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Li Zhenhua
Li Zhenhua is a Beijing/Zurich-based multi-media artist, curator, writer and producer for international and Chinese contemporary culture. He is the founding-director of Beijing Art Lab, a virtual and physical platform for art, research, and exchange, as well as of Mustard Seed Garden. He is currently head-curator of Art Basel Hong Kong’s Film section (2015). Since 2010 he is nominator for the Summer Academy at the Zentrum Paul Klee Bern (Switzerland), as well as for The Prix Pictet (Switzerland). He was a member of the International Advisory Board for ‘Digital Revolution’ at the Barbican Centre in 2014, jury-member for the Transmediale Award in 2010 and advisor for Leonardo, Journal of Arts, Science and Technology.
In 2010 he was chief planner for the Shanghai eARTS Festival. He has participated in various symposia on new media art in leading galleries and museums around the world, such as ZKM Karlsruhe (2003), Walker Art Centre Minneapolis (curated the WAVE project) and Guangzhou Museum. Li has exhibited in the Ghuangzhou Triennale (2005) and in ‘Beam me Up’ at the new media art institution plug.in in Basel, Switzerland. His first solo-exhibition, ‘NOTHING IS EVERYTHING’ was held at Galerie Lucy Mackintosh in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2012.
He has produced the first international new media art festival MAAP, at Beijing Millennium Museum in 2002 and brought the London festival ‘onedotzero moving image’ to Beijing’s Today Art Gallery in 2004. Li was project manager and producer of the ‘Synthetic Time: Media Art China’ at NAMOC (National Art Museum of China) in 2008, curator for ‘CINA CINA CINA’ in CCCS Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, and of the 3rd Nanjing Triennial. In 2006, Li was appointed executive producer of the Beijing International New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium.
Li has edited several artists’ publications, including ‘Yan Lei: What I Like to Do’ (Documenta, 2012), ‘Hu Jieming: One Hundred Years in One Minute’ (2010), ‘Feng Mengbo: Journey to the West’ (2010), and ‘Yang Fudong: Dawn Mist, Separation Faith’ (2009). A collection of his art reviews has been published under the title ‘Text’ in 2013.
GOD, a dog is better than me
2010, Video, 3 min 31 sec
I am a dog that barks for a hundred years, but I cannot awake the Chinese.
Ma Hsiang-po (1840–1939), Chinese Jesuit priest, scholar and educator and one of the founders of Aurora University, Fu Jen Catholic University and Fudan University.
Strolling on the beach, talking to friends about local life during his visit to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Li Zhenhua encounters a dog, playing with a log. Fascinated by its behaviour, he films it with his iPhone. In the film, we observe the animal blissfully engrossed in his game, as he digs a hole around it, takes it into the waves and out again, to no particular end. In this fragment of daily life, the dog’s unconscious needs appear nonsensical, much like we would seem to an alien observer, if viewed from above. But in this behaviour, Li attempts to capture something fundamental to creativity and often lacking in our own conduct, as we persist to live consumed in self-importance and in a continuously dissatisfied strife for success and recognition. The dog in GOD, a Dog is better than me has no sense of chronological evolution, the main element obscuring our vision and detaching us from daily life, according to the artist. Her focus is on the most basic and immediate: the here and now. Earning her Li’s sympathy and admiration and with some sadness in the realization that he will never attain such a state, this film is an ode to play, creativity, intuition and a lesson in forgetting.
Originally trained as a chef, Li Zhenhua once asked curator and art critic Li Xianting what it means to curate. “I do not know”, he replied. Frustrated by the state of Chinese contemporary art, its market and fixation on the prestigious and the “big things”, Li abandoned the kitchen in 1996 and began curating independent exhibitions in Beijing to support local artists. He is currently the chief proponent of contemporary video-art in China and has contributed greatly to its development and to its increasing presence on the international stage. In 2005, stimulated by input from friends, Li began to make art, alongside his curatorial practice. He describes the hands-on, spatial activity of art-making as a horizontal engagement, as opposed to the verticality that typifies curatorial practice; from the top down. His ready-made machines – robots made from refrigerators and televisions, for instance – are made to trigger interaction with the viewer. Li attempts to create a space wherein nostalgia is thwarted in favour of constructing memory through alienation. For him, the screen-based experience offers the strongest sense of community, collective experience, social responsibility, action and activism, all equally central in his curatorial approach.
In art, mass-communication is unavailing, “it does not need the public notion”. Li understands the intimate and the small to be significantly more compelling, wherein the viewer experiences the possibility to interpret and to think on a personal level. In GOD, a dog is better than me, the viewer can hold the animal in its hands, walk around or sit down and privately observe. The video-player is reminiscent of a photo-frame, its weight emphasizing its presence as an object, rather than merely a video, inciting physical interaction rather than passive viewing.