2nd - The One-Child Policy Artist

Li Tianbing


Li Tianbing was born in 1974 in the far southern city of Guilin, China where stunning landscapes have inspired artists throughout the country's history.

http://www.pearllam.com/artist/li-tianbing/


Born in 1974, in the southern province of Guilin, China, Li Tianbing moved to Paris at the age of 22 to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Surrounded by a wealth of visual, cultural and historical resources, Li quickly developed a distinctive visual language with which to express his own cultural origins.
           A family-owned camera was a rare and expensive commodity and so children’s formative years went largely unrecorded. Li ‘s father worked as a soldier in the army’s propaganda unit and was able to intermittently borrow a camera to record his son’s infancy at the ages of three, four and five years old. These images have come to play an integral role in Li’s work. Being an only child in China was a condition shared by many children of his generation, and one the artist has described as a deeply lonely experience with profound psychological effects. Consequently, the artist often sought refuge in his own imagination, inventing games inhabited by fictitious characters.

Referring back to the monochrome palette of his small photographic archive, Li paints himself and his illusory characters in a palette of dramatic greys and sets them within scenes that evoke China’s past and present, its pastoral idylls and commercialized city sprawls.

https://www.artsy.net/artist/li-tianbing





Li Tianbing, Don't Touch my Dog, 2011. Image courtesy the artist, Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Pearl Lam Galleries, Hong Kong