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BY QUITTERIE GOUNOT

In print | Published January 28, 2010

Swarthmore students and faculty are in for a treat. The List Gallery is currently holding an exhibit of the artist Ying Li’s work. This exhibit, which features some thirty paintings and drawings, is sure to evoke a powerful response. Spanning many styles, techniques, and settings, it is a visual journey through a culturally and emotionally rich life. Its stunning depth and breadth of expression make it well worth the detour.

Li’s life story bears the mark of adversity. A native of China, she experienced the Cultural Revolution of 1965-1977. This period was trying for her family. After her father, a professor of Russian literature, was accused of sedition, her family was broken up. She was “re-educated” in a hard labor camp in the countryside and, on occasion, had to create propaganda murals for the government.

When political repression eased, she studied art at the Anhui Teachers’ University. There, she learned oil painting in the Western style. In 1983, she immigrated to the United States and obtained her Master’s of Fine Arts degree at Parsons School of Design. Today, Li is Chair of the Art Department at Haverford College.

If Li is haunted by anything, however, it appears to be her creative compulsion rather than her past. Li said, “I see art as an expression of the artist. You just have to do it.” Her creative fever is clear in the intensity of her deliberate, sweeping brushstrokes, the density of her compositions, and the contrast between the colors she uses.

Through the thickness of oil paint, she creates different levels of meaning. She uses paint to play with the texture of her paintings. Andrea Packard, the director of the Swarthmore List Gallery, said, “Painting is a very elastic medium so it allows for a response to a subject over time.” While the painting might appear frozen in place, it is actually a dynamic entity.

The play on texture makes Li’s paintings interesting from both close up and far away. At a close proximity, one gets a glimpse of the intricacy of her work, the precision and passion inherent in her brushstrokes.

At a distance, one acquires perspective on the work as a whole, as a set of signs that communicate something greater together. These paintings invite a sort of double-take and call for careful and active looking. Li said, “I don’t want people to look at my paintings in one second. A painting is a slow process. First, you see the boat, then the paint, then relief, then tension…”

Li’s paintings, while straying from strict representation, are deeply imbued with setting. The notion of place is at their very core. Indeed, Li’s artistic career has taken her to a variety of places. It is impossible to really talk to her without hearing names such as “Fogo” (Capeverde) and “Montecastello” (Italy). These places have spurred Li’s personal and artistic growth. She seeks to both know and call upon them through her work. Li said, “Every place I have been [to,] I am attached to. I think about it; I dream about it.” About Fogo specifically, she said, “There are so many layers to that place. I really want to get to the center of it, like when you peel an onion.”

Li takes the viewer along on her trips in a subtle, often fairly abstract way. Transcending simple illustration, she aims to conjure moods or atmospheres. For example, she evokes natural elements such as water, earth, and sky without really representing them. She wants to bring not just the physical beauty of a place to the canvas, but also its “people, history, culture, and sentiment.” As such, Packard has described Li’s work as “journeys in paint.” Faye Hirsch, senior editor of Art in America, wrote, “[These places’] remarkable diversity results purely from the interior dialogue she carries on with nature and her own artistic process.”

As for any political or social function, Li was insistent on the notion of her art as self-contained. She said, “Art is a language with its own integrity. It extends on its own, interconnected like a spider web.” Although she appreciates the artistic freedom she finds in the United States, the denunciation of propaganda is not an overt goal on hers. Rather, her experiences of censorship and repression are biographical elements that color her life and inform her art.

Ying Li’s work is already up in the List Gallery in the Lang Performing Arts Center. This Thursday, January 29th, she will be at Swarthmore to give a lecture on the exhibit at 4:30, followed by a reception. Come see art that is, in Packard’s words, “about engagement in the deepest sense—with places, paints, landscapes, and the rectangle of the canvas.”

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