Li Qing
Garden of MacGuffin
Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig
1 March – 19 April 2025
The surface of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate is in motion. But it is not the surface of the Brandenburg Gate. It is a reflection in water (upside down). And it’s not the Brandenburg Gate. It’s an imitation. It’s located in The New Yuan Ming Palace in the Chinese metropolis Zhejiang. It is one of the many attractions of the vast park grounds loved by tourists, who also encounter the Basilius Cathedral from Red Square in Moscow and the Opéra Garnier in Paris, among other monuments. Some of the famous buildings have been modified and supplemented with decorative components. For example, classicistic-seeming sculptures stand in front of the pillars of the “Brandenburg Gate”. That surely doesn’t bother visitors to the park when they take their photos and selfies. Much more important is to have seen the architectonic monument, to have captured it photographically, and to have stood in front of it.
In his artistic work, Li Qing explores architecture and its relationship to people. He is interested in the ambivalence between the external effect of architecture, its external mantle, and its real function, i.e., its inherent societal relevance. He works with various media: painting, photography, video, and collage. The work《水法》 <Rules of Water>, 2025, is a cinematic work, it shows scenes from the New Yuan Ming Palace. We see a shot of a generously laid out, historical fountain complex. In Europe as in China, elaborately designed fountains were regarded as emblems of engineering art and artistic virtuosity, ultimately to display the power of the wealthy client. The fountain ensemble in 《水法》 <Rules of Water> shows European as well as Asian components. Conspicuous are the many figures of animals from which water spews. The animal figures are also found in the exhibition as small works on paper. Certain motifs reappear in various forms in Li Qing’s works.
Water plays an important part in the two scenes in the park complex. It’s as if Li Qing excerpts two architectures from this completely artificial area and underscores their unreality by making water the indicator of flowing significance and shifting form. The Brandenburg Gate, itself not even the original, is shown only as a reflection in water anymore. Li Qing proceeds similarly, though in the medium of painting, in the work《冰山》 <Iceberg>, 2025. Here, Berlin’s Reichstag building’s glass cupola, an icon of modern architecture and an emblem of democracy, is fused with an iceberg. The picture is framed in a massive wooden structure that was originally a window and that Li Qing chose and refurbished. The idea of the picture as a window onto the world suggests itself, but, assembling new constellations, Li Qing is not so much showing an image of the world as drawing attention to the close intermeshing of architecture, ideology, and economics. Simply through form, size, and materiality, architecture reveals much about the society within which it exists — and especially that society’s rulers.
In a work group of paintings, Li Qing examines contemporary Chinese buildings. They show an extremely modernized country that builds spectacular constructions with gigantic dimensions. What seems especially beloved are spheres, or round buildings. In China, the globe is regarded as the most desirable form. Li Qing creates a connection between the form and its multiple representation in advertising and social media. At their center, his paintings show architectonic constructions, often photos of hotels taken or marketing purposes, titled Hollow Form (Phoenix Island), 2023, or Enjoy The Sea (Shimao Enjoy The Sea Apartments, Qingdao), 2024. Below that, as a second level, Li Qing paints excerpts from advertisements with people lounging on the beach, posing in artificial bodily stances, or standing as couples in front of romantic sunsets. The two pictorial levels place the two aspects above and below each other rather than mixing. The architecture overlays the figures below it. Both motifs are removed from reality, like empty husks or, in Jacques Lacan’s sense, a promise of the “Other”.
Here, like Slavoj Žižek’s extending hypothesis on Lacan, Li Qing points to the term of the “MacGuffin”. This expression is used primarily in film and refers to an object that is central to the course of the plot but plays no further role itself. In the exhibition title “Garden of MacGuffin”, we can initially think of the park ensemble in Zhejiang, where many empty architectural hulls stand in the landscape. But Li Qing’s many-sided and reflected works hint at another, more conceptual use of the term: Could it be that the prestigious architectures of our time are a form of MacGuffin that, as hulls, have a function for people, but in reality serve as only digital or flat/superficial pictorial material anymore? What reveals itself in Li Qing’s works, as melancholically as humorously, is the yearning for a social, cultural, indeed existential world that once again addresses the human being.
Dr. Kristina Schrei
Translation by Hagen Hamm
Enjoy this short interview with Chinese artist Li Qing and the visit to his studio.
Film & Edit: Paul Ott, Dario Niederprüm
Music: Georg Paco Ludwig Nitschke
Chinese with English subtitles