We recently connected with Louis Cai and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Louis, thanks for joining us today. How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
I would say that I most taught myself how to draw, although I did take a drawing lesson in middle school, but the lesson stopped since high school because I went to another city. The school was in another province, and it was far from city so I basically spent my weekends by drawing and watching movies. I just drew the scenes from the movies I watched. I should be very thankful that I watch movies of multiple genres like sci-fi, Kung Fu, romance, etc. Therefore I learned how to compose, and how to draw people from different perspective or in different poses. I never really took any professional trainning until I went to ArtCenter College of Design, I met incredible instructors like Sean Cheetham, Rob Clayton, Jason Holley and Kent Williams and others. I started my first oil painting in ArtCenter and that was when I learned figure drawings and paintings, and I decided to hold on to painting after graduation.
I don’t really believe in “speeding up learning process” because I also teach art in an art high school. As an educator, I believe that learning is more natural. However, if there is any thing I wish I could do to speed up, it would be starting reading earlier. I have been so concentrated on craft learning in college, and incorporating music with illustration which kind of make my mind closed. I hope to read more, not necessarily about art, but more about poems, stories and narratives. And I am doing it after graduation, recently I am pretty into French literatures like Georges Bataille and Claire Baudelaire. But I just wish I could’ve start exploring the beauty of literature much earlier lol.
Speaking about what stand in my way of learning more I would say the balance between teaching and artmaking. Teaching teenagers does require a lot of rules but making art doesn’t, so it is kind of paradoxical to find the boarder in my own mind that sometimes I have to work so hard to take myself away from the “teaching mode”, and it does kill time and energy to do that.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
As I have mentioned, I mainly make analogue drawings, paintings and illustrations. I also experimented with video arts, stop-motions and installations in college. Recently I am starting to learn and create by softwares like Zbrush. Within all the mediums I have explored, I favored painting the best. I did struggle for awhile about the future of making paintings because new media art and AI art really gave painters a hard strike, and even the next generation is taking drawing and painting less and less seriously, I almost thought that I am losing the game before I even really join. Indeed, making paintings is time-consuming and comes with unpredictable risks, and requires long-term practice, which new medias and AI can completely avoid those “issues”. However, from the perspective of a painter, those “issues” are actually the beauty of painting. I am glad that I kept drawing and painting although I was so confused because it helped me to figure out that I didn’t pick up my pencils and brushes because they can create images in two minutes and make big sells, I did everything because I enjoy the moments that I have to observe and play around with the materials on my canvases to make images that are not meant to be duplicated, and my soul gently melt into the works I create.
The main things I want other to know about my work is that my works are always about developing personal mythologies that leads people to face the crucial facts and understand each other through my incorporation of multiple techniques. I was born and grown up in China which is a nation full of taboos. Chinese people live so hard because they have to avoid mentioning “death”, “sex”, “alcohol”, “drug”, “censorship”, etc. Also it is even almost a crime that you are not being “well-behaved” or always asking questions, the government doesn’t like it, parents don’t like it, your boss doesn’t like it. I incorporate a lot of imageries like anal, wounds, “sad feelings” in my works, and I post my works on both Chinese social medias and American social medias. In Chinese medias, people always comment “Oh! Are you supposed to draw this?”, but what I drew was just someone roaring with his butthole opened. Or sometimes the work is just an illustration of what happened on news which the government chose to ignore. Those works don’t even look as dark or scary as what I did in college years. Chinese people don’t like to talk about problems, and instead they tend to masturbate in the fantasy that is built out of fake sexy photoshoped girls who pretend to have no idea about sex, glories from a thousand years ago, so cliche iconographies of Buddhism or modernism and so on. I tend to build metaphors in my works that reflects to the truths that I am facing at, to cure this morbidity, to lead my audiences to face to the facts that not every girl has to be as pretty and “pure”, so stop projecting your wicked fetish towards them; people aren’t as satisfied as they look; ancestral glories are not going to make others to respect you. Therefore, I always draw inspirations from real life, and I use abstraction very restrainedly because I want my audiences to be able to see and think about the stories and metaphors seriously, stop hiding behind abstraction.
Another thing about my works is that I like to incorporate different techniques and crafts like carving and printing. Recently I am preparing on experimenting with encaustic too. I always wish to corporate different techniques and materials in my paintings to know the history and context of materials and to find a way to use it as a part of my own art languages.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is that art gives me the opportunity to always be opened to other subject or fields. When I was a child, I like making art because it creates a space that I can explore the potential of myself, but as I am growing up and especially after I graduated, I had to work with excellent people from other fields, we could always start our conversations with art, at least everybody has seen movies. Then other people will be able to build conversations about their fields of studies, and that really blows my mind.
Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?
George Bataille’s poems is giving me strong impact recently, and also his theories about erotism. Musics like heavy metal, post rock and prog rock has been influenced me since high school. I am also really into surrealist films like “Holy Mountain”, and other genres like comedies and stuffs. Chinese philosophies also fascinated me in some ways, that ancient Chinese people build the whole system of Chinese culture based on their observations of locations, materials and natural phenomenons. I like to read histories, including Chinese, European, American, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and other regions, it is always interesting to know how a culture has been developed.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @the_anthropoid_human
Image Credits
Violet Zhan