Beijing Project n.05 Li Jie 李洁

Li Jie’s contribution is especially meaningful because of her own story: for twelve years she worked in a factory of 60,000 people in Luoyang, Henan province. There she gradually took up drawing as a way to escape monotony, endure hardship and nourish her intellectual life. She learned during breaks and overtime until she was allowed to draw even during working hours, and within a few years she became an established professional artist. Her first works are precise renderings of the industrial objects she handled every day – metal parts, screws, nails, circuits, frames – painted with very diluted ink, as delicate as pencil, with minimal shading. They bear the mark of her factory years and keep a strong performative side in the long time they take to make.

In her own words: “The factory I worked in, built in 1955, made more than a hundred products: model 60 bulldozers, model 70 tractors, model 665 large loaders, model 704 tanks… Work taught me that every product and every part has a number, just as every house has a street number and every person an ID number. These numbers are permanent codes of identity, hard to change.”

At Bernard Controls she prepared two blank white canvases, one in the workshop and one in the offices, drew an object on each, and asked every employee to draw one object or part they see at work, whenever they felt ready. “Some joined in easily and drew quietly; some were tense or reluctant; some needed to talk first; some drawings were unfinished and I completed them. In each object you can see a change inside a person: in their repetitive work, a chance to think differently for a moment. The pictures record a brief change of identity.” The two finished paintings were hung in the factory, in places chosen by the heads of human resources and production.

Then, at the end of September 2012, the dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu Islands reached its height, with anti-Japanese demonstrations across the country, just before the 18th Party Congress and the US elections. Since Li Jie had come to the factory together with a Japanese artist, the employees began to talk about the islands. The tension became her new medium of social inquiry: she filmed interviews with workers, employees, managers and foreign staff about this uncomfortable topic. The interviews show that, when invited, people are open to discussing sensitive subjects and confronting opinions without falling into the trap of media propaganda. They took her much time, patience and understanding to build the necessary trust and empathy – the kind of interaction on which the whole Social Sensibility programme is built.