I appreciate Monica D’Mardy’ summery of her life experience as an artist: “Art, a battle of one for oneself.” It is also true of Chinese contemporary art for the past 20 years. A unique and self-willed oil painter, LiLi has kept a distance from the general practice of modern Chinese art, yet tacitly coinciding with it in spirit. Spiritual liberty vs worldly welfare has always been the common theme: transformation and evolution in discourse patterns demonstrate the struggle against the material desires and a breakthrough from the inner bondage. Stylish expressions promise the maturity of autumn fruits, and also the beginning of recession, yet in the course the artist completed self-redemption and purification.

It has been a complex for all modern artists as how to break away from the conventions and how to approach art in a new way. But LiLi seems to be quite, an out-of-the-way type, who, amidst the noisy cosmopolitan, has kept to herself, On the second floor to her studio, she works as an omnipotent muse, enlivening her heroes and stories, seasons, times in her dreamland, —a garden of forking path in painting. Just as Boll Hurst described in The Garden Of Forking Path: it is a gorgeous puzzle, or a parable, with no other key than time, the ever-emerging, ever forking, ever interlocking yet never intervening time, in the cobweb of which all possibilities are caught. That was the intense feeling which I got when I first came to her exhibition at Guanshanyue Art Gallery.

Her unique ability to spatialize time provides her with vast possibility to transcend life and art. The oil series Journey are fairytales born of LiLi’s dreamy childhood life out in Guizhou mountains, with enchanting forests and swamps, exotic vegetations, plants seems can walk birds and beasts bloom. It is on the route to a mystical appointment, and, all of a sudden, like a flashback in time, all lives return to their origin. Journey surmounts the barrier of ration and logic in portrayal of the image of Mother Land, a primitive image aerated with animate breaths of the wild mountains and great waters. The image is a whole and the partial at once, as if all life is coming into being out of pregnancy, meanwhile pregnant with being. Tranquility can be said to be her master piece, in that she employs western approaches and styles to express oriental sentiments. Through abstractionist images and enchantingly rich colors we see plum blossoms intoned in Tang Dynasty poetry, moonlight depicted in Song Dynasty lyrics, grand scenery in Yuan dynasty, and faces of the texture of celadon ware, manifesting themselves, just as messages come out of a Sanskrit bible. In Tranquility, creation of multi-dimensional time and space diplays the painter’s extraordinary ability in scheme and composition. Her employment of Chinese traditional painting techniques greatly expanded and enriched expressiveness of oil painting. The abstract lines in traditional Chinese painting reveal a poetic tension out of its rationality in the composition of Tranquility. Multi-focused perspectives make the time curve to give birth to new realm within realm, and marvelous color scheme speaks of exquisite feelings. But when we walk out of the entanglement of scenes and images to focus on her empoyment of colors, we find the phenotype of color and scheme takes new shape. There is rosy light glowing in the dark shades, and hidden grief gloaming in bright tones, all in proportion to subjective sensations. In front of her paintings, as if seized by a magic spell, we are overwhelmed by a transcendental force, a supreme form of beauty.

Wide perspectives, extensive themes, and rich in varied ways of expression allowed a painter the maturity and liberty to dance ever so freely, at such a unique altitude of excellence as LiLi has reached. In Beauty Faded, quaint as a curiosity, the ever extending bright yellow simply cannot obstruct the blackening erosion of Time, and the crimson blossoms, like some old scars, are mourning of the past. In contrast, Dancing over Night, with its loud colors and exaggerated shapes, singing the outcry of secular passions and wild desires, at starry night that is assassinated by the flickering metropolitan neo lights. Smoking Lady feels more like lavender, a moment of meditation over the present. Ripe tells the liberation of burdened body, joy and celebration of both gods and man. In Flowers we see the joyous chorus of the sky and earth. In Winds over the Blue we hear the cluttering of horses passing the sky, like thunderbolts in spring time, singing for their freedom. Sound of the Universe, a concerto of life born of death and reproduction, brings us back to the remote prehistory where we had the first daylight through Chaos, as if witnessing the pictograghs taking shape.

A review of the hundreds of paintings reveals the painter’s vast inner universe. Her different ways of expression makes it hard to classify her works into any school, and any effort in doing so would be in vain. In preface to one of her previous collections she used to say: “My works can be categorized as ‘nonism’, if any, for the reason that they come in the freest way of expression, with no limit or boundary to itself whatsoever.” I am quite convinced that she has got a profound insight into the Chinese philosophy: great being exists (as if) in non-existence; great beauty goes beyond description.

Everyone is searching, forever searching, for the way of his own. With her ever free painting brush, her insight into life, and her aesthetic sense, LiLi created a secluded garden, yet it is a garden of forking paths, forking into another garden forever, which, in turn leads to another, and still another. Wandering among them, stupefied by the peculiar tints and exotic forms, you forget about the time and your where-about, and you never know what would it be next. Just as Laotzie put it: “Images are just illusions, and illusions clothe themselves in images.” And these images, together with colors and shapes, and prosody with which they are composed, have become a heartening strength calling for the return to human nature when they are bestowed with a soul. Once more, in greater depth, we feel “the indispensable ecological role that art performs in the struggle for the integrity of humanity against alienation.” LiLi works wonders, but she does not elaborate wonders.




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