LiLi’s oil series Bound-footed Women reaffirmed my opinion of her as an ardent and persistent explorer of modern art. Her personal experience, her aggressive insight into life, and longtime exposure and immergence in Chinese traditions add some poetic traits and symbolic implications to her painting.

The artistic depiction of a historically precipitated image in Bound-footed Women looks like a concern about a custom or tradition in history, but it is in fact a metaphor concerning about women’s psyche and fate. The bound feet much praised in many a poem and prose as “golden lotus,” “fragrant hooks,” “step by delicate step,” are actually too miserable and pitiable to look back on, and too painful to touch, like those segments of porcelain, wind-swept and rain-washed, through the vicissitudes of life, long buried beneath the riverbed in the depth of time. However, it remains as a chapter not to be ignored in Chinese history of existence.

It is generally claimed that the custom of bound feet can be traced back to early Five Dynasties(707-969), with its prime in Southern Tang Dynasty(南唐). A puppet King of a conquered country, Li Yu built an isolated yet magnificent kingdom of literature with his genius power in poetry and art. An exceptional artist rather than a able and powerful politician, he might have taken art and women as specially blessed gifts, to be savored and juggled with for the mere sake of beauty. He had the gentlewomen in his court bind their feet with cloth into the shape of a hook or crescent so as to dance on the gold petals of lotus. With that novel move alone Li Yu could be nothing less than the first ancestor of behavioral art in China.

Springing in the royal palace, and spreading to people at large, the fad gained its popularity all the way to the point of becoming a standard practice by the Xining period of Emperor Shenzong in Song Dynasty, all the way until the end of Qing Dynasty. In an imperial system where the country is the emperor’s country, the imperial power would inevitably formalize the aesthetic tendency of a few into a social norm officially. In fact, just as many a pleasure-seeking fad or royal rites radiated from the palace to people at large to become common practices or even legal discipline, bound feet, when imposed on mass women, had become law and order of the society and ethic and virtue for women specially, coupling naturally with the social structure where men predominated women, hence men’s aesthetic preferences and anarchical tendency would often subject women to bondage and damage, both body and soul.

I always hold it to be true of art that art is typically a practice of “form over idea.” LiLi’s emphasis on the image of bound-footed women distinguishes her instinct as a woman painter(many of her works reveal her infatuation with female sexuality); it is also reflection on women’s existence and fate. The Bound-footed Women series is a loud outcry both for and against desire, a two-way operations: the moment an illusionary image is molded might be the moment it is cracked. The struggle of longing vs inhibiting and of revealing vs concealing finds all its expression in reincarnated images rich and colorful.

R. Rort put it in this way: Prior to full maturity and liberation of women, no woman painter could possibly be able to stop identifying women in terms of their relation to men. So is LiLi. We see in her paintings splendid silk and satins, eccentric colors and shapes, sexy little bound feet in striking contrast against jagged rocky mountains, icy cold metals and grotesque male figures, a marvelous combination of the feminine softness and brutal tyranny. Even in the brightest and most harmonious tones, there is the tension, the pain, and the remorse coming from the bottom of the heart, never fading out, as the blue enamel from the segments of old blue-and-white porcelain. Images in her painting are consistently sublimated by means of symbolization metaphoricalization.

Graduating from Shanghai Theatre Academy as a major in stagecraft, LiLi has got that drama complex which seems to have emerged into her subconscience when she composed the Bound-footed Women series, with each piece of work acting as a telling plot against an illusionary stage curtain. Perhaps, it is the dancing of the soul-an oriental ballet on bound foot, as if a soul is reaching out and is being reached, as if a dream, ever approaching yet forever obstructed, a hurting longing perpetually held back. She seems to have found the long-sought balance between western oil paint and oriental complex, balance between tradition and modernity, and balance between flesh and soul.

Perhaps LiLi would not approve of my interpretation of her art. She made it clear earlier “that art is for the sake of beauty; it should not take too much commitment.” True, indeed. Just as truth is the touchstone for science and goodness is the criterion for morality, beauty is the sole standard that art lives up to. Though they govern different realms respectively, the three are integrated into a holy trinity in the universe. And LiLi’s paintings, for all their messages, sentiments and charm, are works of aestheticism, with all the heart-thrusting strokes and flying colors. I believe, her art is like a blue bird set free to the skies, yet always in exile.