Infatuation ¨C The World of Portraiture Created by Li Guangxin
Huang Du

 If we look carefully at Li Guangxin's Portraiture series, we sense a youthful and indulgent fascination for something that can't be named ¨C this series, Portraiture, represents young people's pursuits as well as their indulgences, bodies, selves, fashion and sexuality. In today's information age, traditional aesthetic ideology is waning. What was once forbidden, restricted or bounded is gradually being replaced and deconstructed by a large number of new art forms. Artists have begun to show interest in the subject of uncertainty, because the once clear goal of art has left the historical stage. Art is no longer limited to tradition or experimental forms, but is an "artistic effect"built within a structure of technological aesthetics. Given such cultural conditions, the attention of aesthetics has shifted to observation and sensation, abandoning the objective construction and returning to subjectivity.  This provides a broader space for sensation, and from this sensation there emerge certain changes of emotion or feelings of excitement. The core of this ideology is the aesthetic core of Li Guangxin's photography.

In modern dictionaries, the word "infatuation"means finding so much pleasure in something that one cannot put it down, or having interest in only one person or one thing and become completely absorbed by it. Li Guangxin has given full rein to his imagination in the Portraiture series. Infatuation has been subjectively expressed as a kind of uncertainty, a dissociated and undetermined visual language. From the artist's view, "infatuation" does not only mean the extreme love of something, but also connotes complete absorption by it. His photography is precisely a representation of such ambiguously neutral discourse. Precisely because of his indulgence to such an odd and vague aesthetic, he is able to bestow more complex and obscure cultural connotations and meanings. He treats "queerness"as oddity within human relationships ¨C homosexuality, impersonation, androgyny, self-absorbedness, obsession, etc. These phenomena are often considered the aesthetics of the "bizarre" or "strange", and diverge into other many new branches of meanings. Those with such symptoms are often discriminated against or treated unfairly. In fact, those with these tendencies do not consider themselves abnormal, but use any means possible to have equal relationships with others. Therefore, compared to distributable mainstream art, sub-cultural art has a marked "otherness" in terms of artistic ideology. It is not trying to present a radical or destructive language, but to latch onto a mainstream cultural system with delicacy and elegant composure. At the same time, it maintains a certain distance and independence from this system. As a platform for sub-culture, the internet has provided a space for Li Guangxin; it opens up the possibility of searching for "otherness". It is through this channel that he has built communications with different young men and women, and gained images for the subjects of his photographs.

 It's quite clear that Li Guangxin shows a great interest in youth. Abstracting a period of youth from a life, that is, framing the most lively moment in the course of one's life, creates an object for which people have great nostalgia. In his photographs, we cannot find any trace of narrative, we cannot find anything about the subjects' cultural backgrounds, nor can we detect historical clues. We know even less about the characteristics of their identity. They become people without attributes, they almost become non-human. Nevertheless, we can still sense the instinctive and youthfulness of these people, that is, his/her innate beauty or handsomeness. Li Guangxin has applied hyper-realistic experiences in order to manipulate people's portraits, to provide them with the features of epic still-life objects. People are not directed by depth, but unveil an unknowable youthfulness and "melancholy". The beautiful and handsome images of youth are completely dependent on post-production computer technology. Therefore, Li has sufficiently applied the aesthetics of technology and fashion in his photographic creations. These nearly perfect images represent a kind of tendency and fashion.

Li Guangxin has transformed commercial advertisements into a photographic style with a unique language. His computer-edited digital images allow the subject to become impeccably beautiful. These artworks have a beauty of the bizarre ¨C caramel liquid leaking out of the mouth and bloody colored liquid dripping from the noses of the beautiful girls and handsome boys, or the tears in their eyes or on their cheeks. All are drawn digitally.  Due to the utilization of technical beauty, and because the "blood" and "tears"are manipulated into overly delicate and wonderful forms, the existing meanings of blood and tears become revolting. With the editing of the color of the skin, Li creates a grotesque beauty that is beyond traditional customs and social boundaries. This is obviously his reconstruction of the subjects, a way of demonstrating the relationship between mass media and art. He has inserted more and more popular culture elements into his photographic language. Popular culture has given a voice to the culture of a borderline group, and stands in opposition to 'heroic culture'.

Because he has abandoned the narratives of documentary photography, his Portraiture series can be thought of as an extension of his imaginations of reality. These portraits, with their individual characteristics, are reenactments of epic classical paintings. By the use of appropriation, he replaces epic portraiture with fashion. He realizes that photography is definitely not an objective representation of reality, but a new visual expression of subjectivity. He clarifies the mutual function of painting and photography. Photography is like a mirror, the viewer can decode its connotations and meanings through his or her experience. His photographic concepts adopt methods that both attract and shock people in order to deconstruct people's inner feelings and outer appearances. He strives for tranquil facial expressions in his photography. Every detail on the face, even skin color, is manipulated in the minutest ways, but the viewer is still focusing on the surface of the image, and finds it difficult to reach out to the subject of the photograph. Their individual characters have disappeared behind the image; only the accuracy of their appearance is represented. All that is left behind are the features of the spring beauty of youth. At a certain level, instead of considering this his attention to "others", it is more like his attention to himself. Not only has he created an imaginary world, but he has also established a ground for self-adoration. This is his most important stylistic characteristic. Moreover, Li Guangxin is also quite interested in the topic of the body in contemporary culture, an important topic in contemporary art. From the perspective of modern philosophy, the body can be analyzed on three levels: the natural body, the social body and the technological body. Li Guangxin's photographs encompass or mix the meanings of all three levels: they represent the natural body, they analogize the social body, and they manipulate the technological body. In his photograph series, we can detect that the constructability of the body becomes a conduit for relationships with others and for its re-imagining as a spiritual body. The exposed body is positioned in a space of control, oppression, dissection and construction, the elegant and respectable body is thus eventually replaced by a body of reality and hyper-reality. In the artist's view, anyone will see the bodies of others as the body of the self; that is, knowing others means knowing oneself, and knowing oneself relies on knowing others.

 In Li Guangxin's view, concept itself is a kind of form, and behind form there must be various semiotic meanings. In the portraiture series, we find the artist intentionally decorating the subjects with pearl necklaces. He is in fact drawing an analogy between youth and pearls, sleek and smooth, but eventually disappearing. Therefore, it goes without saying, the meaning implied by the pearl necklaces worn by a young person is different from its meaning when worn by someone of middle age.

 Therefore, Li Guangxin's images express both media and text, creating a new socio-cultural relationship between the creator's coding and the media viewer's decoding. If we look at it from another perspective, the artist¡¯s creation of the self is not rational or fixed, nor is it based on constructability; rather, it is based on "creativity". His creativity is shown through the marriage between artistic concepts and technological aesthetics. Even though his artistic experiments have characteristics that are "unique", they also prove that we are living under a media scope ¨C that media has extended to consumer culture, as well as into nature and body. It has even reconstructed the social realm and the realm of everyday living.