hem. For that project I sold off a lot of things that I did not want. I chose to sell the catalogues because I believed then that knowledge in the contemporary context is a burden. I wanted to rid myself of this burden. Why did I want to paint these covers? Because I often participate in biennials, and at the opening you always get free catalogues. But they are so heavy. So I took these free catalogues and sold them to other people. I think that action is art, but there is another level of value that parasitically attaches to this art act. Painting the catalogues is another level of parasitism.

JS: This brings us to another work you did with Hong Hao in 1997 for Documenta X, where you sent the fake invitation letters to Chinese artists and curators.

YL: That work was slightly different, an extension of the feeling I often have as an artist. The people who got the letters were actually quite excited, and I knew they would be excited. If it had been me receiving the letter, I would have been even more excited than they were, even though it was all fake. At first the people who received the letters were mad at us for joking with them, but later the people who did not receive letters were upset as well. They were upset not to have received an invitation, even if the invitation was a fake.

……

JS: You are playing with the structure of the art world, because participation in a major biennale means that the artist’s name will circulate, that he will become very famous. It is as if you invited yourself to be part of this mechanism of fame-making.

YL: We were just thinking that if people got these invitations, they would be as excited as we would have been. In a certain sense, being invited to Documenta is the highest ideal of an artist. I am not sure that everyone is as shallow as we are, but all I wanted then was to participate in Documenta, and we never thought there was a problem with this attitude.

JS: All of your work is about playing with the art world system?

YL: My goal is not to play, but rather to express my true feelings. When I make work, I first think about my own feelings in the most direct sense.

JS: Even your studio looks like the studio of an art director. You don’t have a traditional artist studio like your colleagues in China, with two thousand square meters and twenty assistants. Your windows face on the CCTV building. It feels corporate, not like an artist studio.

YL: I like this feeling of living in the city. What is contemporary art after all? I look at a lot of artists in China and I do not envy their lives at all. I think it’s best to preserve a living attitude as an ordinary person, not an artist.

JS: But your studio is not for normal people. If you wanted something normal, you could live in a hutong.

YL: Precisely where you live is not the question. So long as it’s convenient.

JS: You have an office, not a studio. If you were a normal artist, you would have a traditional artist’s studio. But you are in an office, with office people, not ordinary people.

YL: But I don’t think these “normal” artists are normal in the context of Chinese society. This is actually really interesting. The lives of artists in China are so different from those of ordinary people. It is all so symbolic. But when I walk down the street, I don’t want people to think I am an artist. Perhaps they see me as a businessman, or something else. I like this feeling.

JS: Businessmen would not have hair as long as yours.

YL: Really?

JS: You look like a singer, or an actor, or even an artist.

YL: That just means that I have style. I am not necessarily trying to look like an artist. Mr. Ullens has style too.

JS: Very stylish. But not every businessman looks like him. He is very high-profile. Not normal. Let’s go back to your work, specifically the paintings where you are including the artists gathering together, or catalogues of shows, or curators, or collectors. You are showing all the society of the art and the tools: the books, the pictures in magazines, the high society of collectors. It all appears in your work.

YL: My work is about things that I have had to encounter. And in the process of encountering these things, I have found a certain feeling. I hope my work can express that as directly as possible. You are talking specifically about my Climbing Space paintings. Why did I paint those people? Because we worked together. These experiences have become my résumé, my psychological process of “climbing,” because in everything I do I aim to gain something new. That is how I understand my work.

JS: How did you go from the Climbing Space series to other series like the Color Wheels and Sparkling series?

YL: I work on one series for a period of time, and then I feel tired or annoyed, or perhaps a new idea comes to me. As for painting, after Climbing Space, I started on a new series in 2003 and 2004 called Super Lights. That was the time in China when the idea of “contemporary art” really began to emerge. So for these paintings I copied works by other artists, like Ai Weiwei, Liu Wei, Cao Fei, and others, all from the Uli Sigg collection show. Because of copyright concerns, I decided to paint them in two colors, with a line separating them.

JS: Did the line run down the center?

YL: No, there was a proportion, like the proportion of filter to tobacco on a cigarette. Because I was diluting the strength or the interference of the original works.

JS: So your work has always been about appropriating – other pictures, other paintings, other people?

YL: Yes, but in this case, the result is consciously not as powerful as the original.

JS: This has to do again with questioning the question of authorship.

YL: Yes, this is my attitude toward art. I feel that the less I do, the more pure the gesture.

JS: And when you reproduce something, it is never the same size as the original.

YL: Yes, because I take the images from catalogues, so they are based on the size of the reproduction. I often do not know the dimensions of the original. I think more about the size of the canvas I am working with, how to fill that. It is an assembly line.

JS: So you copy the images from magazine or printed matter? So it is a reproduction of a reproduction.

YL: Yes, or you could say that they come from my system of knowledge.

JS: You are questioning this notion of knowledge, which we know more and more through websites and magazines. But it is never the real thing. The size and color are always off.

YL: Perhaps you are saying that my works function in the same way as the media. My expressive powers are limited, my system for making paintings is not omnipotent, so I will never try to match the colors of the original, because I could not do that well.

JS: But you are copying from a reproduction.

YL: Yes.

JS: Is it a critical gesture that you choose to paint from reproductions, or is it just a fact?

YL: I don’t think art really allows for effective critique.

JS: No, but I mean more in terms of the content of the art, is it critical of the notion of gaining knowledge through reproduction?

YL: It is better to call it information than knowledge. The vast majority people will encounter these works as reproductions, not as originals.

JS: Do you think in the end that visual information belongs to everyone, so there is no longer this idea of copyright?

YL: Artists should have a special freedom to deal with images. We use images to express ideas. This is not advertising. So even if I were to take the original images of others and use them directly, there should not be copyright issues. This is our visual freedom, our way of dealing with questions.

JS: “Super Light” for me means no more content, no more taste. I used to be a big smoker, and I liked lights, but extra lights? No more taste. Nothing almost. I needed ten cigarettes to have taste. So is this a way of saying that knowledge is the same way now? We have visual information but without content, without meaning, without reference.

YL: Yes, it is a dilution of the original knowledge and content, as well as of the artist’s will to expression. But in another sense, I think that by taking a work and turning it into a “Super Light,” you make it a lifestyle object. It becomes more open. People can explain it as they choose.

JS: It looks more healthy, but in fact it is more dangerous. When you smoke lights, you think you are smoking less, but the filter is dangerous.

YL: So that’s all the more reason why we cannot believe in art.

JS: It is also about the body—we all want to lose weight and become “super light.” So it is a general statement on our contemporary obsessions.

YL: That is a nice understanding. There is also the question of production. My studio is a system for producing paintings, so I must flood and saturate it. And that is what led me to the Sparkling paintings.

JS: When you move to a new series, do you end the previous series, or do you leave it on the side so that you can come back to it later?

YL: It is never absolute. If you think about this in absolute terms, you are actually making a promise to the commercial market. But I also like to make works that raise questions about the market, whether in terms of their content or their quantity.

JS: So it is indefinitely suspended. It is open, you can return at any time.

YL: Yes. I always want things to be free and open. But my ability and capacity for work is limited, so I tend to focus on a specific series for a period of time.

JS: It can always be reactivated.

YL: Yes. Moreover, my Color Wheels series is like a parasite that nests in the working conditions of my studio. Hanging in my studio, these paintings make me feel optimistic. They can be infinitely reproduced, and never duplicated. Duplication would be impossible, both theoretically and technically speaking. I could leave my studio and these paintings are still being produced. They are produced at the same time as my different figurative series.

JS: By a machine?

YL: No, by people.

JS: To go back to the Sparkling series, you pick a photo, you go onto your computer, you retouch the photo, and then you put it into this kind of light which looks like something between a Russian communist background and something from a cartoon. All of the characters look like fashion models, or youth heroes.

YL: It is strange. When I put an image into this context, some people think I am kissing ass, elegizing this or that. But other people are more sensitive. If I painted you in this way, you would be quite nervous, not knowing if it was sarcastic. I think these two feelings are very interesting. It becomes difficult to explain the series from a single position. The art world is selfish and narcissistic, so this sort of treatment looks extremely sensitive. It becomes a very subtle psychological statement.

JS: How do you select the picture that will go inside? Because the more I think of it, it looks like the beginning of photography, where photographers would use a fake landscape or a fake context. It is contemporary, but it is the same idea somehow. It is a neutral, futuristic background in which everybody can appear and disappear. You could make a slideshow where the background would remain the same but the image would change.

YL: That’s true. Anyone, anything can be placed against the background.

JS: How do you choose the images?

YL: Each time I do a new project, I am faced with some specific choices. For example, this portrait of [Documenta 12 curators] Roger Buergel and Ruth Noack makes them look so heroic, almost like leaders. I did another series called Sparkling: Aspen, with a number of paintings, the images all come from my memory of the time when I had a solo show at the museum there, as recorded by my camera. Some of these images were more like illusions. When I think back on these images, each moment seems to shine, so I called them “sparkling.” I chose these images because they were floating in my head.

JS: But these were found images, or reproduced images? Were they existing images?

YL: Some I shot myself. For example, the images of my solo show at the Aspen Art Museum: when I went to Aspen, I looked at some archival images, like pictures of Andy Warhol there. That image left a deep impression, since his bearing and form seemed so full of the artist’s isolation.

……

JS: The way you are staging people is a bit like the way Warhol would stage people in the factory. Or reproducing covers of magazines like Warhol would reproduce Campbell’s Soup or something else. So there is this proximity.

YL: How do I put it … I still think my work is a bit different from painting Coca-Cola or Campbell’s Soup, because the things I choose have this extremely direct connection to my life, and not necessarily to mass culture.

JS: You have to understand that when Warhol did the soup cans, it was because they were in his house, and he did not know what to paint, and he was not rich, so he took the most popular item in front of his nose. It was an object very close to him. And, he was a graphic designer, working for magazines, just like you!

YL: But in terms of artistic style, I have not consciously tried to pursue a relationship with his work.

JS: I know, but I will do it.

YL: But I feel that I am actually most interested in Warhol’s understanding and interpretation of desire, and not necessarily in his artistic style.

*This interview was published in China Talks, book published by Timezone8 in 2009.