Li Tian-Bing : Childhood Fantasy

Li Tian-bing’s paintings are haunted by memory and an acute awareness of recent Chinese social history. The artist, who was born in Guilin, China in 1974, creates poetic images where, in his words, “reality and fiction are mixed together.”

While Li uses old photographs as the source of his works, mimicking their blurred focus, subtle tonalities and surface blemishes, his work is not Photo- Realism. The work evokes both Li’s own childhood, as an only child, and the great changes, which China is currently undergoing. He paints fluidly, allowing the evidence of his hand to show, and transforms photographs by melding them with other images or new figures, painted in brighter monochrome colors. Oil painting, in the artist’s words, is the ideal medium to merge “privacy, intimacy, currency and memory all together, in the process of “gradually visualizing…personal phenomenon.”