Design Series: Possible Dilemmas (2008-2014)

For several years now, Chinese artist Li Feng has focused on the digital remnants of our age. Exploring the complex link between our present digital time and violence, Feng has decided to pick up what remains from this relationship in the form of signs and symbols and to turn them into an expression of our contemporary condition — both influenced by progress and restrictions that are sometimes very well hidden among the overbearing visual data. The scale of his works is commensurate with content; digital symbols amass, creating a visual repository of contemporary anxieties exacerbated by the lack of direction and meaning, grasping at our perceptual field on large canvases.

In Possible Dilemmas, Li Feng creates a strong impact of the information age, with a dense array of signifiers and codes filling the images. Due to the need to showcase numerous forms of information within limited space while ensuring clarity, the artist condensed large physical storefronts into tiny logos. This represents the ultimate application of media communication in the context of “urban-commerce-billboard-flat map-consumer expectations.” The form of the information battlefield on the artwork involves various small and large “digital” elements negated by red lines or crosses, indicating their inability to enter or proceed to the next stage. In the realm of desire-driven online practices, one must confront and overcome the warning sign of an identity verification – a CAPTCHA!

This is probably the essence of the artist’s profound “digital perplexity.” In the artistic creation of Possible Dilemmas, the “identity remnants” of this “digitized subject” – the truth of the flesh, spirit, and identity within the digital realm is expressed, making the viewers nostalgic for the systemic violence of various institutions (economic, cultural, psychological, informational, discursive, etc.) that instrumentalize people and things. Defying categorization, his practice builds on the academic forms of abstract art and introduces vernacular elements to expand his approach and develop new pictorial strategies.