In my work, every step forward is unpredictable, but the one thing that has never left my mind is the troubles and anxieties about being an artist.

Yan Lei’s practice has gone through so many transitions that it often strikes me as puzzling. Yet in the statement above, we can see a core issue that runs throughout Yan’s art: “the troubles and anxieties about being an artist.” So what are these troubles and anxieties?
Yan Lei was born in Northern China. He studied at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou and graduated from the Printmaking Department in 1991. Printmaking’s step-by-step system and reproducibility may have had an underlying influence, as these elements reappear in his more recent works. In the early 1990s, Yan Lei, who had recently graduated, moved to Beijing and worked as a designer for newspapers including Drama & Film News and Beijing Youth Daily. One can only imagine how the early 1990s were full of anxiety and trouble; not only for a young artist, but also for the entire cultural community and social-psychological environment. As social values got twisted and economic structures reorganized, the country was full of new opportunities as well as new dilemmas. The conservative cultural policy since 1989 still dominated; the avant-garde had declared its failure, while Political Pop and Cynical Realism became the mainstream styles of contemporary art. It was in the mid-1990s that Yan Lei’s practice first got attention — at this time, the unease in society caused by ideological shifts was starting to dissipate. A steady improvement of economic conditions and material life brought a new optimism to society.
Although there was less anxiety, what an artist could and should do was still full of uncertainty. In terms of the history of Chinese contemporary art, the most important development during this period was that Chinese artists were beginning to participate in the global art scene. While they remained marginal in China, they were frequently invited to exhibitions abroad. As a result, artists from China could only use overseas exhibitions as a platform for communication and exposure of their works, leading to a kind of alienation between the living environment that fostered their artistic creation and the exhibition environment where exchange and discussion about their art works took place (the dark tunnel in Yan Lei’s International Passageway [1999] represents such an ”in-between zone”). Artists were also starting to realize that the opportunities of their careers were in fact in the hands of predominantly Western institutions and curators and that their destinies had a lot to do with chance and marketing strategies. Ironically, getting invitations to exhibitions abroad and gaining popularity among curators had become the most urgent issue, while the ‘real’ question of artistic language and method was somehow becoming secondary.
Sensitive to the growing opportunism among Chinese artists, Yan Lei was one of the first artists who actively dealt with this issue in his art. His paintings Are You in the Exhibition that’s Going to Germany? (1996) and May I See Your Work? (1997) are recognized as works that historically represent this period. In Curators (2000), Yan Lei openly turned a group photo, taken while some foreign curators were visiting China, into a painting and claimed that it was a piece of art. By revealing the behind-the-scenes situation, Yan Lei was inventing a bizarre “meta-artwork” that sought to demonstrate what was at stake for artists at the time: the anxiety of getting opportunities and recognition from the international authorities of contemporary art.
During the latter half of the 1990s, the situation for Chinese artists was about to go through more big changes. Such changes are epitomized in one of the most amusing stories about Yan Lei: In 1997, together with Hong Hao and with the help of Hans van Dijk, Yan Lei created fake invitation letters to participate in Documenta and sent them to many artists all around China. One can only imagine the chaos it caused; then rather ironically, about 10 years later, Yan Lei did receive real invitation letters to Documenta (2007 & 2012). For an artist living in China and struggling in the most marginal space of society, quickly becoming a frequent participant of the most renowned international exhibitions is what quite a few of Yan Lei’s contemporaries also experienced. To cope with such success – coming so suddenly – became one of their biggest challenges. As newcomers to the globalized institutional environment, they found that to get recognition and to be “professional” meant that they had to face a lot of expectations and demands, to be categorized, and function in different discursive, curatorial and collecting systems. They had to fill spaces and walls constantly, answer questions, and be articulate. Could these artists, who had been used to working in an underprivileged sector of society and fighting against hegemony, now resist all this love and attention? Would their work not be turned into stereotypical production and be put into a mechanical, supply-and-demand relation?
During this time, in the late 1990s, Yan Lei somewhat unexpectedly turned to painting, a medium that he had always despised, now seeing it as a tool to express his attitudes in art. Yet he drew a clear line: he would never actually do the paintings himself. “In 1998 I discovered that there were some painting villages near Shenzhen, so I started to use their labor to make works. They very explicitly called their work labor. So from then on, I started thinking about making art by not painting” The artist plainly spells out his viewpoint here: paintings are the products of labor but not of art, but this doesn’t stop them from being camouflaged in a traditional form, to be displayed in exhibitions and be purchased. Such an obviously erroneous logic somehow continued to function in reality. Since then, he has carried out several “painting projects” that all aim at investigating “making art by not painting”. The attitude of these projects lies somewhere between provocative indifference and sarcastic criticism.
When talking about a series of paintings of catalogue covers, he once again clarified his point of view: “…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 [exhibition openings], 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 [itself] to this act. Painting the catalogues is another level of parasitism.”
Yan Lei’s strategy here is in principle the same as his fake Documenta invitations — his insinuations are a dialectic of negation; what he represents in art is the power structure of art institutions, an artist’s anxiety to become successful, and art as a fetishism of luxury goods. These are all things that make an artist become cut off from art. In his Sparkling series (since 2006), he makes use of the logic of classic Pop Art. The subjects of the paintings include celebrities and advertisements, and each of them has a caroonish aura. Interestingly, this ambiguous aura may remind us of the words of Andy Warhol: “Some company recently was interested in buying my “aura.” They didn’t want my product. They kept saying, “We want your aura.” I never figured out what they wanted.” This is a typical Warholian joke – Warhol had of course figured it out; so did Yan Lei. In his Sparkling series, he therefore practically ‘aurarized’ images from his own memories and turned ‘aura’, the concept invented by Walter Benjamin to defend the authentic nature of art, into something completely superficial and impersonal. His Super Light series meanwhile (since 2006) directly copied other artists’ works and covered them with dark colors. Yan Lei claimed that they were a kind of filtered art, a kind of substitute. Like a sweetener or methadone, they provided you with a lightened enjoyment and would help to control your addiction to something harmful. His Color Wheel series (since 2006) was described by the artist as a project “looking to adopt a tone of optimism”. The project imagines a production method that is completely automatic, impersonal and does not require any spiritual input. The artist has configured a mechanical method that creates a huge amount of random combinations of colors that can be completed by workers. These paintings are psychedelically pleasing to the eye but have absolutely no meaning—they perfectly represent a sheer illusion.
Limited Art Project, his latest “painting project”, is still evolving. It was first made for Documenta 13 (2012). The artist hired painters to paint 360 images of entirely different subject matters and visual styles. The resulting paintings were exhibited at Documenta 13. During the exhibition period, one painting was taken away each day and sent to a local car manufacturer to be sprayed with a single color normally used on cars. The monochrome paintings were then sent back to the exhibition room and they gradually made up a larger proportion of the paintings in the room. On the back of these canvases sentences remained that described what the paintings originally were. After Documenta 13, the project travelled to the Rockbund Museum in Shanghai. This time, Yan Lei sent the remaining descriptions to painters and asked them to recreate the pictures freely according to their imaginations. Limited Art Project became like a game of interchanging visual images and linguistic descriptions. As always, Yan Lei’s goal was to demystify painting: their contents were indiscriminate; their styles tasteless; their production kept away from the artist. Their very existence was like a digital image: virtual, cheap and temporary, not meant to be remembered, and living a short life.
From a criticism of art’s realities and problematics to unrelenting sarcasm about the fetishism of artworks, Yan Lei has developed a practice of using his own artistic creations to deal with issues. This also helps to explain his somewhat puzzling transitions in art—his methods change as situations and issues change. Yet, behind all these issues, there should be one fundamental problem that always motivates the work of an artist, and such a problem can be articulated in many ways. Let’s tentatively call this how an artist defines the value of art.
The difficulty of finding Yan Lei’s answer to this question is due to the fact that he often uses negation in his art; he is dedicated to representing things that are not art. In order to protect what he truly pursues in art, he always has to conceal such pursuits. With Yan Lei’s latest exhibition at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing (2015), curator Hou Hanru proposed a new keyword to understand the artist’s practice: “Kong Xiang” (空想), or “to think without substance”. The terms came from an anecdote: to deal with his taxes, Yan Lei needed to set up a company. He wanted to name this company, which actually had no monetary value, Kong Xiang, but the name wasn’t accepted as it was simply absurd to set up a company that deliberately aimed to have no profit or productivity. But this was what it was, as the company would only serve to settle the financial matters created by Yan Lei’s artistic work — his Kong Xiang business.
As a compromise, he used the term “reverie”, an English and French word corresponding to Kong Xiang, and transliterated it back to Chinese as “Liwuli” (利悟利), which sounds like a usury company and thus was much more reasonable as a company name in the eyes of the Department of Commerce. Using Yan Lei’s company as a metaphor, Hou highlights the disguises in Yan’s work and tries to point out these Kong Xiang hidden behind the superficial forms of his work. The question that Hou jokingly asks about the artist is: “How to become an artist that doesn’t make a work of art?
Yan Lei did talk very clearly about his pursuit of art: “I think that the highest form of art cannot be represented by objects. It exists outside of language.” As we can tell from his existent works, he firmly believes that an object of art will never escape from the misfortune of being commoditized or institutionalized. And as he talks about “the highest form of art”, it is also clear that while he constantly negotiates with the contemptible phenomenon in reality, he has not given up pursuing purity, despite the fact that it may only exist in reverie. In Chinese, the term Kong Xiang was first used as the translation of Utopian Socialism. It is therefore related to the concept of utopia, meaning that it is not some random idea, but a model of the highest ideals—even though it may not enjoy the right conditions to be actually realized. However, with the artist’s wisdom, even utopia can temporarily come true: leaving your heart forever in a place you visited (Nice Project, 2004); keeping a piece of land unused in the center of a commercial city (Fifth System, 2003-2005); bringing a Beijing punk band to perform in Istanbul (A Present from Beijing, 2007). I think these less eye-catching works in Yan Lei’s practice are closer to what he describes as “the highest form of art”.
Yan Lei speaks with few words, yet he is always precise. He has told me a few times that he’s wanted to stop making art. I understand what he means, as to carry on an art career within the existing environment, it is simply not possible to break away from the control of institutions and capital. And according to his usual logic, what he means by ‘stop making art’ may also be: in order to continue making art, one must first stop making art. Art must be changed into something else to regain its vitality. Today, there are quite a few artists who are coming to this conclusion. What is troubling them is the question: what to do next? Artists are doing everything they can to get away from art, so as to find an exit from the besiegement of institution and capital. Isn’t this the most essential thing among all the issues of contemporary art? From Duchamp, Klein, and the dematerialization movement in the 1960s, to relational aesthetics and new forms of performance art over the last two decades, such a thought process about the fundamental nature of artistic products and productions has achieved profound results that inspire us to better understand cultures and societies.
Today, the thought process may be continued as a critical reflection of physical labor versus intellectual labor and the socio-economic organization of production since capitalist modernity. In this regard, the perspective of artist Anton Vidokle is highly inspiring: “I feel that the ethos behind much of this has to do with the communist dream of non-alienated work. When Marx writes about the end of division of labor and narrow professionalization, he describes a society where identity and social roles are extremely fluid: one day you can be a street cleaner, the next day an engineer, a cook, an artist, or a mayor. In this scenario, alienation disappears and art becomes indistinguishable from everyday life: it dissolves in life. Historically there is a clear trajectory of this desire for the dissolution of art, which is visible in artistic practices from early modernism to the present day.” Therefore, when Yan Lei said: “Why can’t ‘Art’ be substituted by ‘What do I like to do’?” , what he wanted to say was to redefine an artist’s work as a kind of pleasurable and non-occupational action in a resistant manner. “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.” If we say the value of art is created in its mutual action with life, and life is the source of art’s vitality, then equally the problems of life should always be the problems of art, and vice versa. The prerequisite of an artist’s work is to recognize what the current problems are and turn all these problems into his life. It means that an artist, especially an artist of Kong Xiang, will always have to struggle with trouble and anxiety.