Reviewed by Tessa Wright
Dinu Li’s ‘A Phantom’s Vibe’ is a journey through the everchanging concept of cultural identity. Through a series of sculptural, installation and film artwork, he demands viewers involvement in his physical manifestation of an artistic ethnic mosaic. Dinu Li who was born in Hong Kong and immigrated to the UK at seven years old is an interdisciplinary artist. Li takes the everyday and includes it in artworks that branch years of history and experience together in this magnificent exhibition hosted by the East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) contemporary art space.
This exhibition ‘A Phantom’s Vibe’ gives one insight into both Li’s life experience and the historical event of Chinese indentured labourers moving to Jamaica in the latter half of the 19th century to replace those freed after the emancipation of slaves. Marking the entrance to the exhibition is a doorway with three rubber see-through panels of green, yellow, and red, the colours of the Rastafarian flag. This is the first of many subtle hints throughout the exhibition that nods to its core focus on the cultural exchange between Jamaica and Chinese people.
The first object to one’s immediate left when entering the exhibition is the sculpture A Phantom’s Vibe, (Fig 1). The paper sleeve of the album ‘Flower Drum and other Chinese Folk Songs’ at the center. This effectively instructs the viewer of how fundamental the song ‘Always together’ is in the exhibition. Li first came across the song on the backstreets of Hong Kong as a young boy and rediscovered it when moving to Hulme in Manchester at blue parties. Having originally mistaken it as a Chinese Folksong, Li heard it again and discovered it to be a reggae classic sang by the Chinese singer Stephen Cheng. This mix of genres was due to the song being recorded in studios in Jamaica owned by descendants of the Chinese labourers who had moved there. The title of the artwork which is also the title of the exhibition is metaphorical as like a phantom, the song reappeared in Li’s life.
‘Always Together’ along with an amalgamation of mountain folk music and Li’s own dub track music ‘Skanking Hawker’, sets the stage for the exhibition. Eight artworks, six made for the exhibition two former creations, are littered across the room encouraging the viewer to move around and see the installation works in tutto tondo while the different soundscapes and soundwaves circulate.
The sculpture placed parallel to the entrance is Skanking Hawker (Fig 2) which holds twelve speakers placed on three rounding tiers. All the speakers are missing their surrounding elements, stripped back to their bare parts. Li collected the speakers from scrapped cars, representing how Li transforms everyday objects into cultural elements by including them in artworks. This links to Li’s focus on Stuart Halls theory of being and becoming applied to music. In this exhibition there is no full stop to what will become of the music playing through the stripped back speakers as the soundwaves revibrate through the room without a stopping point. The music continues through the air conditioning vents onto the street to spread cultural ideas into everyday life as Li does with his work.
The sculptures vary from self-standing to hung on the walls, although dotted around the room there is a hazy distinction in the boundaries of where each artwork begins and ends. Correlating metaphorically with Li’s discussion of blurred cultural boundaries. This unclear separation is due partly to effective use of space. For example, the materials that frame the showing of Nation Family provide the backdrop to pieces such as Herb Vendor. Each artwork blends easily into another creating a cohesive exhibition. The arrangement and framing of the exhibition is informed by markets Li grew up going to owing the loud music to performers on Temple Street who Li watched. The sculptural pieces are comprised of objects including dusters, pom poms, fake pearls, Union Jack coloured tarpaulins, hair extensions, horns, and other things. There are share motifs in the sculptures of hair and rope referencing the Moai people and rope featured in Li’s archived pictures of immigrating Chinese labourers.
The room is filled with delicate and dim red lights spotlighting the works, with yellow or green light creating focus on certain areas of artworks. The dominance of red light in the exhibition is a nod to the 1984 movie ‘Yellow Earth’ and the important red motif in the film. The film is a key element in Li’s exhibition because the plot is about a communist mission to travel to remote areas of China to find folksongs, to rewrite them and use them to galvanise the rural communities. Li in a sense put himself into the film, journeying into remote areas of the Chinese mountains to visit the Suojia Miao people. With the Miao peoples’ traditional hairstyles influencing the prevalence of hair in Li’s sculptures. The hair in the sculpture not only alludes to the culture importance of hair in many communities but is also a reminder that like one’s hair, cultural practices can also be so deeply personal to those who identify with them. The hair’s inclusion therefore centres human experience in the ideas the sculptures discuss.
Photographs of the Miao communities’ members can be seen in the artwork Tinker’s Spell, (Fig 3) two photographic prints, one of members in traditional dress with their rare hairstyles on a foggy mountain during a funeral. And another photo of members on roller-skates dancing to Earth, Wind and Fire, a black disco group, further blending of music and therefore culture. Both photos are framed with reflective gold decorative paper reminiscent of gilded frames in galleries. This decoration gives one the sense that these photos that allow for a vulnerable look into a culture’s moments of mourning and play should be comparable to what the art history cannon regards as paintings by ‘old masters’. The photographic prints are not next to one another but are rather one is on the wall and the other is at a ninety-degree angle positioned much lower. This positioning creates intriguing variation in the space using different spatial levels and further accomplishes this sense of movement echoed across the exhibition. Movement is felt and seen in the haptic elements used, such as the flowing hair and textured fibres of the dusters ruffled by the air conditioning. The film-based artwork ‘Nation Family’, projected onto a draped sheet, deforms the straight lines making them flow into organic shapes matching the curving atmosphere of the room. An atmosphere accentuated by the music and the repetitive use of circular shapes seen in Skanking Hawker tiers and speakers.
Information is provided in the exhibition on a brochure which titles the artworks and shows where each work is positioned. It gives some background on the artist and discusses the most important themes and how they are expressed. Mentioning Li’s experience with song ‘Always together’ and the historical implications of a Chinese people established in Jamaica. One might consider whether it would be clearer to have wall texts next to each artwork with their titles and a bit of information on each piece. Although this way of organising might correlate best with how most gallery goers are used to seeing artworks, this is partly why it would be the incorrect approach for Li’s exhibition. The exhibition is an enveloping experience, one which draws you into a world with music and organic sounds reverberating throughout the space. The artworks themselves are essentially linked so shouldn’t be clearly demarcated by wall texts. How each artwork shares attributes with one another and their different aspects is what makes the exhibition so thought-provoking and thus successful. The space feels separate from clear instruction due to the lack of visible text and the sharp difference in lighting, while outside has a lot of natural light in the foyer inside the exhibition is dark and mostly red. This encourages engagement instead of standing back cautiously and reading descriptions. Due to the lighting, it would also be impractical to have wall text as minimal light does not allow for clear reading.
The brochure is one of many examples of the incredibly impressive curation and design in this exhibition. There are many overlapping, coalescing ideas brought forward by the objects included in installations like the speakers in Skanking Hawker or the gold decoration used in Tinkers spell photos, furthering so many of the ideas communicated in the exhibition.
Overall, an exhibition which at first struck me as a colourful yet half-empty nightclub revealed itself to be a complex and layered journey into philosophical ideas of identity and culture based on Li’s experience. Yet due to the effective and careful curating of the exhibition and sculptures, individuals can engage with aspects of Chinese and Jamaican culture and how the cultures historical interactions have manifested in music. Fundamentally, Dinu Li’s ‘A Phantoms vibe’ is a love letter to the everchanging nature of culture and music and how this can follow one throughout their life reappearing when least expected like a phantom.
Bibliography
Thulaja, N.R. (no date) Chinese coolies. Available at: https://www.nlb.gov.sg/main/article-detail?cmsuuid=1934198c-b5bf-4980-abc7-0aeb29ed39c9#:~:text=Chinese%20coolies%2C%20who%20were%20engaged,instead%20served%20as%20indentured%20labourers. (Accessed: 29 October 2023).
Dinu Li: A Phantom’s vibe (no date) esea contemporary. Available at: https://www.eseacontemporary.org/exhibition/dinu-li-a-phantoms-vibe (Accessed: 28 October 2023).
Publication Launch ‘Dinu Li: A Phantoms Vibe’ (2023). YouTube. 19 October. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-Jw9q-ajLQ (Accessed: 27 October 2023).
Sim , D. (17AD) ‘Preserving a dying tradition: China’s Long Horn Miao headdresses made of ancestors’ hair’, International Business Times, 13 February. Available at: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/preserving-dying-tradition-chinas-long-horn-miao-headdresses-made-ancestors-hair-1606364 (Accessed: 28 October 2023).
Yellow Earth (2022). 1 October. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iK_zA1Zymk0 (Accessed: 29 October 2023).
Dispatches in Art History 