Li Chen

Biography

In Search Of Spiritual Space
By Ian Findlay in World Sculpture News

The Taiwanese sculptor Li Chen seeks to make art that has a spiritual space fixed within its powerful physical presence. By bringing the spiritual and the sculptural together in his figurative and narrative work Li hopes that the philosophical nature of his work will enrich people’s lives. While his art is of a deeply serious nature, his fusion of traditional Buddhist styles and contemporary ideas has resulted in work that is both humorous and full of irreverent wisdom, as well as brimming with the vitality of life and its unpredictable nature.

The history of modern Taiwan sculpture is a turbulent one. Throughout the 20th century, Taiwan underwent some of the most complex political, social, economic, and cultural changes experienced by any part of Asia. The most significant to impact the life of the Taiwanese were the colonization of Taiwan by Japan (1895-1943) and the arrival of the Nationalist government and its forces in 1947, and the subsequent leadership of the Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975).). Both of these experiences shaped modern Taiwan's artistic development profoundly, drawing as it did from influences that spanned both Japanese and Chinese traditions, many of which remain important the minds of many Taiwanese artists and cultural traditionalists. Yet, while traditional Chinese ink painting styles and modern Western-influenced oil painting flourished, sculpture struggled to obtain the same recognition and to be viewed as an integral part of Taiwan's modern and contemporary fine art canon. Over the past 20 years, however, the international success of such sculptors as the late Yu Yu Yang (Yang Yingfeng, (1926-1997), Ju Ming (b.l938), and Li Chen (b.1963), each representing very different generations and fresh personal visions, has cast a new light on Taiwan sculpture. While Yu Yu Yang's sculpture blended Western ideas with Chinese myths and aesthetics, Ju Ming has used the intricate movements of taichi to address cultural difference and power. Li Chen, however, has breathed a new dynamic into traditional Buddhist sculpture. He has taken it beyond the merely religiously significant and onto a human, personal level in which ordinary people can recognize important parts of themselves.

The traditional view of sculpture in China was that it was mere craft or a folk art form whose practitioners made functional items of a decorative nature, as well as producing animal carvings, gods and Buddha figures, for temples, and relief work for architectural projects. But with the arrival of the Japanese, sculptural practices changed dramatically and those interested in sculpture as an art form could receive such education in Japan. The first generation of Taiwanese sculptors among them Chen Hsia Yu, Huang Tu-Shiu, and Pu Teng-Sheng -- learned not only about Japanese sculpture, but also about modern European sculpture through their Japanese teachers.                                         With the tyranny and chaos of World War II ended, Taiwan sculpture was dominated by political concerns resulting in numerous statues of Chiang Kai-shek, Sun Yat-sen. and Confucius. It was only through religious sculpture that local culture could be expressed. But from the mid-1970s onwards, the Taiwanese sculptural world changed utterly: partly through a significant shift in art education and the opportunities for international art education and the opening up of Taiwan to the world; and partly due to the growth of a gallery and museum system hungry to develop and to promote contemporary Taiwan art in its broadest sense. Besides these, sculptors were no longer confined to traditional materials such as stone, marble, wood, and bronze but were also using a broad range of both natural and synthetic materials to express themselves.

Sculpture, of course, is no longer sidelined as a minor art form in Taiwan. This is evident in the rapid development of numerous sculpture parks and the respect given to the works of such sculptors as Ju Ming, Yu Yu Yang, Tsai Ken, Lee Kuang-Yu, Dawn. Chen Ping, Marvin Minto Fang, Chang Tzu-Lung, Michell Hwang, Tsong Pu, Lin Liang Tsai, and the naive artist Hung Tung, as well as the many young installation artists whose works appear regularly at international art biennales. It was in the rapidly developing and singularly expressive sculptural world of the 1980s that Li Chen began his career, basically self-taught but filled with the determination to make his mark as a sculptor. "I wanted to be a painter initially." he says. "But for me it was just two dimensional. If I was making sculpture, there were more possibilities for me to express my vision of my experience and the world around me. I wanted to sculpt because I could touch it and hold it. Sculpture has the power of reality that painting doesn't have."

Li Chen, who was born in 1963 in Yunlin, Taiwan, majored in arts and crafts at high school and began to learn about modern sculpture under the guidance Hsieh Tong-liang at the beginning of the 1980s. For Li, however, it was not the multiplicity of contemporary sculptural forms that attracted him. Instead it was traditional Buddhist figurative sculpture that held his interest. His experiences in making traditional Buddhist icons was, in essence, his real apprenticeship as a sculptor, giving him a thorough grounding in the making of religious figures and the discipline of working with materials.

As Li says of this time of change, "I made some traditional Buddhist icons because it was my work for about half a year in a factory. When I worked as an assistant later with a sculptor, after my national service in the army, I began to make sculpture, Buddhist pieces, successfully. But as I considered my work as craft, not art, I wouldn't sign it.

"When I started to make my own work, I still worked with traditional Buddhist sculpture. But the style that began to evolve was not one made to intentionally attract people. It was one that represented my own spirit. By 1992, I began to feel the need to create something that was different from the traditional. And I made only one piece a year until 1997. My early works weren't really developed because, after all, the traditional is a burden. It is not easy to break away from tradition. Tradition is safe.

"The first difficulty for me was to liberate myself from the tradition of Buddhist sculpture. It took me seven years to break from the tradition, to feel that I had found my own sculptural voice. From then on I felt free."

Li's tentative beginnings, determined to break from the embrace of craft and traditional religious Buddhist art and the formality of its structures and visual impact, resulted in his first truly independent work entitled Water Moon Avalokitesvara(1992). This was quickly followed by other bronze Avalokitesvara, each showing subtle figurative developments, but still within the traditional canon of Buddhist figurative sculpture and highly detailed. Water Moon Avalokitesvara initiated a breakthrough in Li’s art would result over time in such outstanding series as The Beauty of Emptiness (1992-1996), Energy of Emptiness (l998-1999), The Transformation of Emptiness - Boundary Within Boundary(2000), Delights of Ordinary People (2001), and Spiritual Journey through The Great Ether(2001-2003). Such series not only show Li's development as a confident figurative sculptor with a concern for a singular human dimension in its monumentality, but also his willingness to challenge people's perceptions of religious art and its role in their lives. His beautifully still Amitaba Buddha (1998) and his daringly plump, monumental bronze Avalokitesvara(1999) are examples of Li's humanizing religious sculpture. Throughout the 1990s, one sees greater simplification in Li's figures, almost minimalist in their structural details, and a new attention to surface textures.

While Li is aware that he, as a devout Buddhist, remains intellectually attracted to the aesthetics and traditions of Chinese Buddhist art "especially that of the Tang and Song dynasties," his direction, since achieving his artistic independence in the late 1980s, has been to make a modern version of Buddhist iconography that speaks directly and simply to the world today without sacrificing the spirituality of it.

The formal connections that elegantly bind tradition and modernity are quite clear in Li's work of the 1990s. This is clearly evident in such pieces as Three Bodies of Buddha (1998) and Buddha of Healing (1998) where the meditative reality of the figure is clearly that of traditional iconography, but the volume, form, and texture suggest a more modern dynamic. And there is a sense of a spiritual freedom in such works. As Li Chen says, "When I make my own work, I try to bring to it a free spirit".

By the turn of the new millennium, however, we see the most significant changes and the real freeing up in Li's art, vision, and sculptural techniques. He has retained tradition at the core of his art but there is a new minimalist dynamic at work. Here he has added new sense of vigor, a more humorous element, and sense of playfulness that humanizes his art on a different level than before. His sculpture from the late-1990s is ever more approachable than just that of a decade before as he comes to grips with a greater expressive freedom. As Li told the arts writer Priya Malhotra in New York in 2003, he likes "to be playful and fun. People might see my work with a smile on their faces. Viewers interpret my work in different ways and see different things in it."

Seeing things differently does not, of course, come easily in any society. For Li, in conservative Taiwan society, his studies of Buddhi