Along both stretches of the village road, one sees flowers blooming naturally, without an object of reference or the pursuit of meaning. Simply walking and encountering completed the entire meaning. Here, language and time are safe in their own domains, and yet they represent and intermesh with one another. Li Ran’s poetic lines refract the temporality which was of concern to the artist at the time of creation, along with the related question of modernity. In this work, a mimicry of a Soviet film, “The Fate of a Man,” Li Ran plays the role of a Soviet soldier: he imitates to a tee the affected and artificial style of acting under Communist ideology, and enacts the story of a Soviet soldier reminiscing on the past and yearning for the future.

走在鄉村小路上，兩旁的花朵按其本來的面貌開放，沒有對像的指稱，沒有意義的追尋，行走、相遇，就完成了全部含義。在這裡，語言和時間既安守在各自的地域，又相互像征和牽引著。這段詩意十足的文字折射出藝術家創作中所關心的時間性、及其連接的現代性問題。在這部取材於前蘇聯的電影《一個人的遭遇》的作品中，李然扮演了一位前蘇聯的士兵形像，惟妙惟肖地模仿了共產主義意識形態下矯情做作的演員表演方式，訴說了一位 前蘇士兵緬懷過去、憧憬未來的故事。

1986 Born in Hubei. He moved from Beijing to Shanghai in 2018. His work involves multiple media such as video, performance, painting, installation and writing, etc. In recent years, he embarked on a journey surveying the antagonist roles in theatre, stage art, make-up design, the production of imported films and espionage films since 1950s in China. The artist often writes images through collections of photo documents, character scenes, and dubbed monologues. Meanwhile, he also expands the more complex and personalized time and space of this writing in painting, sound, and installation.

Li Ran has exhibited at the Center Pompidou, Pairs; basis door actuele kunst (BAK), Utrecht; Huas der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), Houston; Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal; The Museum of Moscow, Moscow; Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Geneva; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; NTU Center For Contemporary Art Singapore (CCA), Singapore; Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD), Manila; HOW Museum, Shanghai, Sifang Museum, Nanjing; OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT), Shenzhen, Shanghai and Xi’an; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art
(UCCA), Beijing; CAFA Museum (CAFAM), Beijing; and other venues, He has held solo exhibition at OCT Contemporary Art Terminal (OCAT), Xi’an (2015); His single-channel video work also screening in Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London; The Jewish Museum, New York and other venues; His works have also been featured in Montreal Biennale (2014), Biennale Of Moving Images 2014 (2014 In Geneva), 4th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2014), 2nd CAFAM Biennial (2014), 4th “Former West” Project (2013, In Berlin), 9th Gwangju Biennial (2012), 7th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale (2012). He won the “Best Artist Award” at the 2014 Moscow International Youth Art Biennial and was nominated for the “Future Generation Award” by the Pinchuk Arts Center in 2017.