Hong Lei is an internationally renowned Chinese avant-garde artist whose work features in contemporary art exhibitions around the world on a regular basis. Hong was born in 1960 in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, where he still lives and works today. In 1987, he graduated from the Nanjing Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1993 he joined Beijing's Central Academy of Fine Arts to study print. Hong's preferred medium is photography, and he uses photographic images to imitate and yet defamiliarize traditional Song Dynasty-style paintings of flowers, birds and landscapes, turning their refined realism into modern representations. The Song Dynasty was an era of outstanding achievements in poetry, painting and crafts. Many of the paintings of that time were done at the behest of the emperor and his court, and were rather magnificent and flowery in style. Hong Lei employs modern photographic techniques to recreate a virtual image of that splendid and glamorous age, not as an end in itself, but to express the nihilism of our contemporary world. Hong talks about his views on Song Dynasty flower-and-bird paintings in one of his interviews:"The silk embroideries of the Song Dynasty with their prevailing flower and bird motifs, just like today's ubiquitous trashy brand logos and adverting icons, were probably all connected by some kind of secret code or language, quite beautiful and appealing in their way. The difference is that Song emperor Huizong pursued no commercial interests when he established the Painting Academy, but was on a quest to mould an ideal world, a place of beauty where the aesthetic concept of 'perfection in accordance with the six classics'(proposed by Tang historian and art critic Zhang Yanyuan) would become a reality. Huizong was also permeated with the rationalist-idealistic teachings of neo-Confucian lixue, while the enigmatic fantasies and dreamworlds of the painter Zhao Ji completed his eclectic weltanschauung and arcane artistic ideals. Many art critics feel that those petite flower-and-bird pieces are too conventional, too repetitive and stereotyped. What they fail to appreciate is their subtle understatement and reserved elegance, the delicate balance and harmony that pervade those intricately depicted feathers and blossoms and leaves, brimming with the essence of life, and how these characteristics add an element of solemnity and rigor to nature, helping the observer to truly 'get to the root of things'.

What's truly uncanny, though, is that Huizong, this emperor who cared more about painting and art than his entire empire, should suffer the same fate as the famous poet and last monarch of the Southern Tang Dynasty, Li Yu (a.k.a. Li Houzhu): he lost his throne and was captured by the enemy. (Ironically, it had been the House of Song that had put an end to the Southern Tang...) Heidegger asks: 'With every work of art a whole world comes into existence. But what, exactly, is a world?'(Excerpt from "Dreams and My Work: The Photographer Hong Lei" New Weekly issue no. 118, 2001) In his photographic emulations of Song Dynasty flower-and-bird paintings, Hong Lei makes use of real flowers and birds and ingeniously arranges them in accordance with the principles of traditional composition-only that in his pieces the formerly nimble and sprightly animals have become dead birds. Dead birds are something of a conceptual symbol with Hong who hints that they might be interpreted as a projection of the artist himself. As the existential philosopher Heidegger put it, "Facing reality, I shut my eyes tightly."This, in fact, is also a roundabout way of admitting one's nostalgia for the things that were good and beautiful in the cultural and artistic tradition of the past, things that are now irretrievably gone.

Hong Lei believes that no other nation regards mountains and rivers (shanshui) as symbols of its cultural spirit and identity, or has made them the main motif of painting and poetry, in quite the same way China has and does. Shanshui, also a synonym for natural scenery and landscape (painting), became a collective spiritual sanctuary for China's literati at an early time. Most of the stories and legends that have grown up around celebrated scholars and bohemians involve shanshui, and even much of China's thought and philosophy originated among the wild mountains and waters, in particular the Taoist teachings of Laozi and Zhuangzi, or the theories of Zhu Qian. So Hong decided to reanimate the Chinese shanshui tradition in his own particularly modern audio-optical fashion.

In his 2004 work "Chinese Landscape - Wind, Water, Fire" Hong Lei conveys via detailed miniature images the dreamlike and bewildering aspects that the Chinese courtyard gardens and parks of Suzhou with their artificial shanshui scenery take on when exposed to the natural forces of wind, water and fire. Himself a son of southern Jiangsu, Hong has a keen grasp of the classical features that make up the old urban gardens of Suzhou, which epitomize what's at the core of Chinese literati culture. Yet these gardens and parks are also a symbol for escapism and living in the past. In the artist's eyes, they represent an illusory panorama, a scenery with a morbid quality. Cultural relics they are, witnesses to the transience of human existence, whether experienced through our collective history or in our individual lives.

For Hong Lei, southern Jiangsu, his homeland, is one poignant metaphor for the frailty of life and culture-but it is also the medium for his dream visions.

On occasion, the artist has mentioned his love-hate relationship with Suzhou's classical courtyard gardens, the conflicting emotions they trigger in his mind: yes, he is infatuated with their melancholy beauty, but he does not wish to abandon himself to their lingering attraction. Out of such complicated feelings, Hong Lei has reinvented these Chinese gardens in his own virtual landscapes. Chinese photography critic Gu Zheng has the following to say about Hong's Chinese landscape pieces: "Hong interprets the artistry and alienation of the Suzhou gardens, their peculiar, radiant charm that is coupled with a claustrophobic somberness and gloom, as metaphors for a repressive history, and employs them as tools for transcending tradition. Under the impact of wind, water and fire the gardens with their conventional artificial scenery metamorphose into apparitions of tragic beauty."(Excerpt from Gu Zheng: "Urban China: The Obvious and the Hidden" Guangzhou International Photography Biennale, 2005)

Beauty-of course that is the ultimate goal of Hong Lei's artistic endeavors. Yet he lives in a Chinese society, and in an age and time of superficial aesthetic standards. Consequently, he has to use modes of expression that people can relate to. Art critic Li Xianting has detected the despondency and vulnerability of China's intellectuals in the desolate splendor of Hong's photographic oeuvre. Today, the traditional literati culture of scholar painters and poets, as well as the aristocratic magnificence and glory of the emperor's court, have long since been consigned to the dustheap of history. China's modernization is still lagging far behind the West, while her own sophisticated culture that lasted for thousands of years has long since lost its original appeal. Now China is following close in the footsteps of the West, but what is the result of such slavish imitation? A nondescript civilization, a society lacking in taste and refinement, a world that is polluted with the kitschy icons of ubiquitous popular "culture" how could an artist not feel dejected and forlorn?