Shih Li-Jen – Mr. Rhino


by Sabrina Ardizzoni


The rhinoceros is an emblem of our dominion over nature. A sacred animal in archaic China, and towering symbol of the African savanna, it capitulates only in its unequal struggle with people - those individuals who, in their lust for profit, will not stop even in the face of international bans and legislation.


Some choose technology, others rare gems, others exotic and expensive materials to enhance the worth of their position in the world. An artist makes his or her work precious through self-discipline and with the meanings that proceed from inspiration.


Taiwanese Shih Li-Jen has chosen the rhinoceros as the centre of his artistic investigations. After experimenting in the first years of his experience as an artist with different forms and techniques, this artist was thunderstruck twenty years ago with a "Copernican Revolution", wherein he discovered the "Sun" in this animal, lavishing a wealth of historical, anthropological, artistic, and also biological research on it.
For twenty years, "Mr Rhino" and the rhinoceros have been partners. In his studio residences in Taiwan and Beijing, the artist shares his garden space with his giant bronze animals. In his Beijing workshop, a 3000 m2 warehouse, he hosts on different floors his families of giant rhinoceroses, some bronze, some steel, each with its distinct personality. Young rhinos, elderly ones, some joyous, others more worried; worried about the fate that is leading them to extinction.

The artist has struck a deal with these majestic animals: "My goal is creating rhino sculptures to inspire people to help save these creatures", he says. After studying their biological characteristics with a zeal worthy of a nineteenth-century naturalist, and seeking their presence in the iconography of various civilizations, he has worked out a personal artistic language with which – through the use of various materials, some of them precious – he means to enumerate the spiritual meanings of this creature. Geometric shapes and external features derived from technology and industry mark the evolution of his work from one of rigorously realistic representation to that of aesthetically modern sculptures having complex symbolical meanings.
Shih's rhinoceroses embody a spiritual and environmental message. They bear elements derived from the world's spiritual traditions: for instance, the finger-horn pointed at the sky, indicates that this animal's destiny is tied to that of man.. It is the rhinoceros itself that leads man to contemplate the sky, the tian, that eminent centre of spirituality of Chinese civilization; it leads us towards the sky, while, at the same time, representing the earth, di, the sky's complementary divinity, with its heavy and massive body.

Is he the King, wang, who mediates communication between the earth and the sky? Is he man's mount? Is he Nandi, the bull upon which Shiva rides in Indian iconography? The bronze sculptures exhibited here show the evolution of the animal towards its more abstract and symbolic form. Covered by studs that remind us of the rivets of the leather rhinoceros armours of the Chinese Warring States Period (5th-3rd century BCE), it bears many references to the world's sacred traditions: Mayan pyramids, anthropomorphic figures or the yet little-known South China Sanxingdue civilization, the phurba, ritual dagger of the Tibetan tradition, the dragon, and the kilin, legendary animal mentioned in China's Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai Jing), as well as the Christian church steeple. All these symbols are also present in the gigantic body of the King-Kong Rhino, one of this artist's most famous works, exhibited in Taipei, Beijing, Venice, and now about to leave for other capitals of the world.

Through the various aspects of his totemic animal, the artist reviles the poachers that have – from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to our day – continuously endangered the very existence of the rhinoceros. This animal was once present in all the continents of the earth, admired and depicted by all the great civilizations of the past; today, it is almost extinct, threatened by a human greed that kills it for profit and destroys its natural habitat.

So powerful and invincible – and yet an animal that succumbs under the world-wide dominion of lucre that orbits around its horn, to which traditional Asiatic medicine assigns therapeutic properties. However, the trade in rhinoceros horns is not limited to its "medicinal" use, as it is also one of those exotic objects that, from the eighteenth century onwards, were very much in demand in the display cases of scientists and taxonomists in all of Europe, and in those of the gentry and artists fascinated by this living fossil. One cannot help but remember the saga of Clara the rhinoceros, one of the topics of this symposium.

The history of the rhinoceros goes way back. It was spread out all over our planet in prehistoric times. According to some palaeontologists, men were feeding off rhino meat between 90,000 and 70,000 years ago. These hardy animals survived glaciation and terrible predators, but from the very first moment of the advent of man, we have become the primary cause of their extinction.

Shih re-invents his rhinoceros along the long timeline of history and in the relationship between the animal and the human world: it becomes a container of messages that come from an ideal space-time, a studied and non-linear anthropobiological metaphor.

The horn, the element that best distinguishes the rhinoceros in Shih's artistic re-invention, is a human thumb. A casual observer might wonder if it actually depicts the artist's own fingerprint, in a kind of signature of his work. But the more attentive beholder will find that it is not an individual fingerprint, but a Minoan labyrinth, interpreted here as the common DNA of all of humankind.

In this exhibition, "Mr Rhino", as he is known among his devoted collectors and those that follow his artistic and environmental crusade, presents some of his favourite pieces. We see the symbol of his indictment of the connivance between trade and ecological destruction, but also a young, smiling rhinoceros, a dream-mate, a small totem that reminds us how the relationship between man and nature might be made harmonious, and a couple of bronze rhinos that remind us of the ritual vessels of the Shang Dynasty, from the 2nd millennium BCE. Already in those times, the mighty of China's pre-dynastic age sipped their ritual wine from the large bellied rhinoceros of these artefacts. The use of the animal to mark the prestige of the powerful dates from this ancient period, and embodies man's domination of the wilderness. The artist presents us here with a twin specimen, one male, one female, yang and yin, the regulating principles that create the balance and the harmony in the world of Chinese cosmology's Ten Thousand Things.

In the contemporary era, globalization is a chance to amplify the range of the environmental message: his rhinoceroses, varying in height from less than one, to five metres, made of diverse materials such as ceramics, bronze, iron, and steel, have found a permanent home in the squares and business centres of the huge metropolitan areas of Asia and Europe (one also in Venice), but also on the premises of environmental associations, a reminder of the importance of the dialogue between economic leverage and the preservation of nature. Shih's art and its fellowship with the rhinoceros world reminds us how the exploitation of nature and the pleasure we derive from it are at the same time a source of life and a threat to our very existence.