheap, and ethereal.

 

Born in 1996, artist Li Jiaqi belongs to the post-1995 generation that grew up amid the rise of marketization and urbanization in China, when industrial products such as televisions, computers, and automobiles began to enter ordinary households. Against this backdrop, Li Jiaqi turned his focus to the representation of electronic objects and commodified symbols. Working primarily in easel painting and sculptural installation, he devotes his practice to examining the social relations, capital, and cultural export concealed behind these electronic materials.

 

The television is a recurring element in Li Jiaqi’s work, and to some extent, it lies at the core of his artistic inquiry. Television is the material carrier through which mass media implants simulacra of the world into public life, serving as an inevitable channel for us to perceive the world. Under the influence of media, each of us resembles the figure who emerges from Plato’s Cave, returning to tell those inside about the truth outside. This dynamic shapes the relationship between the world constructed by mass media and its audience.

 

What Li Jiaqi acutely captures are the capital and power relations hidden behind these objects. The elaborately packaged yet inherently inauthentic television boxes, along with counterfeit televisions that pass for genuine, embody what Jean Baudrillard described as an ever-expanding hyperreality. This hyperreality imbues commodities with allure, yet they are in fact traps of consumerism, constantly shaping our perception of materiality and disciplining our sensory systems.

 

Philosopher Bernard Stiegler argued: “Artists should primitively intervene in the problem of the sensibility of the other.” Li Jiaqi delves deep into the individual sensory system to reflect a critical awareness of such issues. His Hollywood series and Our Television Boxes series, for instance, both satirize counterfeit culture. Hollywood, in particular, represents the “American Dream” yearned for by young people indoctrinated by contemporary consumerism—a kind of “Hollywood-Silicon Valley” lightness of being that drifts along within post-historical narratives.

 

Yet in essence, we can no longer distinguish the real world, which has long receded, gradually giving rise to what Guy Debord called the “Society of the Spectacle.” This also reveals how, amid globalization and the relentless expansion of capital, the interplay of reality and illusion leaves the younger generation trapped in the rift between local and foreign cultures and the dilemma of value pluralism.

 

If the Television series marks Li Jiaqi’s initial engagement with the power and social relations underlying mass media, the Digital series represents a deeper distillation, in which he symbolizes the logic hidden behind these relational networks. First, as electronic displays, mobile phones, digital images, and various printed advertisements reshape our cognition and aesthetics, the control of mass media over individuals no longer conforms to the “disciplinary society” described by Michel Foucault in the traditional sense. Instead, it has evolved into the “society of control” theorized by Gilles Deleuze, governed by algorithmic despotism, rendering us fragmented “dividuals.”

 

In his Digital Relations series, Li Jiaqi’s depictions of dial keypads—with their psychedelic electronic hues and ever-shifting numerical symbols—deliver striking visual impact. Through constant repetition and reinterpretation, they generate a charged symbolic quality that reveals the popularization of digital technology, the decline of individual sensibility, imagination, and expressiveness, the domination of individual life by cloud computing platforms, and the deep grammar underlying the Anthropocene society. This Pop-style artistic expression serves as both a warning and a form of resistance against the spiritual predicament of individuals produced by contemporary electronic simulacra.

 

Whether in the Television series or the Digital series, Li Jiaqi’s quest for the meaning of reality and illusion within the world of simulacra, and his symbolic amplification of algorithmic despotism, resonate as collective inquiries of our younger generation, while opening up more possible forms of resistance through art.

Dialogue

EveryArt: In your Hollywood series, there is a sense of cultural shock created by the disjuncture between text and image. How do you view the disjuncture and integration between foreign cultures and the Chinese linguistic context, and how do you present this in your art?

 

Li Jiaqi: “Hollywood” is a transliterated loanword that originally carried no meaning at all. Together with the films it produces and exports around the world, it has constructed a distant, vacuum-like world. I wrote in a WeChat public account article, “My childhood was Hollywood.” The vacuum world of games and films truly accompanied me as I grew up.

 

EveryArt: Your work addresses issues such as mass media and digital simulacra, yet you work primarily in easel painting. Do you plan to expand into more mediums of expression in the future?

 

Li Jiaqi: I actually shifted to easel painting from other mediums. Even after generations of diverse artistic expression, painting may no longer carry a certain “sacredness,” but it still possesses a quality of “detachment” — a quality I wish to imbue into my subjects. Besides, painting is very direct, and I enjoy that directness.

 

EveryArt: Your Television series is fascinating; as viewers, we recognize many familiar images. What inspired you to choose this subject?

 

Li Jiaqi: I have always reflected on vision and the logic of action or thought that vision engenders in us. Although the term “screen experience” has almost become a cliché when applied to the new generation of artists, it is undeniable that screen experience has indeed shaped part of our worldview. The television is the most representative embodiment of screen experience, so I explored it through my work.

 

EveryArt: Formally and compositionally, your Digital series bears a strong resemblance to your work Plastic Eggs, Egg Cartons. What is the intention behind structuring numbers in the same form as egg cartons?

 

Li Jiaqi: Eggs are fragile, and plastic eggs simulate a fragility that they do not actually possess — I find that very interesting. The Digital series is also a search for a kind of relationship that is glamorous yet fragile.

 

EveryArt: In this society of simulacra operated and produced by capital relations and power, the boundary between reality and illusion has long been blurred. How do you view this blurring of boundaries?

 

Li Jiaqi: In my artist statement two years ago, I wrote that most of people’s experiences are indirect rather than firsthand, and these indirect experiences stem precisely from the blurred boundary between truth and falsehood. We do not have sufficient capacity to distinguish between the real and the fake. The logical relationship between our moral judgments of actions and the distinction between true and false is something I wish to continue exploring.

 

EveryArt: During your undergraduate studies, you visited the Glasgow School of Art in the UK as an exchange student, and in 2021 you graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago as a Chinese government-sponsored international student. How have your multiple overseas study experiences influenced the language of your artistic practice?

 

Li Jiaqi: They probably made my practice more eclectic. I have experimented with mediums including performance video, video essays, graphic design, and photography. Design language may come through in my paintings to varying degrees, including my fondness for typography and so on.

 

EveryArt: You recently participated in the exhibition Sixteen Manifestations of Memes. I see your MBTI type is INFJ — a personality defined by sensitivity and intuition. Is this a “natural” advantage that allows you to maintain a certain sensitivity in your creative practice?

 

Li Jiaqi: The results of personality tests change occasionally. Beyond relying somewhat on intuition, I am still working to strike a balance between painting and conceptual practice, striving to connect my works and continue developing new creative directions.