Black Light by Li Gang

Press Release

BEIJING, April 2008 – In an innovative exhibition at 798 / Red Gate Gallery, Beijing, Li Gang shows that he can always reinvent himself through previously unexplored directions.

Titled Black Light, the exhibition contains work which not only explores the medium of photography, it pushes the medium beyond the pictorial and representational into the realm of accident, chance and event.

The characteristic feature of Li Gang’s work over a generation has been the interaction of his ‘artistic sensibility’ and the chance effect of process - seemingly uncontrolled - to reveal the essence of materiality in whatever media he works.

In Black Light Li Gang brings this conceptual and structural process together through the interaction of photography, metal casting and painting. These works have reference to the world – interiors and landscapes – but more than anything else, they stand alone as referencing nothing more than what they are – material, surface and form.

The exhibition will follow his two recent residencies in Vienna (2007) and Valencia (2008) in which Li Gang explored new directions in his quest to create work which is at once an expression of his struggle to manipulate material while allowing the work to have a life of its own. In Li Gang’s words - for ‘God to determine the point at which he stops’ - as the hand of the artist.