Li Songsong was born on 1973 in Beijing, China. He lives and works in Beijing, China. His painting was the kind of iron candy boxes he played with when he was small. Its title was "Beijing Candy." There was another one called "Digging," which depicted some soldiers digging trenches. He painted above two paintings between 1997 and 1999. At that time, he just graduated from college and had not much to do at home so he painted those. This way of thinking was not especially active back then. He made "Horse" in June 2001. He started to paint these paintings during that summer when he found some old photographs. Originally he wanted to paint something that had a certain distance from reality. He thought to construct a scene in painting, representing things or a certain sentiment from our real life, was not so interesting. Li Songsong deliberately plays down the potential implication of the images he chooses for his pictures eliminating his personal feelings from these images by adopting an arms length procedure for his work. He breaks up his found images into segments and loosely regroups them through various shades and blocks of color in his painting. For National Geographic, Li downloaded more than a hundred small photographs of details of Taiwan Island from ?Google Earth?, a satellite imagery-based mapping website, and reconstructed a collage of Taiwan by depicting each portion in thick and bold strokes of paint. The painting of the soldiers digging the trench, for example, was a picture he saw by chance. He felt attracted to the process of looking at photographs. When he looks at pictures in a book, he usually turns them over when we understand the meaning in them. He painted this picture probably because He looked at it so closely. It was a very plain photograph: some people in uniform were digging into the earth on a wasteland. After he read the explanation, he realized that the people were voluntary soldiers digging a trench during the Korean War. If you look at an image long enough, you will discover other meanings in it. He had also painted images from TV, the portrait of the late Deng XiaoPing for example. At the time when he passed his portrait was on TV every day. I took a picture of his portrait and painted it. But he didn't continue with this kind of topics, including the one of the candy box. Perhaps he wanted to paint some existing and ready-made things at that time. But he didn't want to sketch a person in a conventional type of space. He wanted the original image to be something one dimensional. Conclusions: Li Songsong had already established his own style and the impact of the work had won him a strong reputation in Chinese art circles. What to Do Next... If you want any information about Li Songsong or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/li_songsong.htm
Lothar Hempel was born on 1966 in Cologne, Germany, Currently lives and works in Cologne. The title of Lothar Hempel's new installation at the Institute for Contemporary Arts is a big name for a small show. But it's not just the title that makes big claims. Lothar Hempel, a 36-year old German living in Cologne, has a long list of group and solo exhibitions to his credit, a rave review from Frieze magazine, and a contract with the alarmingly fashionable Anton Kern Gallery in NYC. So one goes to this show with every expectation that Hempel is going to be quite good. And the ICA seems pleased enough with its new commission. The ICA's director Philip Dodd has helpfully set out its merits:
In a bewildered London art world and in a newly repoliticised Britain, it's a great pleasure to welcome Lothar Hempel's very resonant work. It addresses the cancellation of utopian imaginings in a world where all is propaganda, or at least often is - and it does so by engaging with the history of art. It's a rare achievement. To which I can only add, not nearly rare enough.
Propaganda is, in fact, an installation-by-numbers, a faintly lazy exercise in rounding up a few disparate items, pasting up a few sheets of the Frankfurter Allgemeine nearby and hoping that it will all end up in a pavilion at some biennale somewhere in a few years time. Its proponents display a certain anxiety about the way in which it ought to be read. Is it, for instance, about propaganda? How political is it? Or is it simply another one of those gut-churningly circular and self-referential conversations with which a certain strand of post-post-modernism insists on boring the shades of its ancestors? The latter, almost certainly - not that it much matters, because its tropes are so hackneyed, its visual force so weak and its faux-casual moments of prettiness so cheap. Why not stick up a few faded Polaroids of old Joseph Beuys installations and be done with it? Or to put it another way, if there's a long lineage linking, say, David's Death of Marat with the Russian constructivists and Fluxus and who knows what else, we can only hope that it is not ending up here, in the ICA, under these high vaulted ceilings with this melancholy autumnal light seeping in from St James's Park and the tourists drifting aimlessly along the Mall outside.
So what is there to find in the first of the three rooms, titled Streik (Strike)? There is a sort of pierced wooden screen, a few upturned plastic chairs, two coffee-percolators but no cups, a non-descript hanging sculpture, a few boringly doctored newspapers pasted onto the walls, and a television monitor placed on the floor. The monitor shows a dreary black-and-white film, in which a woman eats some pasta, finds a key in her mouth and extracts it, and makes an unconvincing show of using the key to open the forehead of another character. Of course we could all fill up several sides of A4 'interpreting' this, or rather, nervously ascribing some sort of meaning to what might otherwise seem almost terrifyingly vapid. So the film makes references to surrealism, and the gothic resonances of the screen are about Catholicism and German-ness, and the newspapers are about the way in which the (conservative) news is obviously manipulated before it gets to us. As for the name, I struggled to connect it with anything in the room, other than those upturned chairs and their hints of arrested activity. Conclusions: Lothar Hempel's new installation at the Institute for Contemporary Arts, is a big name for a small show. But it's not just the title that makes big claims. Lothar Hempel, a 36-year old German living in Cologne, has a long list of group and solo exhibitions to his credit, a rave review from Frieze magazine, and a contract with the alarmingly fashionable Anton Kern Gallery in NYC.
What to Do Next... If you want any information about Lothar Hempel or looking for his paintings please visit us on http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/lothar_hempel.htm
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