Drifting Ice - Li Jinguo Solo Exhibition 

Designer bags have been placed on the altar by the city’s youth, especially young women. Under the propaganda of the mass media, “bao (bag) cures all kinds of diseases” and “everything can be solved by buying a bao” have become their doctrines. This craze for bao signals that contemporary consumerism allows commodities to encroach upon our daily social life, so much so that everyone’s desires become indistinguishable.

Li, after the last series Ink, continued working with the traits of resin and pigment in the Bao Bao series: scarlet dye permeates in the translucent crystal resin, freezing all the memories about time at the moment of solidification. The flow of the paint, temperature, and even his mood at the moment when the pigment was put in are all connected with his life status, suggested Li. Each work is an unrepeatable attempt. Moreover, Li Jinguo added mixed media 2D works into the series this time, which further flattened the simplified resin bags, making them even more difficult to distinguish from one another. This kind of commodity thus became a spectacle, and subsequently a portrait of a consumerist society.

Every handbag is a product of mass production, and it is a cultural phenomenon that everyone’s desire tends to homogenize in the big city. Yet Li has frozen the flowing time with resin, making every bao in Drifting Ice a personalized experience. What Drifting Ice tries to bring to art lovers is a tension between being subservient to material desires and being unique in holding firm to individuality.

- Christine Gu