Artist Li Qing pours chocolate sauce over a statue of Alexander Pushkin. Photos: Courtesy of the artist

One night early this year, armed with a video camera and a bucket of chocolate sauce, young Chinese artist Li Qing stealthily approached the bronze bust of Alexander Pushkin that sits atop a stone pillar at the intersection of Yueyang Road and Dongping Road.

Li climbed up the structure and poured the bucket of chocolate sauce over the bust. The chocolate sauce began to dribble down Pushkin's head, passing over his nose to his shoulders and chest. Li recorded the whole act with the video camera.

Artworks on show at Li Qing's solo exhibition

"Of course, I was very cautious and finished all the work and cleaned up the bust before the police caught me," Li told the Global Times. The finished 20-minute video work, Sweet Statue: Pushkin in Shanghai, is now on show at his latest solo exhibition, Li Qing: In the Vicinity, being held at Leo Xu Projects on Fuxing Road West in Xuhui district.

"The elements in every work all reflect a kind of contradictory entanglement. It is something that I think the city of Shanghai can't get rid of and which still exists now during its modernization process," Li said.

In Sweet Statue: Pushkin in Shanghai, chocolate is a typical lovers' gift, symbolizing romance, while Pushkin is also a representative Romantic poet, who wrote many love poems.

"It's what they have in common," Li said, "but for me, they are intrinsically different: chocolate is the symbol of a materialized and secular culture, however, Pushkin's poems are more spiritually romantic."

Li explained that the pouring of chocolate sauce over the bust symbolizes his belief that our modern consumerist society has covered people's pursuit of spiritual culture.

Artworks on show at Li Qing's solo exhibition

Windows are another major image that Li makes use of to demonstrate contrast in his new exhibition. He collected several old window frames, which were once ubiquitous in 1980s Shanghai. Behind the real windows are oil paintings of windows, creating a juxtaposition of contrasting architectural styles.

Li chose a window of the HSBC (Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation) building on the Bund and a window of the Shanghai Exhibition Center (the former Sino-Soviet Friendship Building built in 1955) on Yan'an Road Middle as the subjects of his oil paintings.

The HSBC building is a Victorian-style neoclassical design, while the design of Shanghai Exhibition Center draws heavily on Russian- and Empire-style neoclassical architecture with Stalinist innovations.

Artworks on show at Li Qing's solo exhibition

"They are two typical architectural styles of Shanghai's modernization period and are both well-preserved in today's Shanghai," Li said.

"In these series of works, the paintings of the windows from foreign-style architectures were placed behind real windows from local families, which looks like two different styles of real windows are really adjacent to each other. It is just a common reality in Shanghai, the coexistence of local and foreign, history and now," Li added.

Date: Until January 14, 2014, 10 am to 6 pm from Tuesday to Saturday; 12 am to 6 pm on Sunday, closed on Monday

Venue: Leo Xu Projects

Address: Lane 49, Building 3, Fuxing Road West

复兴西路49弄3号楼

Admission: Free

Call 3461-1245 for details