Panorama International / Belgian Premiere
In the middle of nowhere, in the countryside of northern England, an abandoned farmhouse serves as a museum of contemporary art, the L.Y.C Museum. This ambitious project is not the result of an institutional decision but of the determination of a single individual: the Chinese immigrant artist Li Yuan-Chia. It was in 1972 that he embarked on this cutting-edge, avant-garde museum venture, which enabled him to exhibit over 300 contemporary artists in almost a decade.
Curator of the L.Y.C Museum, Li is also a multifaceted artist – sometimes a poet, sometimes a visual artist, painter or sculptor – who transcended 20th-century Western abstract art by inviting Chinese tradition, tinged with metaphysical and philosophical questions, into his work. Despite a lack of funding and recognition for his unrivalled contribution to British contemporary art, Li Yuan-Chia continued to keep the museum alive until his death.
In All and Nothing, filmmaker Maggie Li invites us to discover a true enthusiast who dedicated his entire life to artistic creation, far away from the speculations dictated by the capitalist art market. Through the eyes and testimonies of people who knew him, a portrait emerges of Li Yuan-Chia, an artist and curator as secretive as he was generous. His works, seen in the light of his diaries, provide a better understanding of his artistic legacy, which is based on the dialectic of ‘all and nothing’ by the famous Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu.
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