Dinu Li

Dinu Li is a Hong Kong/British contemporary visual artist.

Li, 2017

He has had solo exhibitions across the UK, and his work has been exhibited internationally, including Italy, Romania, Canada, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, China, Uzbekistan and Korea.

His publication The Mother of All Journeys was shortlisted for the 2007 Rencontres d'Arles Photobook Award. His work has been included in numerous publications, such as The Chinese Art Book showcasing artworks by two hundred significant Chinese artists since the Shang Dynasty.

Life and influences

Li was born in 1965, moving with his parents from Hong Kong to England, first to Sheffield and then to Manchester. His interest in photography dates back to childhood hours spent tidying his mother’s dressing table. On the table were family’s photographs protected by a sheet of glass, and his mother would use these to illustrate stories about their family. Sometimes he would rearrange these, creating his own fictions.

He has said:

Moving to the UK at the age of seven, my primary concern was to assimilate and integrate...a pair of bullying neighbours forced their advice on me, ‘Go back to where you come from’, they ordered as they smothered me in soil. This memory has become a strange source of inspiration throughout my life, as I imagine the many different soils we collect on the soles of our shoes whilst we walk on our journeys across the world.

Li was taken on weekly school trips to the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester, and his resultant interest in historical paintings influences his works. In his twenties he by chance came across two photography books on the same day, Exiles by Josef Koudelka and In Flagrante by Chris Killip. These discoveries were a turning point for Li, who suddenly felt he had found his voice.

Much of his process involves travelling to a destination to develop a project, researching the history and other relevant information about that place. This research becomes an element within a larger framework, generating new perceptions, creating patterns, repetitions, and compositions. This process is the same whether he is shooting on location, recording sound in a studio, or looking through an archive.

Selected work

Secret Shadows (2002)

This photographic series explores the provocative subject of illegal immigrants. No people or faces are shown in these portraits. It is only through the spaces in which they exist and the objects they possess that we can build a picture of them. These include clothes, maps, souvenirs, and small red cloth bags, traditional in China. These contain a handful of soil scraped from outside their front doors when they start their journey, to guarantee safe return.

Press The Star, Then Say Hello (2006)

Commissioned by Autograph ABP to mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Samuel Selvon’s 1956 book, The Lonely Londoners , in this series of fourteen photographs Li collaborated with the customers of high-street internet phone shops in Manchester, photographing them as they phone abroad, their bodies in one space and their minds elsewhere. The picture's composition echo those of a Vermeer painting such as Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, in the lighting, sparsely furnished enclosed space, curtains, reflection of a face in a glass, and highlights drawing attention to a letter or phone.

The Mother of All Journeys (2007)

Over four years, Li travelled with his elderly mother back to all her previous homes, first in the UK, then Hong Kong, and eventually her family home in rural China. His photographs of these sites in the present are juxtaposed with family snapshots and remembrances from his mother. This photo-essay in book form reflects on the strong part photography plays in the construction of personal memory, reframing the past through the present and the present through the past.

Crescendo (2010)

Whilst doing a residency in Shenzhen, Li by chance came across a group of people performing a paper-burning ceremony in the middle of a dual carriageway, the exact spot their home had been erased. They agreed to collaborate with him on a performance on a Metro underground train, where the public could not escape. One person began by pointing and loudly accusing another of corruption, then others joined in, creating a domino effect until all were accused and accusing. He also gathered an archive of Chinese propaganda films of the 1950s - 1970s, which were typically about peasant uprisings. The resultant piece consists of three sections; film-stills of characters at the moment of deciding to rebel, documentation of studio rehearsals, and film of the performance with audience reactions.

We Write Our Own History (2017)

Li collaborated with activists, who restaged their memories of the 2014 Umbrella protests by arranging everyday items on table tops. This is a kind of re-enactment using objects instead of people, which would have been dangerous. Li also collected online clips of the protest posted as citizen journalism.

The Anatomy of Place (2007–2017)

Video still of Nation Family (2017). Single channel video installation

A trilogy of films consisting of Ancestral Nation, 2007, Family Village, 2009, and Nation Family, 2017, the three titles share the same Chinese written form as the word for 'country'.

In the three channel video projection Ancestral Nation, Li juxtaposes footage of the self-organising crowds outside Guangzhou train station with the formal choreographed state celebration of Confucius’s birthday in Qufu.

In Family Village Li was inspired by a newspaper article about a Christmas card from a British town planner to his counterpart in Sichuan. Upon receiving the card, the Chinese planner was enchanted by the watercolour of Dorchester, England's vernacular village architecture, generating an imaginative hybrid housing style some 7775 kilometres away. Li scanned a 1950’s cartoon story book about a heroic boy who intercepted enemy soldiers, turning the original cartoon into an animation with an altered narrative in which the boy journeys while collecting bamboo. Every time he returns home he finds his home changing.

Li collaborated with a cousin to create Nation Family, a fictional narrative inspired by two photographic portraits of the young cousin working in the labour camp he was sent to during the Cultural Revolution, a rubber plantation that is now a popular domestic tourist destination. In the fiction, a comrade and a peasant reminisce about the personality and escapades of the character 'Nation', though their stories contradict each other, and neither can explain his mysterious disappearance. Throughout the film, Li shows family photographs that are in fact propaganda. Film, props and songs are translated into different media or verbal and visual languages.

Exhibitions

He has had solo exhibitions across the UK, including The Anatomy of Place, London, 2018, Age of Transition, Bedford, 2005,, As If I were a River, Manchester, 2005. and Treasured Island, An Tobar, The Isle of Mull, 2001. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, Italy, 2009 the 3rd Bucharest Biennale, Romania ; Contact FotoFest 05, Canada; BB3 Manifestation, Bildmuseet, Sweden, 2008 ; Contemporary Chinese Photography, Oldenburger Kunstverein, Germany, 2010 ; PhotoIreland, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland, 2012 ; Family Stories, White Space 798, China, 2004; The Mother of All Journeys, Victoria and Albert Museum, UK, 2004; The Map: Navigating the Present, Konsthall C, Sweden, 2009 ; The Problem of Asia, Para/Site Art Space HK at Chalk Horse, Australia, 2010 ; Liminal Britain, San Antonio Art Gallery, USA, 2006; Tashkent Biennale 2007, Uzbekistan; and the Dong Gang International Photography Festival, Korea, 2015.

Further reading

• The Performance Document: Assimilations of Gesture and Genre by Alice Maude-Roxby & Dinu Li, Photography and Culture magazine, 2018, ISSN 1751-4517
• Family Village, Artsway and The Arts Institute of Bournemouth, 2009, ISBN 978 0 901196 34 7
• Mother of All Journeys, publisher Dewi Lewis, 2007, ISBN 978 1 904587 41 5
• The Mother of All Journeys - Review, by Mark Sinclair, Creative Review, June 2007
• Press The Star, Then Say Hello: Calling Home, Feature by Pavel Buchler, Portfolio magazine issue 46, 2006, ASIN: B004OR7ZY4
• Necessary Journeys, Arts Council of England, 2005, ISBN 0 7287 1112 5
• The Chinese Art Book, Phiadon, 2003, ISBN 978 0 714865 75 1
• As If I Were a River, Commissions in the Environment , 2003, ISBN 978 0954529703
• Ten Thousand Li: Chinese Infusion in Contemporary British Culture, Liverpool School of Art and Design, 2002, ISBN 0 952316 19 6

External links

• Official website
• Dinu Li discusses his work for Enemies of Good Art podcast
• Interview with Wendy Ma for Art Radar Journal
• WYNG Award interview about The Mother of All Journeys
• WYNG Award interview about artistic practice
• Danielle Arnaud Gallery dedicated artist's page
• European Master of Contemporary Photography of IED Madrid
• The Performance Document: Assimilations of Gesture and Genre, Alice Maude-Roxby and Dinu Li, published by Taylor & Francis Online, 2018