Shadow of Knives - Hunting
Li Hongbo
李洪波
Production date
2014
Object Detail
Media
stainless steel, metallic paint
Measurements
35 x 9.8 x 1.7 cm
Notes
In the Shadow of Knives series (2014), Li Hongbo again takes an everyday object as his starting point. He carves the forms of people and animals from the razor-sharp blades of the knives found in every Chinese kitchen, in many instances leaving these forms connected by thin strips of metal to the blade to create a three-dimensional form. Playing with negative and positive, the artist creates delicate installations with an underlying dark humour. Cutting animal images from blades used to chop meat, Li Hongbo asks us to question the role of mankind in the natural world. Shadow of Knives: You Reap What You Sow (2014) consists of six enormously over-scaled knives hanging on the wall: terrifying cleavers for giants. Cut from their blades is a menagerie of creatures, great and small — scorpions and dragonflies, crayfish, ducks, geese, a flamingo, a lion, a rhinoceros, a giraffe and an elephant now exist as absences, their silhouettes excised from the metal blade. A human figure is suspended upside down as if descending into the underworld. On the floor below the knives is a cage, but the cut out metal animals are outside this zoo. Inside, instead, behind bars, is the man. We think of the cruelties enacted upon animals, the needless hunting, the scientific experiments, the horrors of industrial scale farming; all the ethical and environmental dilemmas that we now face are here represented in sharp relief. Never merely polemical, Li Hongbo suggests that the metal ‘shadow’ animals symbolise the way we conveniently ignore our consciences in our relationships with animals.
This is amplified in smaller works, such as Shadow of Knives: Hunting (2014), where a delicate, spindly tree and the ominous figure of a man aiming a rifle have been cut from the blade of a cleaver. Shadow of Knives: Hawk and Shadow of Knives: Cheetah (both 2014) evoke the intricate paper-cuts of Chinese folk tradition. Shadow of Knives: Desire (2014), depicting a line of tiny running men cut from the blade and dashing towards an unknown destination, and Shadow of Knives: Wasteland (2014), with a human skeleton looming over a stunted tree, make the artist’s despair at the excesses of the contemporary world abundantly clear.
Li Hongbo uses metal and paper with a masterful understanding of how traditional forms can be applied to the visual syntax of contemporary art; he knows that multiple meanings are embedded in materiality. However, he is also thoroughly immersed in the everyday world of rural people working with simple materials to create beautiful objects. Li Hongbo’s work honours these traditions, whilst bringing them into the sphere of contemporary art practice.
This is amplified in smaller works, such as Shadow of Knives: Hunting (2014), where a delicate, spindly tree and the ominous figure of a man aiming a rifle have been cut from the blade of a cleaver. Shadow of Knives: Hawk and Shadow of Knives: Cheetah (both 2014) evoke the intricate paper-cuts of Chinese folk tradition. Shadow of Knives: Desire (2014), depicting a line of tiny running men cut from the blade and dashing towards an unknown destination, and Shadow of Knives: Wasteland (2014), with a human skeleton looming over a stunted tree, make the artist’s despair at the excesses of the contemporary world abundantly clear.
Li Hongbo uses metal and paper with a masterful understanding of how traditional forms can be applied to the visual syntax of contemporary art; he knows that multiple meanings are embedded in materiality. However, he is also thoroughly immersed in the everyday world of rural people working with simple materials to create beautiful objects. Li Hongbo’s work honours these traditions, whilst bringing them into the sphere of contemporary art practice.
Accession number
2015.669