"The flanêur is not only someone on the threshold of the city.
LEFTOVERS: Li Gang’s Sculptures as Urban Re-Enchantments
By Beatrice Leanza
"The flanêur is not only someone on the threshold of the city. He is someone who is driven by desire, curiosity, by objects, goods; his urban trajectory is ruled, as in Bloom-Ulysses’, by currents and chance" (G. Amendola, The Post-modern City).
The sight of Beijing-based artist brings trepidation to my blood-flow. He creates free-standing works which balance precariously upon improbable, geometrical stilts, as if they are remnants trouv�, material outcasts, magical and monstrous personalities. They stand in for the epiphanies of a material world where time objectifies and disconnects, and their visage is vilified by the primacy of the excellent image.
The works aim to figuratively reflect our fragmented urban experience, ever-accelerated by conceptual data-processing highways and their physical extensions. He re-imagines Beijing as a city that "dies behind its objects", behind its urgent planning and its futuristic architecture. The urban fabric cloaks the inhabitants in hasty incoherence, generating a martyrdom of imagination. Beijing is thus semiotically, physically, and visually heavy, irksome for its impetus. It accustoms the eye to the practice of discarding; we fail to perceive all but the schematically essential elements of form, only to realize that its decadent affect is destroyed by rapid obsolescence. This framework is an altercation of our relation to space and how we occupy it. The visual and dimensional relation with objects and forms in space becomes essential, succinct, computerized.
The power of matter rules on these metropolitan post-industrial scenarios. New spaces, engineered in post-industrial powders, beams, scaffoldings, architectonic geometries and structural skeletons of iron and metal, evolve into new paradigms. Through his "leftovers", Li Gang documents the process of the material cementing with the conceptual. He rediscovers the audacious confrontation with time, which is the dimensional delirium of sculpture and "the hidden metaphor of the process". He rescues those bronze pieces that remain at the foundry once a process ends, those remnants that vacillate halfway between matter and form, and which are edgy, lame and unpolished. These include shoes, bike-saddles, bike wheels, tubes and runners. He then "poses" these residual bronzes on sand, where the crafty encumbrance of volume, of the weight of time, of its fixity in progress and the eternal wait which as Oliva says, "sculptures want to be forgiven for", are documented into solidity.
The remnant carries with it a privileged dimension because it begs to have the dignity of its uncompleted existence ransomed. Li Gang’s gesture is an exercise of apparition confounding the structural persistence of objects with unforeseeable new affinities. He strives to reclaim the "humane" in everyday objects, in the consumed objects, in the disrespected objects, the objects made immediately old by our disregard. Li Gang recovers the stories of the objects and redeems them in the visual field by welding new conceptual and formal characters. These assemblages are then infused with the power of the simulacrum: the object that is a place, a charactered dimension, what Souriau addresses as "the moment that is".
Li Gang mediates form and matter with the spirit of a spell. Episodical and almighty, like photographic takes from the edge of an non-investigated time, or like the grotesque personages of a Burton animation, his sculptures enchant the mindscape. They repopulate the viewer’s imagination with their micro-times, their captured, inadvertent passing-bys. They deter the frantic cycles of the present and dilate the mind’s eye to make room for an illusory time. They compensate for the synthetic "real" of the contemporary, meta-narrated cities, made simultaneously commercial and mythical by media imaged-communication.
The reinvention of the form in Li Gang’s work proposes an unexpected meaning: it is a spatial fortuity provoking a structural re-adaptation during the hurried visual lunch of the everyday. These objects return theatricality to the aseptic polysemy of the porous, constructed space of the city, and recover the essence of the object to prevent its death behind a sterile copy.
