Li Lang Solo Exhibition: A Long Day of A Certain Year

After his solo exhibition "30219 Days", Li Lang's recent work "A Long Day of  A Certain Year" will be featured at A Thousand Plateaus Art Space on 21st, September. This time, he will take the audience on an unfamiliar journey through the hinterland of China in the span of time and space on a high-speed train. This work invited many volunteers to share thier own life experience. The content of the conversation is self-starting, and at the same time it cannot be stripped of reality. Individual life will eventually produce intensive intersections.

Li Lang is good at capturing the actual facts calmly and accurately. For him, as the train travels, when there is no limit to the destination, the vehicle itself, the meaning of the journey, collapses. In the process of reading other people's life experience, we can obtain more diversified existential experience of ourselves, of others and of life.

A Long Day of A Certain Year

Text/ Li Lang  

Every generation lives like this

 —— A Long Day of A Certain Year (Voice-Over)

A long day in a life is a definite, precise time; it is not a moment that ends up becoming, in our memory, part of an infinite series of anonymous 'yesterdays'. Today and tomorrow are as well part of a 'long day in a life', and through endless repetition they will end up being our whole life.

I took a round trip on a high-speed train traveling for 4,600-kilometres and shot the view out of the window in the manner of taking statistical sampling of the journey through this familiar and yet unfamiliar country that is China, through cities, towns, countryside, hills, plains and the wilderness. Looking numbly out of the window, the landscape rushed against the direction of the train, and then disappeared behind. I suddenly had the illusion that the future is ahead and is embodied by the movement. Without this awareness, the future would be a thing of the past. Paradoxically, it seems to me that the present is non-existent. Only when the train finally arrives at the terminus, I walk out of the carriage and feel the present existence and the reality of my having to go back to the departure point.

What is reality? I have questioned many people about their understanding of the nature and impact of reality. The words interspersed with our very intuitive feelings on life. I once again became a spectator sitting on the train and looking out of the window. In life, ordinary people are realistic observers.

After unconsciously spending countless weeks and boring days, we are happy enough to be able to enjoy a peaceful life without major troubles; a condition that is similar to the safe position of a spectator looking through the window at things that apparently have nothing to do with him/her.

Never forget, however, that one day the train will reach the end of its journey. Passengers will eventually walk out of the carriage and return to reality. We should not imagine that reality is like the landscape outside the window, tranquil and silent. We have that impression only because we are unable to hear the sound outside.