I first took notice of Li Shan's work in the nineteen-eighties, and have ever since followed the trajectory of his creative practice. His art has undergone radical shifts in this time. In 1989, he turned from abstract painting toward what has been referred to as political pop in his Rouge series. In 1995, Rouge transitioned into the bio-art of his Reading series, in which human and insect forms merged in digital photographs and large-format sketches. By then his bio-art project had clearly emerged, and in the decade or so since, Li Shan has continued to be engaged in experiments transforming animal genes. These latter works were all shown in the 2012 Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei's exhibition Reading Li Shan. Li Shan is widely recognized as one of the most significant contemporary Chinese artists. But his radical shift toward bio-art may have aroused misgivings and left us at a loss:in what way are we to understand this bio-art?What sort of illumination is it supposed to cast on contemporary art?

It would be a mistake to make a distinct separation of Li Shan's bio-art from the art of the eighties and nineties, and regard it as conceptual art totally unrelated to the artworks that came before. Li Shan's bio-art is not conceptual art. It is not meant merely to give people flash of deconstructive illumination, nor is it a kind of foundationalist conceptual art. The nucleus of this bio-art is the adornment of biological genes, and the core of his earlier painting also lay in a grand consciousness of life, which in this early period is melded to a philosophical humanism. This life-consciousness that he displays is at the same time biological, making biology metaphysical, with a resultant "extirpation of biology" However, since 1998, the works of bio-art have merely represented a "return to biology", wedded to the life sciences. Looked at superficially, the later works of bio-art are an "extirpation of biology", but the biological forms that result from recombinant genetics open up a space for imaginative combinations that is even more capacious and incredible, uniting elements of mysticism and the morphologies of the sciences.

A closer examination and analysis of the two stages of Li Shan's life-consciousness, their development and the relations between them, can allow us to better understand the sources and logic behind Li Shan's bio-art over the past twenty years.  


The Early Painting: Biologized Mysticism

The keyword here is "biological." The concept of biology that Li Shan takes up is not that of the present day. In Li Shan's early painting, the biological was already a formal element of his aesthetic performance. This explains Li Shan's attention to the basic constituents of life. Because in this early period Li Shan was mainly probing the mysteriousness of life and thus the mystical factors in painting life, the physical (or scientific) factors of biology gave place to painterly ones. The biological elements were already present in Li Shan's early series of paintings Propagation and Order.

"Life-consciousness" was one of the central preoccupations of avant-garde art in China in the mid-eighties.Zhang Xiaogang and Mao Xuhui, both from southwest China,sought to represent the inner spirit of the biological. Their works were like microscopes attempting to examine the human soul and flesh. Their works have come to be labeled "Current of Life", and with their concern with representing the spiritual through figural description, they denominated their own painting "New Figuralism".

However, at the end of the 1970s, Li Shan had already started incorporating biological elements into his figural works. He frequently emphasized structuralism and organic feeling, so his life-painting was not a kind of meditative self-reflection on the spirit of life, but was rather concerned with structure and description. Even though this structure was generalizing and objective, it did not posit a living body as an object of accurate scientific knowledge. For example, in Genesis and Propagation, Li Shan's early painting series from the eighties, there are frequent iterations of the "circular," single circles or several circular forms. But these circular forms are not the geometrical forms of logic, or clear-edged circular forms, the kind found in Western abstract painting, but are shaggy, soft, irregular circles. They remind us of living bodies. Within the contours of the outline Li Shan extremely conscientiously spreads color, not with flat strokes but applies it gently, layer upon layer, leaving extremely subtle calligraphic strokes, fleshing out the form like the tissues of aliving body, giving an almost tactile sense of embodied flesh.

There are also several circular forms to which several lengths of string have been affixed, hinting that they may form a mask. This form prompts one to think of the human-fish totem designs of 5,000-year old Yangshao colored pottery. I do not think that Li Shan's early paintings have any connection to the Yangshao scuIpture, nor is there evidence of it, but I would like to emphasize that Li Shan's paintings, in their emphasis on the biological and the mystical, share some common traits with early humans' mythic understanding of life of early humans.But at this stage in his development, Li Shan has taken the biological and mystified it, in the same way that the archaic totem takes the life of the animal and mythologizes it. The biological in Li Shan's work may be related to how culture was conceived by intellectuals in the eighties. In other words, artists and intellectuals wanted to see themselves as transcendent embodiments of the primitive vitality, or as embodied metaphysics. The biological is granted a cultural, religious or universal consciousness that transcends the animal.

In Li Shan's early painting, therefore, the biological is a sign of the mystical and the mysterious. The biological that is enacted in Propagation corresponds to that in the painting of the "Current of Life" painting of the southwest, superadding something that is "scientific" or "rational": we can, for example, take Li Shan's "circles" as biological cells. This scientificity, of course, is enacted on an imaginative level. The circles, in fact, are not at all what Li Shan is concerned with in his biological genes. These early-period circles, these biological elements, are actually the products of an occult philosophy and are imagined as messengers of the universal,in manner parallel to the way circles represented heaven in the Asia of ancient times. The biological is formally the same as the cosmos. One thinks here of the doctrine of heavenly-earthly interactions of the Han philosopher Dong Zhongshu. The biologism of Li Shan's early paintings is thus philosophical and mystical.

The circular forms in Li Shan's work, like these "circles", are beyond logic: they are not geometrically logical, and are not scientifically analytical. Particularly so in this respect are those black lattice forms and rough black lines; the blackness is intuitive, an intuition allowing us direct access to a mysticism of life, a mysticism of the universe.

In 1986, Li Shan, explaining his Order series of paintings, said that his use of black was an attempt to discover a universal and biological mysticism. The rough black lines and freely painted circles are all black and white, and together they form a limitless mysticism.[1] Li Shan said, "Why do I adopt this kind of 'lattice' symbol and use these kinds of colors? I think this kind of symbol is essentially both simple and ambiguous, both definite and indistinct, and there is an essential mystical tone in it. For some people, the things that they experience in the color black are things that are repressed, frightening things, severe things, etc. But what I experience in it is only mystical." This mysticism is composed of two contradictory aspects. One is logicality, the logic of lattices and dots; the other is individual experientiality: these lines and circles are irregular, improvisatory, possessing a self-performativity. There is a dialogue between the microcosm and the macrocosm, and in one small plane the universe's micro-and macro-levels are brought together.

Li Shan has indicated that the mysticism arising from the conflict between lines and dots, white and black, is exactly what he is trying to accomplish. Life is unknowable. Some might want to conclude that this is a kind of eastern mysticism, but Li Shan's black mysticism (cellular) may have more to do with early Russian modernism's symbolist intuition of blackness; Malevich, for example. According to Malevich, his Black Square represents the world of the future. During the October Revolution, the Russian Futurists, Constructivists and other modernist artists believed that in the future, intuition, language and perception willtranscend our present logical and analytical limitations. Blackrepresents direct intuition and transcendence, the liberation and extension of human consciousness, and reflects an understanding of the materialist principles of nature. For the opera Victory Over the Sun, Malevich worked with Cubists and Futurists to create the backdrop for the second act, consisting of a square diagonally divided into two triangles, one black and one white. This was the birth of Suprematism. The black portion of the backdrop was explained as the victory over the sun of the old world.The darkness eroding the sun, gradually becoming one totally black square: this is an image of the future universe without light.[2]

Of course, in contradistinction with Malevich, Li Shan's Order lacks the will to subjective composition and the strong sense of centeredness and completeness. The composition unfolds naturally and spontaneously. Extending beyond the picture, it becomes infinitely connotative. These kinds of forms and basic ideas that Li Shan employed in the 1970s appeared again in China in the 1990s, and formed a dispersed collective trend of "Maximalism" in art.[3]

This was a specific metaphysical or mystical impulse belonging to that decade, a kind of utopian ideal.[4] And what was Li Shan investigating in his art but this mystery of biology, the existential significance of life? This was a common theme among the artists of the 1980s. However, whereas other artists liked to use metaphorical imagery, the fundamental imagery of Li Shan's rational painting is based directly onbiological morphology. The ragged circles and masklike figures may be Li Shan's unconscious representations of biological cells: they appear as unicellular forms, but are a summation of life. When we were young, we learned that life evolved from unicellular organisms like the paramecium. Recent scientific developments have shown that unicellular organisms have greater abilities for absorption, toleration and regeneration than multicellular organisms. This is both a source of biological mystery as well as a living instinct, and when Li Shan had his illuminations regarding the mysteriousness of biology during the 1970s and 1980s, what he precisely grasped was the simplest of biological forms.

The common thread throughout Li Shan's art over the past thirty years has been an interest in the biological element. In the early period Li Shan depicted life-in-itself from the perspective of his biological imagination, after 1995 Li Shan began to base this on a more analytical and scientific (or biogenetic) perspective. It is this shift in his depiction of the biological that marks the early artistic period from the later one.

Thus, Li Shan's bio-art did not simply emerge from a sudden impulse; he had begun considering these questions more than twenty years ago. In the 1980s, Li Shan created and participated in several works of performance art. Observers have always seen Li Shan's performance art in its collective and social aspect, and have not seen its individuality and specificity. In fact, Li Shan's performance art has been a kind of embodied inquiry, an inquiry into life. He practiced the Taoist discipline at the Guangfu Temple, wearing a black gown and resembling to some extent a Taoist or Buddhist master.

Li Shan's use of performance shows his extreme interest in the modalities and mysteries of living existence.On the one hand, he has transformed this interest into visualization of form, that is, into painting on a two-dimensional surface. On the other hand, he has transformed this into a bodily experience, that is, into the form of performance. More importantly, Li Shan has melded this biological metaphysics and the performance of equanimity in everyday life into a coherent whole.

From ancient times to the present, artists, poets and philosophers have described and investigated the existence and significance of life. There have also been scientists and shamans (immortals) who have attempted to transform life as it is lived by various means. As a subject matter, life is immense. However treating life from the level of biology or directly by means of genetics, and taking the invisible elements of life as the basis for creating artistic works is only a recent development.

The Rouge Series: The Biologism of a Political Fable

Li Shan's Rouge series has garnered the most attention internationally, but this was not just work that only appeared after the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident; he had actually been pursuing these ideas before. and not just Li Shan: Yu Youhan, Wang Guangyi and many of the later "political pop" artists from the end of the 1980s-to be exact, from 1988 onward,had begun to create these kinds of artworks, which became widely popular in the early 1990s. The Rouge Series was regarded as a classic example of political pop art. Firstly, because they carried the image of Mao, people quite naturallyassumed that his works challenged Chinese political ideology. Secondly, with regard to color, pink was regarded as subversive of red, with pink as the color of the erotic and of corruption, and red as the emblem of revolution and earnestness. But Li Shan's work is not at all political pop, nor is it straightforward, even if the Rouge series does doubtless contain a bitingly satirical political message. The images in the Rouge series are of hermaphroditic figures in Chinese society. Originally, "hermaphrodite" referred to a person who had both male and female genitalia.Among people from northern China it also referred to people who were "neither male nor female". On a political level, it is a metaphor for aimless corruption in the class of government bureaucrats.

But it is easy to neglect another aspect of Li Shan's Rouge series with its symbology of plants, animals, human tissues and organs, as well as its political symbolism, things that are actually all confounded in the work. That unique social epoch had occupied the space of Li Shan's brain, and had not simply produced a sociopolitical symbolism of one kind or another,but also had deep implications for his concerns with life and the biological that transcended merely political concerns. No doubt these considerations prompted a break from the mysticism of the eighties, but as for his relentless pursuit of the mysterious, there would be no break at all.

We can see that the botanical flower petals in the Rouge series are composed of human tissue, and this is a central symbol in the work. We also see that two types of figures emerge in the 1989 work: "Mao" and the "common people." The reproductive organs of the common people are divided, suggesting a genetic "hermaphroditic" status. The political figures may thus be representative of this cultural status, and the work figures a genetic essence of political culture. While the gene here (hermaphrodite) is real, it is also metaphorical. If we look at Li Shan's 1994 Asia Rouge series we will see the connection between the Rouge series and the bio-art: in the Asia Rouge series, this thematic has already turned into animals, insects or parts of people.

Bio-Art: A Farewell to History and a Return to Biogenetics

Li Shan's Rouge series is not merely a work of political humor, nor is it a parable about rights, but is a political analysis of biogenetics. The rouge colorations in the paintings hint at the biological or the sexual, making the vocabulary of Li Shan's Rouge series independent of and in a different category from what goes by the name of "political pop," whatever other metaphorical implications it may have. In any case, Li Shan quickly abandoned this kind of emblematic or metaphorical style, and began to proceed in a biologically "realist" direction. When he came back to Shanghai from Venice in 1993, he was not impressed. Instead, he was disappointed, and the only thing that stayed with him was the work of Matthew Barney. It was then that he began to conceive of the Reading series, the possibility of a bio-art. He remembered the discussions he had in his university years with a student named Yuan about how to manufacture a human being. On the threshold of Li Shan's consciousness, a new form of art was about to appear.[5]

This new form of art was "a work of art that is alive, possessing biological attributes."[6] Thinking about contemporary art, he realized that it had to have an intimate connection with the life sciences.Molecular biology came to be an important part of the life sciences in the 1950s,and its symbol was humankind's discovery of the macromolecule DNA, or the gene. Discovery of the structure of DNA, how it stores and transmits genetic information, and how the cell utilizes this information, all of these factors led to the discovery of reproductive technologies. This was a challenge to humanity, and even to all of the living creatures of the universe. Because of this, any art that seeks to seriously consider life must face this unavoidable problem of the biological future. Otherwise, representations of life in works of art will be either arbitrary whims like "freaks spontaneously appearing in the mind," or poetic associations limited by a self-indulgent humanism and self-centeredness.

In any case, it would remain a mere adjunct to history and culture, and these are only momentary flashes in the great stream of universal or even human development. The pleasurable surprise and imaginative identification engendered by bio-art's breaking out of these cultural associations allows aIso an imaginative identification with the "not-I" in its biological synthesis. This synthesis does not have a cultural logic, and takes place outside the logic of culture and history.

The "metaphysical biologism"to which Li Shan had bid adieu had therefore already entered a new stage of "empirical biologism."

At the start of 1995, Li Shan had embarked on a program of study, reading books and journals in the biological sciences, and making notes.He covered the different schools of thought regarding the origin of life to the discovery of cellular chromosomes and genes, to how the biology of the cell had progressed to the stage of molecular biology; DNA and the coding of biological transmission; theories of genetic mutation and genetic engineering; recombinant DNA engineering (DNA's mutations, splitting and recombination). [Appendix: Li Shan's reading notes from Kew Garden,New York (excerpt)] He reflected on the development and theory of biology in this time.[7]

At the beginning of 1998, Li Shan completed his first bio-art project,entitled Reading.Bio-art, Li Shan believed, should present complete works by means of genetic engineering, and thought that its difference from previous art that concerned itself with life lay in the fact that it was based on genetics and the tissues that arose from genes as the guide for artistic creation.Bio-art should therefore be biological and be a visual art of living form.

In the Reading project, Li Shan posited that recombination of the DNA of the sperm of a butterfly with the DNA of the ovum of a fish, a chimaera that was neither butterfly nor fish could be raised. This is an ground-breaking work, because up to that point nobody had conceived of creating an artwork produced in such a manner. This non-fish, non-butterfly form exceeded any previous artistic form because it was alive! Matthew Barney had created half-man,half-animal forms, but he was still within the tradition of the plastic arts. It could be said that the art-historical impact of Matthew Barney's plastic forms is merely one of indifferent novelty. But Li Shan's project is to confer genetic alteration by natural engineering. This difference may seem insignificant, but it moved away from the humanistic arrogance of humankind over all of nature, turning toward a world in which there is a "leveling of all things" and a "universal community".

This is a theoretical problem that humanity today needs to face, and it is also a philosophical problem. Modern science constantly challenges nature; the Copernican revolution and Newtonian physics started the process of constant development in the sciences. But science is limited by the scope of its rational tools, and the practical limitations placed on it by capitalistic pragmatism; moreover, scientific technology has become a means of human alienation by this pragmatism. Science and technology also cannot overcome the limitations of anthropocentrism. The basic use of human technology has been a tool to master nature and the other. And the development of biological sciences has not been able to throwoff this limitation. Li Shan has raised an ethical challenge to the life sciences and to anthropocentrism, audaciously asserting that humankind's biological revolution is in genetic hybridization, or genetic recombination. Li Shan's aspiration to elevate his work to this high level is not at all sensationalist. As this critique and self-reflection on the Enlightenment's anthropocentrism and instrumentalization has already been underway, in the field of aesthetics, Li Shan's audacious move was definitely transgressive. His bio-art is inseparable from scientific experimentation, but in this field he has encountered unprecedented difficulties and obstacles. Some of his projects and plans may be destined to be abortive, and the creativity of some of his discoveries may acquire the element of an unavoidable "birth of tragedy."

After Li Shan's Reading project in 2000, the American artist Eduardo Kac used transgenic technology to produce Alba,a green fluorescent rabbit. What he had originally imagined was a green wolf. This was the first work of bio-art ever produced in a laboratory. If Li Shan had had his own laboratory, his "butterfly fish" would have most certainly been born before Kac's creature.

Recombinant Genetics: Empiricism and Romanticism

The core of Li Shan's artistic work from the 1990s to the present had therefore become human-engineered recombination of genes and genomes. He approached this from three aspects. First, in painted works, including works featuring hybridized images of humans and animals. In 2000, when I was preparing the Wall show in Shanghai, I encountered an immense work in Li Shan's home featuring a recumbent person whose extremities were all fish,and was astonished: he had abandoned any kind of "painterly" values, and the style was exceptionally frank. Moreover, the person depicted lying flat resembled someone who had attained Buddhist nirvana, but the body of this "Buddha" was covered with fish. This was why I included the works belonging to the Reading series in the Wall exhibition, which opened in 2005.In 1996 Li Shan began to use digital composition technology to produce pictures depicting human bodies hybridized with animals and insects, as well as many human or animal bodies hybridized with fish, but with heads that resembled butterflies. With a computer he composed spiders, butterflies, and houseflies, having human body parts located where they would be on a human, such as mouths, ears, fingers or genitals. These projects were exhibited in the Wall show, and during that show they generated a lot of controversy. Many people did not understand them; some wrote articles questioning their legitimacy, saying they had little to do with the theme of the show. But in the exhibition, these works of Li Shan had value precisely as a kind of "foil" to what I wanted to show. Their images of the technological and biological were far from people's definition of contemporary art. It may be that people could still see Li Shan in terms of the image, as if he was playing a kind of game with the image. But these people do not actually perceive the challenge behind Li Shan's gentle, veiled images and paintings that are no longer a part of this kind of traditional art. On the contrary, it is the challenge to the biological boundary of the "human,"and the examination of the borders of human ethics.

Transcription Error is Li Shan's painterly "illustrations" that imagine a complete biological hybrid based on the possibility of genetic recombination and artificial genes. The strange images are all based on an imagined result of recombinant DNA and synthetic genes. They are not the product of a laboratory, but are actually the product of the "laboratory" in Li Shan's own mind. No matter what the ultimate result will be of genetic recombination and synthetic genes, one can see in Li Shan's "hybrid paintings" a rich imaginative power. One thinks of the pre-Qin Dynasty Classic of Mountains and Seas, which, although an ancient work of geography, brought together shamanism, mythology and religion, and for a long time was thought to contain metaphors for hidden cosmological correspondences and Yin-Yang relations. The many images of strange beasts that often feature in legends, including the azure dragon, white tiger, and vermilion bird. The fact is, all of these creatures are hybrid images. If one analyzes these strange creatures, they might very well arouse interest in today's genetic engineers.Though the people of ancient times did their utmost to capture one of these imaginary creatures, one could say that today, if one were captured in the imagination, the creature resulting from this might indeed prove a mysterious living body. Perhaps it is precisely these images of monstrous births, arising from an extremely transgressive science and biology, which ultimately collates with the rational logic of genetic recombination. A time may come when there will be only a slight difference between science and shamanism.

More than anything else, this prompts the realization that there is a productive relationship between Li Shan's early mystical impulses and the empirical bio-art of his later period.The basic rhetoric of Li Shan's bio-art is genetic recombination, but this is not Li Shan's objective.

In a work entitled The Possibility of Random Expression he appended a short statement:"remove the control mechanisms behind the process of transcription and translation,and allow genes to express themselves randomly." The product of random expression is a living morphology that is impossible to know or predict, and this is what Li Shan wishes to emphasize. It is this very mystery that has become his driving force. However, Li Shan's constant excitement for this mysticism and unknowability is not for the sake of something definite and practical, such as biology's interest in propagating life and eradicating disease (which is completely understandable), but rather the attainment in his art of the Garden of Eden. This alone is the essence of life, and the highest state of freedom not merely for human life, but that of other animals as well, and the great unity of the world. Were it not for the limitations of human ethics, I believe that Li Shan would create extremely vigorous works of bio-art. We can already see a glimpse of this vigor in Li Shan's Pumpkin series of bio-artworks. In collaboration with a scientist, he combined the genes of a pumpkin and other vegetables to create strange new fruits. In Pumpkin, Li Shan is just trying his hand, a project to tide him over; he can only do this kind of project as it is not subject to ethical restrictions. But its terrifying image is enough to render people speechless with fright and anxiety.

Bio-art and the life sciences are divided in the fact that biology finds its ultimate end in the value of biological cloning. In other words, genetic modification and recombinant DNA lead effectively to cloning, and because the unalterable end of the life sciences is the service of human life, it has to reproduce the most optimal genes. Human life ultimately moves toward reproduction, something shown in the very fact of reproduction. Just as we live every day in the age of mechanical reproduction amid media, newspapers and images, all products are mass-produced. If the day came when humans were mass produced, the world could not bear to imagine it. It probably would be far from the simplistic depictions of robot wars seen in movies. From a conservative perspective, the value that humans will continue to have will not lie in their comparative superiority to the animals, but rather in the awareness of their ability to act as individuals, in their uniqueness. The value is in the safeguarding of subjectivity and freedom, something we have known since the Enlightenment, and defended with great effort by philosophers and thinkers.

However, the goal of bio-art is not in the reproduction of pedigrees, and it is not in preserving the uniqueness of an individual. Li Shan's bio-aesthetics goes beyond using reproduction, and transcends humanity's narcissistic uniqueness. Bio-art is a belief and a thought system relating to humanity, or a test of the ability to think. Its function does not consist in specific works, that is, it does not perform endless experiments to extend the life of humanity, nor does it try to create a superior life form. I discovered that Li Shan's bio-art is actually a painful non-questioning inquiry into "whether the quality of humanity's animality is in need of a basic change." If humanity's evolution is done, what will be the next change that it faces? Not changing is impossible, because the human environment is constantly (or perhaps acutely) changing. The universe is in constant state of flux and cannot allow any one part of it to stubbornly persist, unless it becomes fossilized. Will we say that fear of Li Shan's concept of bio-art is not ungrounded? It may be something for later generations to deal with. But Li Shan's attitude is that a millennium is too long, and one should make the best use of one's time, so the problem of his bio-art being marginal to the art world may not be such a bizarre challenge. Today people are accustomed to the artworks taking any material form whatsoever. But with respect to the concept of the human and human ethics, the challenge is prescient.People have not yet become aware of this issue, and this is why Li Shan's bio-art has hitherto been considered relatively mild and moderate.

Li Shan's passionate investment in genetic recombination is practically equal to belief in a weird religion. Religion starts with people but is not limited to them. Consciousness of life comes from people, but life does not belong merely to people. This sublimation of the concept of life may lead to our constituting a universal community, or what Zhuangzi termed the soul of all things and equality of all things in his Discourse on Making All Things Equal. But this biological self-sublimation derives precisely from Li Shan's pure materialism with respect to life; the total acknowledgement of the essence of genetic variation: the essence of genetic variations' materialism has not been superseded. This is decisive of the equality of all things in a universal community.Humanity has no privileged place within such a scheme.

On the wall of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei Li Shan has affixed twenty thousand transparent, crystalline dragonfly wings that are stirred by the ambient air, and which may to some extent allude to this concept of "universal community." In the exhibition Reading Li Shan, the artist also displays a Bible. It is a book with no printed letters inside of it. In the center of its blue cover is a digitally altered "insect," part of which is made up of Li Shan's body. It is an obvious metaphor of the story of God as Creator, but in today's changed circumstances and bestowing on it another idiom. Today, God has become the engineered gene, and artifical life.The life sciences have replaced God. This Bible may also be regarded as Li Shan's bio-art manifesto: he means to create "a completely new world of life that is not created in the image of God."

Nietsche's proclamation "God is dead" has already been subverted in "+".However, since the Enlightenment, reverence for the spirit of humanity and freedom of the subject has produced a new "God" in the form of humanity as a whole, and the value of the individual. This may be the most difficult thing for the life sciences to confront and surpass an impediment to the new ethics.

In the last portion of Reading Li Shan is a digital image that Li Shan composed specially for this exhibition. This work constitutes not only his concluding remarks, but is also a perfect commentary on the realm of bio-art. A dragonfly made up of human bodies soars into the sky, an image full of imaginative power and poetry. The spectator is drawn into the world, seeing the dragonfly now flying, now alighting on a leaf, and then flying into the sky. Following the dragonfly, we feel extremely at ease,Alying amid the clouds in the blue sky, and we suddenly forget who we are and how we get there. Looking at this "human dragonfly," we can't help but thinking of Zhuangzi's uncertainty: "whether he were the butterfly,or the butterfly were he." This is may be precisely Li Shan's ultimate point: the freedom for which we plan and search for. It is thus not the result of an experiment, nor will it result in a monstrous abortion-a life resembling dead matter.

Conclusion

In more than forty years of his artistic career, Li Shan lived through the experimental art of the 1970s, the "rational" art of the 1980s (a unique period of "abstraction"in China),the Rouge series of the 1990s, as well as the past twenty years of engagement with bio-art.Li Shan undoubtedly ranks among the few most important and influential artists in the history of contemporary art in China because he has constantly investigated the possibility of new forms of art. Li Shan is a refined and understated artist, but his art is brimming with a fierce tension, whether in the early-period paintings, installations or performance art, or the later bio-art. All of his works are challenging and critical. Li Shan's art has always forged links with the unique developmental stages in the ecology of contemporary art; and in his works, he has been able to assert his own voice, untrammeled by the aesthetic concepts and social limitations of the time. At the end of the Cultural Revolution, when art was still awaiting a breakthrough in the range of what it could accomplish, Li Shan became a representative of the radical art scene in Shanghai, and he assiduously discovered how to use the latest and most forceful artistic forms. The art of the 1970s with its "new forms" carried with it the association with new life and new politics. In Shanghai in the 1980s, Li Shan participated in and organized influential avant-garde events and exhibitions, such as the Aotu Exhibit,The Last Supper, and others.His work became the most influential representative of "rational painting" among the new wave artists of that time. Li Shan has tirelessly investigated a kind of "mysticism" that is not at all a kind of "nothingness" but rather expresses something that intellectuals of the 1980s would endorse, namely that they are members of a greater humanity and a greater life. The mysticism in Li Shan's "rational painting" is not expressive of an absolutist modernist primal abstraction; Li Shan's abstraction is always linked to a philosophically informed "cellular life" and it is this very biological consciousness that has formed the unconscious foundation for his later bio-art.

As a member of the avant-garde in China, Li Shan organized and participated in significant avant-garde artistic events in the 1980s,including the 1986 Zhuhai Conference and the 1989 China Contemporary Art Exhibition. At the beginning of the 1990s, Li Shan created an extremely influential work of political pop art called the Rouge Series. However, just as political pop became an international success, and the artists of that movement began to enjoy the twin opportunities of market success and fame, Li Shan suddenly and courageously turned against the current and from 1993 onward, and began to meditate on his own bio-art.

What prompted Li Shan to suddenly turn inward away from the crowd, and spend twenty years pursuing in solitude his investigations into bio-art? His mild temperament aside, what kind of aesthetic and sociological impulse impelled him to choose this incredibly radical change? We may not be able to judge whether Li Shan's bio-art has a transcendent significance in the context of art history. But at least we can try to understand the reasons it came about.

First, Li Shan may have seen at an early period the crisis in contemporary art. In 1993 he participated in the Venice Biennale, but when it was over he felt not the slightest bit of excitement, but was rather disappointed in what he had seen, which may have come from a sense of crisis in contemporary art. Art became commodified, and it became a prerequisite for artists to either approve of it or deny it when they make art. These preconditions have led to a rupture between modernism and postmodernism. Modernism advocates that art remain above commodification (or elevate materialization), and this is represented by the emergence of abstraction in its various forms. Postmodernism advocates de-commodification (or dematerialization), with the result that finished goods, installations and bodily performances can directly become "materialized" themselves. This is the antithesis and the subversion of the classic and modernist conception of "materialization".

However, from the standpoint of a materialist aesthetics, whether or not the work is materialized or dematerialized has no bearing on the artwork's status as object. Even so, people want to bestow aesthetic uniqueness for the sake of revolutionary significance, based on aesthetic or social agendas. For example, modernism would bestow laurels on abstract works for directly recapitulating a high-level "theory." Postmodernism on the other hand would award its laurels to ready-mades that revealed "social context" or "social sculpture."However,all emphasize merely one aspect of a material object (the physicality of the artistic work). Another result of postmodernism's decommodification has been the critique of capital markets. But contemporary art has never broken away from the marketplace and has never been independent or free of it. Jeff Koons and Hertz ultimately had no choice but to use the market to play at art. This is what constitutes the crisis in contemporary art in the mind of the public.

Even if Li Shan has never cited specific things in contemporary art that has made him lose hope, over the past twenty years of unconventional practice, he has opened up a new area belonging uniquely to him, inciting the admiration of us all. He no longer considers what significance a work of art manifests. He no longer relies on a traditional Western or Eastern frame of reference. As Li Shan has said, "arts and humanities often do not have much to do with people's usual understanding. Bio-art is a completely new system, a living, vital one, that can echo humanity, a system of common existence."[8] Bio-art no longer takes on the burden of "displaying" the capacities of human thought, and is not concerned with reconstructing truths. It returns to the biological. Li Shan feels that his art has been liberated.

But this "return" can be founded on an anti-anthropocentric point of new. Anthropocentrism is a result of the Enlightenment's focus on human liberation, and its direct result was that metaphysics replaced theology, and utilitarianism incurred human alienation and a crisis in resources. For this reason, the Frankfurt School, and Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment in particular, criticized the Enlightenment's anthropocentrism, but this criticism still sought the causes within human history. Perhaps the solution to the crisis should be found outside of the social bond. And this may be another consideration when Li Shan started making bio-art.

Li Shan has incisively pointed out, not without a certain humor, that "the human species, when placed on a par with other species, seems rather incongruous. That dogmatic attitude in which we write books, that upright stance when walking, none of these things are tolerated in the natural world."[9] Li Shan speaks from the standpoint of the majority of animals when conversing with the human, and exposes human's arrogance and inequality. The way out for him is genetic hybridization, for humanity needs to rise above this juncture. This is why he paints the person in a lying posture, with fish "genes" in his body.

Over the past forty years, Li Shan has proven in his artistic practice that he is a unique artist with an extremely rebellious nature. His aesthetic philosophy is skeptical. From his early abstract works to the Rouge series, all are suspicious of the "true" and the "real" and skeptical with regard to aesthetic realism. His later bio-art is skeptical of human morality and ethics.The bottom line of ethics and morality are really concerned with self-interest, whereas they should be concerned with the welfare of all living beings. The greatest challenge to ethics will come from people themselves. This skepticism has been the logic of Li Shan's artistic development for the past forty years. His early mysticism to the empiricism of his later bio-art, have all been the logical product of his thinking.


[1] From a TV interview on the “New Wave in Art” in 1986. Published in Gao Minglu, ed. The ‘85 Art Movement: A Collection of Historical Materials, Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008, p.622.
[2] On the contrary, from the point of view of the Russian modernists, the sun was the emblem of the old,backward powers of this world which were in the process of being demolished by modernism, and the supreme powers of modern people would automatically produce new abilities. These concepts and attitudes are woven into the opera Victory Over the Sun. The language in the opera is without logic and the actors' lines are composed of poetic songs. See Lissitzky, "The Plastic Form of the Electromechanical Peepshow: 'Victory Over the Sun'", in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, pp.347-348. See also Gao Minglu," "Lissitzky,"Aesthetic Research, 2009, No2., p.124-128
[3] Gao Minglu, Chinese Maximalism, Chongqing Publishing House, 2003. See also the English version, Gao Minglu, "Total Modernity and the Avant-garde in Twentieth Century Chinese Art," Chapter 11, Maximalism The MIT Press, 2011.
[4] This ideal is seen in the "rational painters" of the mid-1980s. Rational painting has on the one hand an attachment to mysticism, the mysterious, and the pursuit of intuition, with description of an unreal world,representing an abandonment and transcendence of the immediate. At that time we called it "rational." This rationality is not instrumental rationality, but is an investigation into the world in itself and the metaphysical rationality of life. This rationalism and the painting associated with it constituted a form of "abstract" painting in China in the 1980s that combined surrealism and mysticism. See Gao Minglu,"On Rationalist Painting,"Aesthetics,198 no.8.
[5] Li Shan, Narration
[6] Li Shan, Reading
[7] Li Shan, Reading Notes, 1995
[8] Li Shan, Bio-Art Manifesto, 2008
[9] Li Shan, Letter to Gao Minglu, 2003