LITERATI ARTSPACE

What art touches our heart is always a touch of delicacy and sense. It has nothing to do with any epic works. The process of art creation is a mental adventure and self-reflection for artists. When we look at the pieces of artworks, we are actually searching for such experience of the artists, and combine it with our own senses – and in turn, internalising such into our own feelings.

 

This exhibition showcases two apparently distinct collections of Li Wei. However, if you take a closer look at the creative style of Li, it would not be difficult to realize that both collections share the same concept and message – the development of contemporary art and the insistence on traditional Chinese culture – which are common to many of her works.

 

In the Hongyinzhi (“the red carbon paper”) collection, natural sceneries like trees, valleys and rivers are painted “casually” on the transfer paper. Looking into the scene sinking into a sea of red, the organized silhouette of it is as intriguing as the fact such a daily material has been cleverly transformed into a creation of art. This is by no means a straightforward adaptation, but a touch of genius, a demonstration of the vast amount of thinking and execution that has gone into her work. The red carbon paper, in terms of both its appearance and its form and content, has become the unique “subject” and “language” in her creation. This also fits the characteristics of contemporary art perfectly.

 

If the hongyinzhi collection impresses you with its choice of materials and its application, then we shall appreciate the strong feelings for Li’s identity in her Fangshengchi ink on silk collection. It resembles the traditional ink paintings but with representations on contemporary ways of thinking and creative concepts. Viewers will often get disappointed if they insist on getting the meaning just by looking at superficial shapes because such dot-like shapes did not exist in traditional Chinese paintings. By removing the continuity in the painting, Li displays the traditional ink with all the materials at her disposal. Underneath all these materials, it is a creation in contemporary drawing and thinking. Looking at these alignments of “dots”, you can see the fishes vaguely on the silk. Step away and come back again, you would go through a “solid-hollow-solid” experience, which might give you a sense of “what you have seen is not what you think you have seen.”

 

Since her exhibition at the Today Art Museum in Beijing in 2009, the subsequent exhibitions of Li have always been full of surprises. Each of them does not seem to have anything to “see” and indeed, “seeing” is not the important, your mental experience is.

 

SHI Xin

At Beijing Caochangdi

2011-11-7

 

 

Carbon Paper

Li has long discovered the carbon paper as a medium for her work. Yet, due to the stereotype of it being “a tool to be used in the creation of something else”, it has kept unnoticed. The carbon paper has always played the role of the intermediary between two different media. Usually it is the draft on top and another kind of paper underneath. Above is the source; below is the product; the middle is temporary – something we throw away when we are done.

 

Li wanted to highlight the artistic value of the copy paper, making it the “product” on its own. It also implies the concept of looking at things from different perspective and challenging the usual understanding of the hierarchy of matters. Hongyinzhi adopts the most raw and plain drawing methods to deliver a mood by depicting our daily life – an indescribable mood and feeling in the midst of reality and unreality.

 

 

Dots

The concept of dots drawing can be correlated to modern printing technique. On the surface, Li is trying to reproduce the effect of colour priting by hand but in fact, it is almost a kind of self-torture; only to trigger viewer’s thoughts on the ever intensifying irony between industrialization and nature, and automation and craftsmanship. Dots drawing, in terms of its contribution in the artistic language, offers a unique way of appreciation. You see an abstract map of dots when you look closely but from a distance, you see the narrative of her theme – the different visual experience given by different viewing points. Li Wei is also one of those who are chasing the process of complete-symmetrical-replication-balance-harmony and finally perfection. During the process, the scene goes from an imbalanced one to a balanced one, generating the tension of continuity, the aesthetics of abstractness and the joy of narrative along its way.