The display of acrobatic chair stacking portrayed in Li Yousong’s Acrobatics resides within a stable “picture within a picture” composition created by the four carved relief marble walls surrounding the image. This stage like composition created by the walling also serves to frame the subjects in the image, dividing the internal from the external. Acrobatics played an important role in the “acrobat diplomacy” of Sino-US relations during the Nixon era. Li Yousong’s father was the conductor of the Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe and the childhood memories of the visual wonders of the performing arts and Western architecture served as highly formative aspects of the young man’s initial vision. The influence of these memories can be seen in his series Chinese Acrobats in Manhattan.

In the case of Acrobats, completed in 2013, we can see how Li Yousong uses the subjects relating to the Cultural Revolution, in order to create a contemporary stage within his mind. In the face of academic painting, Li is uninterested in deconstructing classical standards; his is an alternative response to the cultural structures of modern industrial society. Born in the 1960s, the Cultural Revolution served as a backdrop to Li’s early years and as a child he watched the revolution with a certain sense of detachment, as if watching a staged performance. His creative works depicting this period take on a kind of depoliticised aesthetic. In his catalogue Imagining the Past, Li writes that: “Looking back on it all, everything that happened during the Cultural Revolution seems to have been a kind of aesthetic proposition of transcendent significance. In hindsight it seems to have been a Revolution filled with an eternal romanticism. I find this to be a source of creative inspiration and a realm I can rearrange into my own personal game.”

(Edited by Lijie Wang & Miao Zijin)