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When it comes to a documentary relaying the obligatory biography bits, doing it through the medium of abstract art is fitting for Chinese artist Li Yuan-chia, who set up the LYC Museum and Art Gallery in Brampton, Cumbria in 1972. At one point, a friend of Li’s leafs through a book of embossed designs on white card that, as dots and lines appear and rearrange themselves on the pages like giant braille, represent the stages of his life: “Here the two families are united in his parents’ marriage. And there’s another dot. Who’s that? It’s Li.”
Maybe such abstractions are what all lives boil down to. But it would have been nice to know a bit more about the background of this extraordinary man than what is supplied within this pensive but hazy film. The facts offered are scant: born in the southern Chinese city of Guangxi in 1929; part of Taiwan’s Ton Fan art collective, which irked the island’s nationalist governors; a stint squatting in a furniture factory in Bologna; then tip-toeing into swinging London’s avant garde scene. “Pushing, pushing, pushing, on the road, on the street, on the path, in the city,” as Li described his solitary art quest.
What is indelible is the community-transforming impact of the LYC, which occupied a dilapidated husk of a farmhouse. Apparently largely renouncing his own practice to manage it, Li (known to local people as “the Chinaman”) welcomed all there and nourished an emancipating creativity in this little corner of England. Staging an average of five exhibitions a month, he prioritised the work of regional artists over the metropolitan elite. Rather than the money-corrupted art market, it was grassroots art that sustained him.
Sensitively collaging their film together from Li’s art, photography, paraphernalia, readings and interviews with favoured Cumbrians, directors Liao I-ling and Chu Po-ying certainly capture his essence. The dot was at the conceptual heart of his work: all and nothing, as per the film’s title. In later installations, this motif expanded to planet-sized suspended circles covered in magnetic shapes people could move around; the LYC gallery, inside which Li corralled other people’s expression, was this participatory ideal writ large.
But the dot’s essential irreducibility says something else about the man, a privacy Liao and Chu struggle to penetrate. There are fleeting hints of his inner world, like his seemingly umbilical link with his mother – but as with Li’s artwork, this film leaves us pondering over many blanks.
