Bai Yiluo could be anyone. Narrow-rimmed specs flank a studious gaze; the barest hint of stubble flecks his chin. He could walk past you and you wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. But his art has always had the uncanny ability to grab the limelight, whether it be a Han-inspired burial suit, plastered with thousands of Chinese ID photos, or a sculpture of a giant, anatomically correct heart strapped to the cart of an old bicycle. He knows how to play a gallery.
Born in 1968, Bai is the self-taught photographer who found his calling working in a basement darkroom alongside Ai Weiwei. In the past decade, the former factory worker from Luoyang, Henan province, has exhibited as far afield as London’s V&A and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He tackles life and death, the great and the small with a single levelling gaze, but as he prepares to bring his new two-part show, Song of the System, to Pékin Fine Arts, the artist appears to be wrestling with his place in the world.
At the time of our interview, Bai is still completing work on his new show. The first part, ‘Illumination’, has taken two years to create and comprises a collection of night scenes playing on the theme of light. But it is the other, a series of paintings named ‘Song of the System’, from which the exhibition takes its title, that raises a quizzical brow. Bai has been labouring on it for six months, he says, patiently working with felt pen and acrylic, patterning concentric circles with fine lines and shapes to give the blessed illusion of texture. They resemble eyes, I comment, vast glaring pupils peering out from enormous grey irises. But the artist is clearly unconvinced.
‘Many have said this, but when I was creating these works, I didn’t want to make this point. My works are round because there were some extra circular frames in my studio. If there had been some rectangular frames left then my works would be rectangular. It’s pure coincidence.’
The rigid lines and patterns were made using a modified lazy Susan and plexiglass guides while Bai dangled over the image from a makeshift platform. But what stands out is that they are devoid of the artist’s usual mixed-media tics – no photos, no sculpture, no obvious social context. There’s not a dollar bill, skull or sarcophagus in sight. The idea came from a previous piece, an engraved chair called ‘Chieftan’ (2009), but any link with his past collections isn’t obvious.
‘My works are all linked to my life,’ Bai reaffirms. True enough, his obsession with ID collages came from when he worked in a print shop, processing passport pictures. A vast montage of them formed his first exhibited work, ‘People No 1’ (2001), and the basis for many others. Similarly, the idea for an early piece, ‘Flies’ (2003), a mass of tiny insects exposed directly onto photographic paper, came from another odd job experience. ‘At the time, I was working around pastureland,’ he recalls. ‘There was a lot of open-air waste and every day, I had to kill so many flies that doing so became a part of my life.’
In both these past works, detail blurs into abstract pattern when viewed from a distance. Similarly, in ‘Song of the System’, your eye is lost in the image, only for detail to shape itself into rough form as you draw your gaze away. Up close, you have the illusion of order in the lines and shading – but pull back and you’re subject to the whim of imagination and an artist with a dearth of rectangular frames. Isn’t everything just a series of patterns, it seems to say; and if so, what are these but evidence of a system at work?
If anyone knows systems, it’s Bai Yiluo. He first took up photography as a means to escape working in a factory. ‘I thought that being an artist would bring me the most freedom,’ he says. Since then, he has resisted all attempts to categorise him as a photographer. ‘There shouldn’t be any restrictions; an artist should break boundaries and explore. That is what I pursue,’ Bai repeats. And yet, I’m slightly troubled by the world he portrays in his ‘Song of the System’ series – it isn’t the rebellious one I expected.
‘We all live in different systems,’ argues Bai. ‘They are something that every one of us has to face each day. However, systems are very complicated, unexplainable; just like abstract art, they have no particularly explicit content.’
This isn’t a political statement. It’s no coincidence that Bai pairs ‘Song of the System’ with its sister series ‘Illumination’; the contrast of his night scenes with the intricate details of their counterpart is typical of an artist who revels in the no man’s land between the micro- and macrocosm. Universal chaos rules, the only reassurance is the system, Bai appears to be saying. It’s a sobering thought from the man who refused to stay where the world put him.
Time: Until April 16
Address: Pekin Fine Arts No.241 Caochangdi, Chaoyang district
朝阳区崔各庄乡草场地村241号
