Craig Jun Li
of
RAINRAIN, New York
Text by Jonathan Goodman, October 21, 2024
Edited by Lily Sun
Images courtesy of the artist and RAINRAIN. Photography by Marc Tatti.
Installation view. Craig Jun Li: of, at RAINRAIN
Rain Lu, originally from Mainland China, has a good amount of experience working as a gallerist in English-speaking vocations, including a stint of several years in Australia. Most recently, she has set up a space on the edge of New York City’s Chinatown—on Lafayette Street, one block south of Canal Street. Open only a year, the space has been showing energetic, challenging exhibitions that bring in Asian artists but do not emphasize them alone. Lu is fully aware of the importance of presenting artists with Asian roots, while also recognizing the need for a more diverse roster.
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In the current show, the artist Craig Jun Li, currently a student at the Hunter College MFA program, has put up a very accomplished set of flat constructions: Typically, a photograph would be set up on the left side and the image most often is printed on a piece of fabric. Beneath the fabric we can sometimes see a mechanical element—a sphere, for example, moving up and down underneath the textile fabric. The mechanism, eccentric enough to keep visitors highly focused, sets up sculptural motion in startling contrast to the virtually motionless image being shown. On the right, we often come across a group of black and white photos, which regularly establish a subject matter influencing the overall composition, even when the themes are diverse, which they often are.
Installation view. Craig Jun Li: of, at RAINRAIN
This artistic apparatus leads to a tableau, in which both the beauty of the single image and the meaning of the larger group of black-and-white photos contrast with each other, constructing a mostly intuitive imaginary resource. The oddity of the sphere rolling up and down behind the image printed on the gauze-like material creates an atmosphere of idiosyncrasy if not outright humor. What Li uses is not necessarily easily understood. But the juxtaposition between a flat, printed image, and a rounded sphere in motion amounts to a real innovation for visual idiosyncrasy.
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A few words must be said regarding Li’s highly modernist penchant for an art that attracts by virtue of suggestion and a devotion to the partial rather than the totality. His ability to attract and respond at the same time, his use of mechanical devices, and his technologically well-derived postmodernism all show us how sophisticated Li’s art has become, even though they come from a great classical culture. His artworks, a well-made combination of printed media and kinetic motion, bridge the gap between the full and the flat, the art of late modernism, and, I suppose as the artist hopes, an art in conjunction with the future. There is nothing especially Asian about this work, which exists more as a conversation with the present and future, rather than as a dialogue with the past. Indeed, many tenets are suggested by the artist’s use of early modernism, now more than a century old, as a scaffolding for a new way of thinking–mechanical, historical, and intellectually visionary in nature.
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One of the more interesting works in the show is an erratically placed group of desks or vitrines, painted black and set tightly against each other. The look is extremely non-artistic, being only slightly heightened by their physical closeness and the small objects set upon them. It is hard to make sense of the piece at first. But maybe the piece has a meaning beyond its physical existence supporting a metaphorical reading. Of course, we inevitably read the mass of desk-like fixtures as three-dimensional art, but the idiosyncrasy of the forms, both individually and en masse, try our imaginative understanding. In fact, the eccentricity of the work demands that the viewer make sense of something difficult to read from the start. That difficulty, central to the piece, becomes necessary to our insight into its meaning. There is a slightly didactic quality to the exhibition, and perhaps the black constructions, nearly desks with (as I have noted) the odd object set on their tops, act as a metaphor for a direction and goal the gauze images impeccably support.
Craig Jun Li, with contributions from Clare Hu
work, 2024
Time lock mechanisms and parts, antique bearings, cast brass, pigmented cast silicone, synthetic weavings, found tip-in prints, inkjet prints on newsprints, stainless steel steamers, condensation-generating system, plexiglass, BIC lighters, antique children's books, slide changers, found stanchions, Walthers miniature sets, furniture nails, painted plywood, Dimensions variable
The images on fabric are photos taken by Li’s parents in their family garden in China. Taken with phones and zoomed on flowers as mundane subjects, it looks like they are actively rejecting any extended claim on our imagination. A sharp contrast is rendered in the curatorial set up of the show, in which representational images are juxtaposed with finely embossed silicone image-sculptures which are devoid of conventional subject matters as required in classical visual arts. The smaller silicone frames are, I think, about the persistence of memory, but the yellow floral image is a statement of fixed interest, and more deeply, a work of ingenuity and especially, independence in an esthetic sense. Silicone is a material often associated with mold casting. In p.m. 24 and p.m. 25, Li crafts materialized photographs with physical textures—albeit void in its visual form—that have no negative films to begin with. These “rootless” images are nonetheless given forms thanks to secondary materials like silicone. They are covered with pastel-colored bits of color, which additionally cover the background and open spaces of the composition. Li is as good an artist as they are a technician of lyricism, and the work holds our interest beautifully for that reason.
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In the moment, Li’s art succeeds as a view of the manmade and the natural, based as it is on a conflation of perceptions and theses. We haven’t spoken much about the abstract tone the works present, but that is why the work succeeds. The classic modernism we experience in Li’s works describes a place where opposites meet—not in contrast, but in an agreement having little to do with antagonistic cultural stances. Instead, the artist’s juxtapositions and imagistic swerves lean in the direction of an originality whose terms are very much their own. The goal of all good arts, at any point in time, is to keep visual independence alive. Li’s originality, matched to his skill, does exactly that.
Installation view. Craig Jun Li: of, at RAINRAIN