Liu Ye, Book Painting No.12, (Lolita,London.Weidenfeld&Nicolson,1995,Page.11), acrylic on canvas, 20×30 cm, 2016

Mont Sainte-Victoire is a mountain located in South France, which artist Paul Cezanne had a full view of from his studio.  During Cezanne’s lifetime, he had painted dozens of paintings depicting this mountain. Li Ran uses the mountain’s name as the exhibition title, trying to construct his own entry point into this modernist aesthetic, whilst re-viewing fragmented experiences that are grounded in our own history. Li Ran has compiled a four-part statement comprising of the themes: Reflection of Images and Scenes, Gaze, Competition and Encounter. During the exhibition opening, a live performance took place with the artist mimicking voice-over styles from 1970s-1980s’ Chinese dubbed movies. The performance is accompanied with a display of three automatically timed projectors exhibiting a continuous loop of more than 200 photographic slides. The images of these slides feature ‘image extracts’ culled from the artist’s own aesthetic experiences of modern historical images of the ‘west’ found in textbooks and art history.

In 2013, during the construction operation in Longmen county of Yangshao area, Henan, workers unexpectedly discovered a red pottery tripod (“ding”). The vortex pattern on the vessel bears similarity with the modern “hammer and sickle” motif used to represent New China. According to the C-14 dating, the tripod excavated in Longmen has a five-thousand-year history. Chinese archaeologists have named its mysterious pattern the “hammer and sickle”. On the basis of archaeology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, semantics, semiotics and mythology, Professor Yao focuses her research on the origin and development of the “hammer and sickle” motif, concerning which she proposes six hypotheses with scientific significance.

I want to try to build such a “stage”, where all the individual performers have multiple aspects, including the visible and the invisible, the real and the hypothetical. These bodies are at the same time physical proofs of the real world and symbols that connect all kinds of desires. They are signs of a certain period of history but also void of any specific historical meaning.
Do they exist between imagination and ambiguity? They maintain a relative synchronization within different orders; they are introspective presences in public space; they share the same space but ignore each other. This is a stage filled with normality and abnormality. It is my experiment with video, and my understanding of the world that I live in.