When I met Li Feixue he was hobbling along on a homemade crutch fixed out of a 2x4 and some scrap wood. A cigarette dangled down to his goateed chin as he lulled out orders and answers to the beckoning bunch of foreign artists trying to make sense out a football field sized exhibition space with no real program in mind other than “a kinda big party”. In the car Zhang Hui and Yu Ji described Lei Feixue as an artist curator who lived in NY for 9 years with his rich Jewish wife and daughter until something happened and he was legally booted out of his family and adopted country with his tail between his legs. Now his leg is a little broken… a wall fell on it during this exhibition installation to end all exhibition installations in yet another new enclave of artist studios and super sized galleries on the eastern edges of Beijing. Located between Suojiacun and Feijiacun this old helmet factory is now at the hands of some developers who have the hootzpah and hindsight (albeit a little unoriginal by this point) to open another big bunch of commercial galleries. Anyway Li Feixue’s loosely assembled show of foreign and Chinese artists looked like a big beautiful mess (take in mind it was still two days before the show and some of the works were being made on the spot) ala art school grad shows or the like with Zhang Hui’s painting shining like a star on the wall- The new series, coming along painstakingly slow but worth every tortured moment … “but I’m starting to loose interest” he says so he’ll go do an installation to get the linseed oil smell off his fingers for a while and come back raging, I hope. Yu Ji’s two new photos of a pregnant woman poised in two landscapes with a sex doll strewn somewhere in the background is the first thing I’ve ever liked of this scraggly Sichuan artist and will include it in a show I will do at Scope Hamptons and at YOUNGBLOOD in Sag Harbor, NY at the end of the month.
Li Feixue, as it happened to be, originates from an island off the shores of Shanghai very close to Putuoshan. It’s a fishing village where he says you can buy a house for less than 6000USD’s. I pull all the info I can out of the man over the next few weeks. Telephoning whenever me and the lady are getting sick and tired of the absolutely horrendous Shanghai summer weather. Finally we go early one Sunday morning to a delightful surprise – actual breathable sea soaked air and a bodacious breeze… Not to mention Li Feixue’s little village all covered with murals... all kinds of murals from all kinds of artists from all over the world. We spot in the distance Zhou Tiehai’s camel guy! (later he says that he never went there but that the work is indeed his- I think Li painted it for his lazy Shanghai buddy) Apparently Li convinced the local town leader to apply for district grants to spruce up the place. They didn’t get all the moolah they asked for according to the town leader’s lovely Sunday painting wife but enough to convince a bunch of friends to hang out for a month and literally paint the town. It might seem like oh yea so what’s the big deal but this is China not Barcelona baby painting on people’s houses just doesn’t happen nor does any form of homemade gratuitous public decoration or even graffiti for that matter. Hat’s off to Li Feixue!
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