By Li Li

The way Yan Lei’s voice echoed on the phone, one could imagine he was alone in a room, striving to explain what ‘reverie’ meant to him. Yet one could not imagine what his hand, holding a cigarette, might be pointing to…

Although he has taken “doing nothing” as his artistic form, now and then Yan Lei still has to communicate with galleries, museums, and the media for the sake of his art. For other artists who toil away all day in their studios, this person who only conducts his daily affairs via email and phone seems more like an agent than an artist. Isolation follows in the wake of this misunderstanding, as Yan Lei’s attitude toward art challenges many people’s ideas of existential values. At the same time, his stipulation that art be untainted is almost mysophobic, to the extent that he has even given up the power to select images for his works.

For Yan Lei, there was a crucial period of solitude from 1991, when he graduated from Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts (now known as the China Academy of Art), until 1997. This “artistic solitude,” as it is often called, also influenced his understanding of art. Having witnessed the ’85 New Wave Movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “Magiciens de la Terre” exhibition at the Pompidou Center, and other landmark events, Chinese contemporary art at the time began to exhibit a “systemic” awareness rooted in a sense of hegemony and cultural superiority, along with a nihilistic cultural elitism brought on by this superiority complex. For Chinese artists, a great degree of fantasy and longing surrounds symbols of Western cultural “power” such as Documenta and the Venice Biennale. In 1997 many Chinese artists received letters from a certain Ielnay Oahgnoh, who invited them to participate in Documenta. They did not realize that “Ielnay Oahgnoh” was just Yan Lei and Hong Hao, another artist, spelled backwards. The surprising silence after the fake letter incident forced Yan Lei into an artistic exile of sorts; however, it also spurred him to contemplate the politics of community.

We can also see that at the time Yan Lei was just like the artists who received his “Invitation Letter”–he too fantasized about Western cultural contexts. Soon after this, his cultural identity began to shift, moving from an ambivalence between fetishization of and skepticism toward the “holy lands” of art, to ridiculing artistic and cultural power as he began to address desire through his actions more directly.

From 1998 to 1999, Yan Lei, who had moved to Hong Kong by that time, filled an art center there with the iconic pink lights of the city’s red light district. The center had been built by the Hong Kong government on Shanghai Street, in a rough area. Due to its smart appearance, this deceptively ambiguous space attracted many working class people. For a while, it even caused congestion problems in the area, but very quickly people realized that the space was not “doing business.”

This derision of the cultural power of art spaces broke through Hong Kong’s stifling cultural atmosphere of the time. Its message of “art is dirty business” subtly satirized the huge amount of politics, interests, and commerce that were tacitly hiding behind art. For his Catalogue Cover Series in 2000, Yan Lei used his VIP credentials to obtain free catalogues. He then sold them, after which he painted their covers on canvas to sell them a second time. His actions have an air of dark, derisive humor, which is obscured by canvas after canvas of catalogue covers. This method of transforming and recycling “power” ultimately dispels the value of power.

For the painting International Luck, exhibited at the Shanghai Biennale in 2002, Yan Lei uses the black 8 ball, the final ball on a pool table, to proclaim that he too hears the call of the international art market. For the 2004 Shenzhen International Public Art Exhibition, Yan Lei appropriated the name of the exhibition, “The Fifth System,” to convince the local government to allow him to fence off a plot of prime real estate the size of a soccer field (he originally hoped for a golf course) and let it grow wild for two years. This “exchange” represented a chain of relationships related to land rights: the three-sided business transactions among government, developers, and landowners. The artwork, also entitled The Fifth System, embodies Yan Lei’s various institutional explorations, both artistic and political.

In 2006, in a revised version of the Ward in the Hospital in Arles by Van Gogh, Yan and his art partner Hong Hao “hid” themselves in the painting. The original insurance contract accompanying the painting stated that if they suffered from mental or physical illness due to their artistic activities within a year starting from the date of the signing of the contract, the two artists would receive the full settlement from Taikang Life Insurance. In this piece, titled Taikang Project, Yan Lei and Hong Hao claimed a massive insurance premium of seven million Renminbi to lay bare the “deficiencies” of China’s insurance mechanisms and the evasive actions these companies take, in one stroke completing his explorations of and engagement with this commercial system.

In his Color Wheel series, begun in 2002, Yan Lei employs seemingly true theories of color and pairs them with systems of artistic value. The work allows us to see a symbol of the market that is simple yet imposing.

Yan Lei first participated in Documenta 12 in 2007, and was the “dark horse” of the exhibition. At the time, many had yet to realize that the object of his searching was not merely the grand topic he seemed to address. Even as he interacts with “cultural power” and the “power of capital,” his starting point is always the self—from the Climbing Space series (begun in 1998) that symbolizes the transformation of identities, through the Super Light series (begun in 2004) that represents artistic “punctum” to the Sparkling series (begun in 2005) that is related to memory, Yan Lei does not merely respond to the commodity economy and operations of capital, he also faces his own desire.

However, the objects Yan Lei paints are not important; the images in Yan Lei’s artworks are non-expressive. Rather, they exist to represent a part of the artist’s experience. This kind of painting also uses the symbolic significance of acrylic materials as they relate to the commodity economy and industrial production. It responds to the fundamentally commercial character of painting.

However, Yan Lei is in no way surrendering to the commercial system. Quite the opposite, the “product” is the other side of his understanding of art. For the opening of his large-scale retrospective “Rêverie” at the Red Brick Art Museum on April 25th, 2015, Yan Lei not only used the name of his company for the title of the exhibition, he also set up a modern industrial assembly line of almost symphonic proportions within the exhibition space. However, this industrialization was not the form of his work. He believes that it is superfluous for the artist to participate personally in the production of his work. Thus, Yan Lei employs others to make his art, because his understanding of art exists out of sight.

In the artwork entitled Rêverie, Yan Lei swaps art for Volkswagen car parts that have been sprayed with a beautiful metallic paint. Artworks are hung up along a large overhead chain conveyer belt while industrial products occupy the walls of the museum. This action is the clearest expression of art being a commodity. By declining to paint, Yan Lei aims not to manufacture any products. More interestingly, when you walk past the oppressive “product wall” of color blocks that comprises Limited Art Project , you feel like you’re in a time warp, looking at a wall of blurred stained glass windows in a church, reaching upward towards the heavens. Finally, Yan Lei’s collaboration with sound artist Chen Hongli (Chen Dili) took the form of an on-site sound performance based on the sounds of an engine revving, taking the idea of a “symphony of commerce” to its logical extreme in a kind of auditory carnival. Yet after the performance, as people were heading towards the exit, they suddenly realized that behind those towering “product walls” there was nothing. When all the “acoustics” suddenly stop, white noise still echoes in your head…

Through these painting series that incorporate industrial production methods, we can clearly see a shift in Yan Lei’s practice, from his early direct confrontation with structures of power to a cynical engagement with despotism and centralized power. The “dormant” quality of this cynicism makes the exhibition “Rêverie” seem like a big joke. Through careful consideration, Yan Lei adopts a posture of affected naiveté, proclaiming that he does not do anything. This is the real meaning of the ‘reverie’ in the exhibition’s title. This reverie also constitutes an image–hanging up the phone, Yan Lei sits motionless in a barren room, without a single object around him for him to refer to.