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Ying
Li March 4 - March 25, 2009
Influence,
Inspiration and Choice: The Education of Ying Li
“Art is not the mirror of society but an essential part of the fabric of society, with a unique role to play, and more than anything else its role has to do will affirming the stubborn particularity of a person's experience.” Jed Perl The New Republic, December 24, 2008 This exhibition is not intended as a retrospective, nor should it be taken as such. Though it features the work of painter Ying Li from 1976 to 2006, my narrow focus as curator was on the task of placing a selection of the artist’s early pictures, created first as student, and later teacher in the People’s Republic of China, along-side canvases of her subsequent years as a painter in New York, in the hope of illuminating the roles of influence and inspiration in the development of an artist’s vision. It is a task somewhat at odds with Ying Li’s energetic and always forward-looking attitude, and so I must first acknowledge that this exhibition could not have been produced without the patient indulgence of the artist herself, for which I am deeply grateful. Central
to a comparison of Ying Li’s early canvases with that of her
recent work is that chapter in China’s modern history known
as the Cultural Revolution, the effects of which form the basic
influence in her education as an artist. It is the specific character
of this influence, combined with Ying Li’s instinctive and
eventually successful negotiation around its sweeping ambitions
that dramatically illustrate the resilient inner vision artists
inevitably rely on for direction. Ying
Li’s success required cutting a path through a difficult cultural
landscape. Her formal education took place during an infamous period
of repression and anti-intellectual censorship that established
radical new political limitations on all cultural activity in China.
For students of Western painting this meant they would be handicapped
by a filtered view of that painting’s history. For their senior
colleagues these political intrusions were catastrophic. Ying’s
father, Fangjie Li, ended up in a re-education and labor camp, the
Communist Party having suddenly declared subversive his once lauded
teaching of Russian literature. Western
style painting had found its way to China in the nineteenth century.
But in the decades following the 1949 revolution, and particularly
during the Cultural Revolution, Communist rule limited the available
historical record of Western art to choices deemed supportive of
the proletariat ideal, or items authored by artists with acceptable
political credentials. Modernism was probed tentatively, and only
deep enough to reach some of Picasso’s Blue Period street people.
Such politically motivated selectivity left the bulk of Modernism’s
expressive energy hidden, and it was this artificially truncated
narrative that served as Ying Li’s initial exposure to easel
painting. But
censorship proves a clumsy tool. The mind is too nimble, the eye
too quick. Apparently lost on those who rely on censorship is its
Achilles’ heel, located precisely in those sections that seem
to a keen observer missing, and therefore the most intriguing. Instead
of merely erasing inconvenient space, censorship tends to create
a corridor of lit rooms punctuated by unlit rooms the very darkness
of which beckons seductively. This is particularly true when censoring
visual imagery. A great deal of Modernism’s message is coded
into the minutiae of formal elements, like Van Gogh’s expressive
color, or the gestural tension of his impasto strokes. None of these
things would mean much to a party official whose job is to influence
students politically, but suggest extraordinary possibilities to
a painter. And it was within these possibilities that Ying Li found
inspiration. The
difference between them is that an artist can choose to respond
to influence, while inspiration is felt on too deep a level for
discourse. An artist’s ability to accept or reject influence
is often taken as a sign of growth and maturity. But inspiration
is not even perceptible until its transfer is complete. Inspiration
is private, idiosyncratic and easily relates to intuition, sensibility,
and those properties we associate with feeling. Influence on the
other hand is public. It transpires in a shared environment. It
can be located, mapped, imitated, absorbed or discarded. There
are other reasons artist’s choose covert methods when applying
inspired ideas. Unlike influence, the purely instinctive nature
of an artist’s inspiration is often difficult to covey in words.
As Arthur Koestler put it, “…true creativity often starts
where language ends.” Unlike the sort of discourse generated
by influence, a confession of inspiration inevitably suffers in
translation. According to several biographers, Arshile Gorky could
rhapsodize about Paolo Uccello’s rendering of feathers; Cézanne’s
letters left us with the tease of a “…petite sensation”;
and Barnett Newman wrote eloquently of an inspirational visit to
ancient Native-American burial mounds. And yet nothing in Gorky’s
work overtly resembles Uccello; I have yet to read a coherent description
of Cézanne’s little sensation; and finding a visual
correlation to burial mounds in Newman’s work is at best a
challenge. Such clues to an artist’s motivation are fascinating
and biographically informative, but they also function as indicators
of the inadequacy of language in explaining what actually moves
an artist to make characteristic choices. Ying
Li’s arrival in New York in the mid-eighties and her experience
in the MFA program at Parsons School of Design not only gave her
a chance to study the full spectrum of Modernism, it provided an
environment conducive to a reconciliation of the conservative style,
for which she had been trained in China, with her instincts for
exploring the physical qualities of oil paint. Though her study
in China was certainly successful in terms of her absorbing conventions
of late nineteenth century rendering, it was her years in New York
that made possible an exploration of those techniques that exploit
fully oil paint’s uniquely evocative properties. A painting
finished in her last weeks at Parsons is hung in this exhibition
at the artist’s suggestion beside a similarly shaped traditional
landscape, executed in the same year, to illustrate that together
they suggest her coming to terms with both periods in her life.
As evidence of influence these two pieces are continents apart.
But in terms of inspiration they represent a fusion of ideas that
causes little disturbance in the silent, flexible space of the mind. This
same flexibility extends to her understanding of formal issues,
as Ying Li is apparently comfortable drawing upon a wide expanse
of gestural possibility, marked at one end by the heavily worked
surface of Tiber River Storm, its physical density articulating
the light of the Umbrian landscape in which it was painted, and
that of Maryland Dove, Launched, dominated by a calligraphic,
dry-brush technique that floats comfortably beneath the picture
plane while allowing us to feel a similar sense of space and light
through a delicate weaving of color. This
ability to fuse disparate elements brings us to the most extraordinary
fact of Ying Li’s art, which is that she is a plein-air painter
with roots in the landscape-inspired canvases of Willem De Kooning.
Committed to optical cues (as was De Kooning, even prior to his
landscape period) Ying Li has become adept at finding a balance
between the paint’s color and textural qualities, but unlike
De Kooning, never at the expense of rendering a subject incomprehensible.
As art critic Faye Hirsch observed, “Although Li’s florid
gesture and color register the influence of Abstract Expressionists
[…] there is a kind of efficient communicativeness to her strokes…”,
to which I would add that there is also a clear deference to the
subject as something shared, which in some respects indicates residual
influence from her early years when art was taught as a practical
political tool. I don’t think it too presumptuous to consider
that perhaps Ying Li has chosen to embrace that part of her past
that emphasized communication – although it is certainly clear
she does so on her own terms. It is a long way from Anhui province to Manhattan. But undaunted by confining political limitations, and unintimidated by all the freedom New York can throw at an artist, Ying Li found her way, like all strong painters do, by adhering to personal imperative. From her early canvases to the most recent garden paintings there is always present a painterly inventiveness that illustrates Ying’s confidence in facing any and all influences. And such confidence is not gleaned from programs, fashions or curricula, but from that still mysterious factor we call, for lack of a better term, inspiration. Peter
Malone
Winter Pond, 2004-2007 Montecastello Sky #7, 2004 Valley,
Full Moon, 2005 Tiber
River, 2005 Model
Study, 1976
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