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Li Jinyuan’s Paintings: a struggle between Darkness and Light
Somehow, every painting is a trade-off between darkness and light, and this is especially true for Chinese painting, where the ink and the paper seem to be always in the process of negotiating the proportion of space that black and white will finally occupy, water mediating between the two protagonists. But it has always seemed to me that, in the paintings of Li Jinyuan, the trade-off between darkness and light becomes instead a struggle, which has also become the theme of the paintings. At a later stage, what he expressed so well with ink painting has inspired his oil paintings as well.
If I am not mistaken, I have seen paintings encompassing the whole career of Li Jinyuan : his first paintings on the steps of his master Feng Jianwu ; his patient exploration of the various regions of Sichuan, through which he found his personal style; the vivid paintings done during and after his travels in France and Thailand; the new exploration of the highlands of Abba and Liangshan that followed; the series made on the road of Mateo Ricci from the south of Italy to Beijing; more abstract paintings that mix together ink and golden acrylic; oil paintings suggesting the mystery surrounding the Tibetan and Yi highlands of Sichuan. Beyond the diversity of time, space and style, if I had to classify his works I would put them very simply into two categories: dark paintings and light paintings, each series complementing the other one.
The dark paintings testify to the difficulty that the light encounters in appearing and subsiding. Light seems for us a matter of fact, and we forget that it is obscurity that at first prevails in the universe and in our world as in our heart. In these works, the heaviness of darkness permeates the medium. The majesty of mountains becomes oppressive. The colors that are used make the black ink even darker. It is not that there is no light. It is that the light is fragile and in danger of being extinguished forever. Its presence is often noticed in the lower half of the painting, and one wonders if and how these sparks will rise throughout the obscurity. For sure, life is here - animals, shepherds, old women, and, while they walk, the same seemingly desperate struggle occurs within their hearts. Even in the paintings where golden acrylic is used, its main function seems to make us feel that the roots are struggling within the deep cave of the earth. Gold speaks about an inaccessible sun. The world of light and open air is dreamt from the heart of darkness.
In contrast, other paintings celebrate the irruption of light at the moment where the miracle just happens. It is a miracle indeed, of which nobody can account for. Birds from Thailand or from the Pyrenees mountains sing softly. The Sichuanese fog becomes almost fluorescent. The hometown of Mateo Ricci is bathed in the ten thousand colors of the world. The white snow tells us that the heart in its original state is an everlasting morning. What remains of ink, shade and black seems always on the point to annihilate itself and to enter into the full glory of the light.
For sure, some of Li Jinyuan’s paintings stand somewhere between those two extremes- and these particular paintings might represent the best of his production. Dark paintings run the risk of being a bit melodramatic. Light paintings might sometimes lack in vigor and focus. Those paintings that stand just between the triumph of darkness and the sudden victory of light are the ones that testify best to Li Jinyuan’s quest for a state of harmony in which everything finds its true nature and whole dimension. Then; as the painting is suspended between chaos and harmony, the two becomes one when light permeates the fibers of darkness while the darkness gives to the light the shadow under which the song of birds is to be heard.
After Li Jinyuan’s stay in France for six months (August 1995-February 1996) some people were shocked by the intensity, the crudity of the colors used in several paintings. I think that this was indicative of a stage in which the affirmation of the final victory of light over darkness was the inner experience to be conveyed by the artist. In his following works, Li Jinyuan reached a synthesis between this groundbreaking experience and the roots of Chinese paintings. For indeed, the use of colors is always a difficult process in Chinese paintings. And this is not to be seen as a limitation of this form of art: in its spiritual essence, Chinese painting is not interested in the colors at such, it is interested in their source, their origin, i.e. the miracle throughout which light appears and gives birth to the endless variety of colors, shapes and shadows. I see Li Jinyuan’s creative work exactly in this way: a quest towards the origin of light, a quest towards the roots, the source; a quest towards this spark of fire, a spark so utterly fragile and all the time rising again, till it puts all things ablaze. Now that his heart is assured of the ultimate triumph of light he wants to turn himself towards the origin of the fire, towards the first spark that grows and rises in the same way as does the seed of the tree.
What I just wrote about the struggle between light and darkness could be found in other dimensions of Li Jinyuan’s paintings, for instance in the tension between the simple and the tortuous - simple forms organizing the whole of the paintings and conflicting movements within it that often signify darkness at work in the outer and the inner world. More importantly, Li Jinyuan’s work is multidimensional. It can be read at the same time as an aesthetic manifesto, an allegory of Chinese recent history, a commentary on the painter’s own spiritual development, or an exercise in cross-cultural fertilization. It is the spiritual deepening that these works illustrate that is most striking to me. The struggle of which I am referring to is completely non-violent. It is a struggle towards meekness and self-dispossession, a struggle that makes Li Jinyuan more and more vulnerable to the forces that shape the world, a struggle that places him always more at the epicenter of the confrontation between ugliness and beauty, meekness and hatred, darkness and light.
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(Benoit Vermander)
From Li Jinyuan's painting to Claire Shen's photographs
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