Li Songsong - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Monday, June 28, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Private Collection, Belgium

  • Exhibited

    London, Saatchi Gallery, The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art, 2008

  • Literature


    The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art, exh. cat., Saatchi Gallery, London, pp. 122 – 23 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Li Songsong’s paintings are based on found images from magazines, film stills and photographs of historical events. His work alludes to the deceptive qualities of images and the subjectivity of represented ‘truth’. In Gift (diptych), we are presented with Chinese fighters parading a gunned-down Japanese aeroplane. However, the implications of the original war image seem lost within Li’s disjointed layering of the pictorial scene. The artist’s gestural and expressionistic process of painting has given way to a detached, almost abstract, narrative. As ‘fact’ becomes secondary and dissolves into a gestural network of mark-making, the scene is rendered a purely artistic production. Gift oscillates between historical interpretation, artistic visualization and fractured memory – establishing at once a powerful interplay between documentation and perception.

30

Gift (diptych)

2003
Oil on canvas in two parts.
180 x 301 cm. (71 x 118 1/2 in).
Signed and dated 'Li Songsong [in Chinese] 2003' on the reverse.

Estimate
£150,000 - 200,000 

Sold for £169,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

29 June 2010
London