Paper
Li Hongbo
李洪波
Production date
2010
Object Detail
Media
paper
Measurements
2 figures, dimensions variable
Notes
Li Hongbo intensively researched papermaking, woodcut printing and paper construction for more than a decade. The intimacy of handling paper resonated with childhood memories: growing up in Jilin Province in China’s far north-east, closer to North Korea and Russia than to Beijing, Li Hongbo, like many small children at that time made his own simple playthings from paper, taking pages out of school exercise books to construct toy planes, trucks and trains. Today, having mastered the art of cutting and gluing thousands of sheets of cheap brown paper in order to transform this material into intricately designed kinetic forms, Li Hongbo says that what he enjoys most, apart from the endless possibilities of the medium, is its accessibility. He believes that Chinese people have a special bond with paper due to cultural memory, and his commitment to the preservation of this connection lies at the heart of his work today.
Paper (2010) at first seems to consist of solidly sculpted figurative forms. Two life-sized naked men stand straight, hands held stiffly at their sides like Archaic Greek ‘kouros’ figures. This was one of the first fully realized sculptures Li Hongbo made using the ‘paper gourd’ technique. The first experimental figure took six months to complete; the second was finished in three months. Gourds were considered to have ritual, almost magical properties in Daoism: the shape of the fruit represents the sky and the earth, the infinite universe, and a portal through which the Immortals could travel. Their name in Chinese signifies good luck, health and prosperity, and in many parts of China people still make brightly coloured paper gourds to hang from the roofs of their houses during festivals. Many layers of paper are glued together to make expandable, net-like forms that can be cut into the required shapes. Li Hongbo uses this technique, in a far more ambitious and complex way, to create male and female figures and sculptural busts. Carpentry tools, an angle grinder, and sandpaper release the sculptural form from its block of thousands of glued sheets of paper.
Li Hongbo’s works take on entirely new forms when these apparently stable objects and figures are activated, stretched out like a concertina. Objects that seemed solid are magically unpredictable, capable of expansion and contraction, creating new relationships with the spaces they inhabit. The two figures that make up Paper literally stretch the bounds of normality. When compressed, the paper men look as if they are carved from wood or stone. Made of almost ten thousand layers of paper, they can be expanded and pulled into bizarre configurations, their elongated arms and legs twisting and tumbling across the gallery floor to occupy the entire room. The intact, compressed figure juxtaposed with a stretched, apparently boneless one, its long limbs writhing through the gallery, suggests that humanity’s potential is limitless.
Paper (2010) at first seems to consist of solidly sculpted figurative forms. Two life-sized naked men stand straight, hands held stiffly at their sides like Archaic Greek ‘kouros’ figures. This was one of the first fully realized sculptures Li Hongbo made using the ‘paper gourd’ technique. The first experimental figure took six months to complete; the second was finished in three months. Gourds were considered to have ritual, almost magical properties in Daoism: the shape of the fruit represents the sky and the earth, the infinite universe, and a portal through which the Immortals could travel. Their name in Chinese signifies good luck, health and prosperity, and in many parts of China people still make brightly coloured paper gourds to hang from the roofs of their houses during festivals. Many layers of paper are glued together to make expandable, net-like forms that can be cut into the required shapes. Li Hongbo uses this technique, in a far more ambitious and complex way, to create male and female figures and sculptural busts. Carpentry tools, an angle grinder, and sandpaper release the sculptural form from its block of thousands of glued sheets of paper.
Li Hongbo’s works take on entirely new forms when these apparently stable objects and figures are activated, stretched out like a concertina. Objects that seemed solid are magically unpredictable, capable of expansion and contraction, creating new relationships with the spaces they inhabit. The two figures that make up Paper literally stretch the bounds of normality. When compressed, the paper men look as if they are carved from wood or stone. Made of almost ten thousand layers of paper, they can be expanded and pulled into bizarre configurations, their elongated arms and legs twisting and tumbling across the gallery floor to occupy the entire room. The intact, compressed figure juxtaposed with a stretched, apparently boneless one, its long limbs writhing through the gallery, suggests that humanity’s potential is limitless.
Accession number
2010.027