LACOSTE challenged Chinese artist Li Xiaofeng to create two different polos for the 2010 Holiday Collector’s Series. For both, he had to adapt his work methods slightly. For the limited edition printed polo, he chose blue and white shards with lotus and children designs from the Kangxi Period (1662 - 1772 AD) of the Qing Dynasty (1644 - 1911 AD). The lotus grows from mud underwater to emerge as a flower, symbolising purity and rebirth. Images of babies represent fertility, as during that period the high infant mortality rate meant that people decorated ceramics with babies hoping they would be blessed with children.
This particular type of folk ceramics reflected the Imperial taste at that time and was only used by the upper classes, as techinically the painted blue background on a white base that delineated the figures was more complex to produce. Xiaofeng shaped and polished the shards as usual, but instead of drilling holes and linking them with wire he photographed each (251 for the men’s polo and 304 for the women’s) and placed them one by one in a life-size digital pattern of the polo’s front, back and sleeves. He chose a dark blue ribbing for the collar and sleeves on the men’s polo and a light blue for women. The final touch was the addition of a white LACOSTE crocodile logo, the rarest breed in the brand’s collection. The printed Porcelain Polo is limited to 20,000 pieces for both men and women and comes packaged in a silk pouch stamped with the red seal LI XIAOFENG LACOSTE logo
China forbids the export of ancient artefacts including porcelain shards, so for the Porcelain Polo art work, Li decided to use new shards so that the piece could eventually be shipped out of the country. Inspired by the early Ming Dynasty (1368 -1644 AD), he painted porcelain bowls with images of a scholar contemplating a scenic landscape surrounded by what is referred to as the ‘Four Gentlemen’ in classical Chinese painting, namely an orchid, bamboo, chrysanthemum and plum blossom. He chose to use under-glazed red in addition to the quintessential Ming blue and white. Red represents blood and life force; traditionally, Chinese brides wear red, so it is also a colour associated with festivity and joy.
Xiaofeng drew the LACOSTE crocodile logo and letters on the bowls as well as the phoenix, an important symbol of good fortune, opportunity and luck in Chinese culture. The artist also brushed some traditional Chinese well-wishing expressions on the bowls, making sure to have the characters broken up into different shards so that the characters are fragmented and no longer evident on the completed sculpture. His idea here was to reflect the mixing of the old and the new which echoes contemporary Chinese society. At the back of the Porcelain Polo, Xiaofeng used two parallel rows of the half-circle broken bottoms of the bowls to represent the raised scales of a crocodile. At the center of the polo, Xiaofeng inverted the LACOSTE crocodile logo and letters, following the Chinese tradition of turning characters upside down for good luck.
It took Xiaofeng three full months to paint, fire, fragment, shape, polish, and finally link together the 317 shards to create the Porcelain Polo, which is the most expensive and most exclusive LACOSTE polo to date. The Porcelain Polo will be unveiled in Paris on 25 June at the Musée des Arts et Métiers and then in Bejing in the fall at Li Xiaofeng’s first one-man show organized by the Red Gate Gallery, the first private contemporary art gallery to be established in China which was founded in 1991 by Brian Wallace who first arrived in China in 1984.
Li Xiaofeng trained as a muralist but turned to sculpture to explore a new concept and expression of Chinese landscapes. His choice of material is unexpected; instead of marble, wood or even glass, he prefers buying shards of broken porcelain recovered from ancient archeological digs, some dating from the Ming Dynasty, and then shaping and polishing them, drilling holes into each corner and linking them together with silver wire to create ’rearranged landscapes’. It is fitting that these poetic pieces, which have been perhaps best described as ‘post-orientalism’, usually take the form of clothing, including traditional Chinese dresses and jackets as well as neckties and military uniforms. They are ultimately ‘wearable’ although certainly promise to be as heavy as any armour and would require a strong retinue of dressers to don and doff.
vía: yazter
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