Detail: 'Rent' - Rent Collection Yard (2007) is the title of the largest and most complex sculptural installation Li Zhanyang (born 1969, Jilin Province, China) has ever created. Taking eighteen months of production after nearly a decade of conceptual incubation, Li Zhanyang's 'Rent' - Rent Collection Yard is a humorous and subjective look at the Chinese contemporary art scene. It is informed by the artist's personal experience. Characters, both local and international, are brought to life. The 34 life-size coloured fiberglass figures of this installation are modeled after the likeness of various people familiar to the artist - among them international celebrities as well as some only known in Chinese contemporary art circles. They include Chinese and Western artists, curators, collectors, gallery owners, gallery assistants, and art students.
The gathered subjects were chosen according to their public or professional roles. Displayed on a real stage they were designed to showcase each figure in a striking a pose - dramatic or absurd, some of them with imbuing mordant satire. Following six conceptual themes (Paying Rent, Foot Washing, Raping, Oppressing, Dying a Martyr, and History Observed), the sculptures are spread throughout three exhibition spaces of Galerie Urs Meile in Beijing. The congregation seemingly gathered or juxtaposed is part of a broader and fabricated narrative revealing latent conflicts and power relations - the dirt underneath the high-gloss surface of the art world. The artist places his fiberglass alter ego amidst the other characters, representing himself by gazing intently into the darkness of the spectators. And among the spectators, Li Zhanyang places two exceptional figures in the front row: Joseph Beuys and Mao Zedong (in History Observed). Beuys, one of the most influential figures in the modern contemporary art scene, is expounding on the dynamic and chaotic interplay in front of them with a wild and passionate gesture beside the icon and father figure of revolutionary China.
In one of his essays Li Zhanyang writes "'Rent' - Rent Collection Yard tells a story that is not necessarily true or real. "The work is a contemporary transposition of the story of landlord Liu Wencai. During the revolutionary era, Liu Wencai was a victim of political muckraking and depicted as a brutal exploiter of the peasants. Liu's historic appearance as a despotic oppressor was the origin for the monumental and sculptural masterpiece called Rent Collection Yard (1965) also known as Rent Collection Courtyard. Permanently exhibited in the rent collection courtyard of landlord Liu Wencai's orchard (in Dayi County, Sichuan Province), this group of sculptures portrays the class struggle between the indigent farmers and the ruling landlords prior to the Chinese Communist party's coming to power. Commissioned by the provincial government of Sichuan Province and realized by a team of local folk artisans and Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, professors and students, Rent Collection Yard consists of 114 clay figures crafted in a stylistic combination of folk realism and Western academicism. In his version 'Rent' - Rent Collection Yard Li Zhanyang transposes the format of the original sculptures in order to apply a realistic approach with elements derived from his own art education that is emphasizing in particular the revision of Baroque art that refers to the iconographic languages of humanism. In an interview the artist states: "I am entirely dedicated to portray life for stressing an individual spirit on the most rudimentary levels of society."

1 To Li Zhanyang the lasting value of an artwork does not exclusively rely on its technique, content, or the chosen media, but on contemporizing its message and innovating the technique, as well. Li's understanding of "rent"-in a more formal and conceptual way-refers to "nalaizhuyi" (meaning tentatively "grabism" that is grabbing what is useful) as a creative process of assimilation and not merely a superficial form of cultural appropriation.
2 For this reason, when artist Cai Guoqiang in 1999 had the original Rent Collection Courtyard remolded at the 48th Venice Biennale as a conceptual performance, he transposed it into a contemporary art context, as well. Though, it is important to understand at this point that for Li Zhanyang, logic and singular theories are no longer suitable for the discourses of contemporary art as his conceptualization of both the original version from 1965 and that of Cai Guoqiang is about a continuing process and the significance of this artwork that will not terminate with the passing of time.
3 Consequently, in Dying a Martyr, Li Zhanyang shows Cai Guoqiang in an eye-catching scene together with Samuel Keller, the former Director of Basel's art fair Art Basel. The two protagonists are carrying a deceased Jesus Christ-a mighty visual reference to the internationally acclaimed Swiss curator Harald Szeemann (1933-2005) who was the curator of the Venice Biennale 1999. As a parallel figure to the terrible landlord Liu Wencai, in Foot Washing Li Zhanyang has chosen the internationally renowned artist and architect Ai Weiwei. He is shown in an armchair-chubby, cheerful, and cozily slumped-having a foot massage while doted on by his wife, curators, collectors, and his gallerist and assistants. In Li Zhanyang's eyes, it could well be that the initial struggles of Chinese contemporary art are definitely over since it has now become accepted by the international art scene.

- Nataline Colonnello.