参展艺术家：李继开
策 展 人：黄笃
主办单位：上海美术馆
承办单位：南画廊
展览地点：上海美术馆二楼第四展厅
展览时间：2007年7月11日－7月20日
预展时间：2007年7月11日
开幕暨画册首发式：2007年7月14日下午3点

李继开所代表的新艺术吻合了21世纪中国当代艺术的大趋势，从微观角度来反视个人的经验和价值，即以个性化的艺术语言对个人的记忆、境遇进行描述，并赋予作品很多的寓言性色彩。他的绘画完全融合了具像性绘画和平面装饰、表现笔触和抽象化的语言，并在这二者之间找到了平衡点。他相对于“星星画会”和“政治波谱”及“玩世现实主义”艺术而言是断代式和跳跃式发展的，跨越了所谓的卡通绘画和“青春残酷”绘画，不再关注以往艺术与社会及政治相关的话题，而是转向挖掘自我心灵的潜意识活动。因为他所处时代政治意识的宏大叙事逐渐淡出，集体无意识的时代也随之终结，而取而代之影响他内心深处的另一极则是家庭意识形态的过多关心和呵护以及电子时代的视觉图像和文化信息。他开始反思真正的自我是什么。他的绘画既没有现代主义对绝对真理的探讨，又没有后现代主义玩世不恭的态度，而是解析自我存在的意义，内心与外部构成的不确定性冲突。作为一部自传性的创作，李继开以他的日常经验、现实和有处可去的想象在中国当代艺术世界中打开了自己的话语空间，找到了自己的心灵住址。而他所呈现的是内心幻像，他不是赤裸地展示现实，而是关注基本的现实，或者说更为对应于永久性的现实命题：一个生命本身的痛苦与幸福，并充满激情地将此时此地的现实转化为家园，这就是他的魅力所在。在某种意义上，李继开的艺术奠定了70后“自我一代”的美学基调，超越了70后绘画早期对于青春表象的摄影性和心理主义表现，从而真正意义深入到自我分析的领域。而他的绘画最终完成了两个方面，一是为70后一代的自我征候在图像上设置了一个最低限的意义状态，二是为这种自我状况找到了图像和自我特征对应的自我形式。最低限意义主要表现为70后一代特有的一种“微痛苦”。表达的主要是这一代一种类似“粘稠”特征的自我感受，和一种自我假想和虚拟高处的一代人的自我处境，描绘了70后一代的内在精神历程，表现了这一代人的一种自我本质的内在状态和物质社会的新生代形象，他塑造的这种新的形象的自我特征初步勾勒无疑具有开拓性的里程碑意义。

Li Jikai’s art inosculates with the major trend of the 21st century in the contemporary Chinese art, and introspect personal experience and value system from micro-perspective, which is, describe personal memory and circumstances with highly individualized artistic language.His painting combines objective painting and two dimensional decorative characteristics emphasis expressive brushstrokes and abstract language, and keep a very good balance between these two.To compare to Star Group or Political Pop or Cynical Realism, the growth of The Ego Generation is fragmental in a leaping pace. They have bypassed Cartoon Generation and Cruelty Painting, they no longer pays much attention to the topic about the relationship between art and society or art and politics, but rather prefers to discover the sub-consciousness. This is all due to the declining of grandiose narration in the current social political context, which marks the termination of a time of collective unconsciousness, replaced by warm concern from the perspective of a family, its tenderness, and the cultural information and the visual images in a digital era. Li Jikai began to introspect the real me. Through his painting, he doesn’t try to pursue the absolute truth of Modernism, nor a cynical attitude of post-Modernism, but rather analyzing the meaning of the being of himself, an uncertain conflict between his heart and the outside world.Just like an autobiography, Li Jikai opens his own dialogue space in the world of Chinese Contemporary art through his daily experience, reality and destined imagination, finding his soul dwelling, while what he presents is the inner illusion. Rather than showing the reality nakedly, he prefers to focus on basic reality, or in another word, on the more permanent realistic topic: what Li’s glamour lies in the misery and happiness in one’s life and to turn the reality right now passionately into the homeland. In a certain meaning, Li Jikai’s arts lay an aesthetic foundation for the “self-generation” in Post 70s Li Jikai’s painting goes beyond the photographic and psychological expressionistic approach for the façade of the youth, and then gets to a level of exhaustive self-investigation. Through his painting, Li Jikai successfully accomplished these two tasks: at one level, he sets up a bottom-line for the state of minimized ‘meaning’; at the second level, he finds his own personal forms that matches the images and his own characters for this status. The minimized sense of meaning mainly refers to the expression of mini-pain that is distinctive for the post-’70s group.what Li Jikai tries to convey is a kind sticky personal feeling of his generation. He reveals the condition of this generation who perceive themselves from high, a fictitious height solely in self-imagination Li Jikai’s art records the internal pilgrim of spirit of the post-’70s artists. He represents an inner status of the essence of one’s own of this entire generation and the image of new generation in the materialized society. There is no doubt that the self-symptoms of the new image he portrays is of very significance as a milestone in the art history.