Ying Li: Geographies

YING LI: GEOGRAPHIES

geographies

HAVER FORD COLLEGE

Ying Li

Acknowledgements Ying Li: I would like to thank Haverford College, the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, and Magill Library for all their support. My thanks also to the residency programs at Centro Incontri Umani Ascona, Switzerland, The Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, and the Telluride Painting School. Thanks as well to Matthew Callinan, James Weissinger, Terry Snyder, Bruce Bumbarger, John Goodrich, Rachel Xiao, Tess Bilhartz, and Padma Rajendran for making this show possible. I’m especially grateful to John Thornton for his beautiful video film “Synaesthesis,” and to Curt Cacioppo, whose powerful music and passionate understanding of visual art made our collaboration on “Synaesthesis” an inspiring journey. I’m particularly grateful to Matthew Callinan for encouraging me to write “From Michael’s Window,” and to Deborah Roberts for her thoughtful edits. My special thanks to Faye Hirsch for curating the show and writing an insightful essay; it was a great pleasure and learning experience to work with her on this show.

Faye Hirsch: I would like to thank Charles R. Dean, who introduced me to Ying Li’s paintings and has in many ways taught me to see them.

1

ying li geographies

This publication accompanies the exhibition Ying Li: Geographies, curated by Faye Hirsch and presented by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and Haverford College Libraries at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery & Sharpless Gallery of Magill Library, Haverford College, Haverford, PA, September 9 – October 7, 2016, and traveling to Sordoni Art Gallery, Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA, October 25 – December 18, 2016. exhibits.haverford.edu/yingligeographies “Ying Li: Geographies” is supported by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and Haverford College Libraries.

Designer and photographer: John Goodrich Editors: Deborah Roberts and James Weissinger Printed in Canada by Prolific Copyright 2016 © by Curtis Cacioppo, Faye Hirsch, Ying Li, and the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Haverford College. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by electronic, mechanical, or other means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

All Images © Ying Li

2

John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities/ Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery Koshland Director: Deborah Roberts Associate Director: James Weissinger Programs and Administrative Manager: Emily Cronin Associate Director, Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery and Campus Exhibitions: Matthew Seamus Callinan Financial and Administrative Assistant: Kerry Nelson Post-Baccalaureate Fellow: Christine Dickerson CFG Co-Managers: Kelly Jung & Sofia Tieze CFG Staff: Courtney Carter, Morgan Chien-Hale, Courtney Lau, Evan Hamilton, Rachel Xiao Haverford College Libraries Librarian of the College: Terry Snyder Library Conservator: Bruce Bumbarger Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery & Haverford College Libraries Haverford College 370 Lancaster Ave Haverford, PA 19041 haverford.edu/exhibits library.haverford.edu ISBN: 978-0-9906110-6-6

ying li

geographies SEPTEMBER 9 - OCTOBER 7, 2016

L I B R A R I E S

HAVERFORD COLLEGE, 370 LANCASTER AVENUE, HAVERFORD PA

4

From the Cities Series: Love from New York

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

From Michael’s Window Ying Li

S

oon after my husband Michael died, my family, friends, and students joined me at his Manhattan fifteenth-floor study to pack his books, which filled some one hundred-plus cardboard boxes. We moved them to Magill Library at Haverford College, where his collection of books is now located.

After his study was emptied, I stood in the middle of the room and felt a deep, dark hole in my chest.

I looked out the window; it was a bright day, and early wintry sun poured onto the brick wall of a

project building across the street, turning the rusty red into bright orange. Through the window I could see the Empire State Building to the east and a slim slice of the Hudson River to the west, beyond the Javits Center. I remembered Michael telling me that he had chosen this little studio apartment because he loved watching the big cruise ships docking while listening to the sound of their horns lingering in the air. I pulled out a sketchbook and started to draw what he saw outside the window. That was how I got back to work after he died.

2

Since that day, I have painted and drawn looking out from that single window. The scene is ever changing, bright or moody: gray clouds load the sky, autumn leaves cover the brownstone roofs, snowflakes swirl above the playground next to the project buildings, the red and green lights shine softly at the top of the Empire State Building on a quiet Christmas Eve. The scene has changed much since Michael died four years ago. I am no longer able to see the river.

Instead, behind the projects, layers of new buildings have been rising, expanding, bullying their way into the old buildings and pushing past my window frame vertically and horizontally. There are so many cranes on top of the constructions sites—now I am looking at an orange one, stretching and curving into impossible positions like a ballerina, picking

up something from below. The reflections on a new glass tower shoot into my eyes like bomb explosions, too bright to paint. And there is so much to paint.

Michael’s room now is covered with paint and crowded with unfinished paintings. He once said, half seriously and half teasingly, that there was no way he would let me paint in his study since I was such a messy painter. I am a much messier painter now.

—Ying Li Michael Gasster was a scholar and historian of modern Chinese history, and Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University. He and Ying met at the top of Yellow Mountain in China and were married in 1983.

3

City, Night and Day

2014-16 oil on canvas 40 x 30 in.

4

Sky Above Lago Maggiore #2

2013 mixed media on paper 9 x 12 in.

Left to right:

Waterfalls near Losone

2013 mixed media on paper 12 x 9 in.

Angela’s Garden #2 (Study for Nutty Pine)

2013 mixed media on paper 12 x 9 in.

Angela’s Garden #5 (Study for Old Pine)

2013 mixed media on paper 12 x 9 in.

Ying Li’s Art: Hinge Pin for Collaboration Curt Cacioppo

Y

ing Li and I collaborated in September 2015 on a concert/exhibition entitled Interiority and Panorama: an Intermedial Journey at the Centro Incontri Umani in Ascona, Switzerland. In the Sala Gioia at Monte Verità she displayed over a dozen new paintings created that summer during her return fellowship residency at the Center. A beautiful German Steinway grand piano was positioned in the space, and I performed

a series of my own compositions selected to complement the images on view. Audience members were invited to contemplate the works physically presented as the program unfolded. We then turned to digital media for the second installment of the evening, projecting two music videos that combined our work: Wuji (Infinity), which explores through a visual choreography Ying’s painting of the same

name with a track from my string quartet Impressioni venexiane; 1 and Sorriso a Catania (Smile in Catania), which pairs another of my string quartet offerings (this one expressly dedicated to Ying) with photographic images of Italy (my own) and Ying’s works on paper made during her first residency in Ascona and sojourn in Venice.2 The event culminated in the premiere of our multimedia work Synaesthesis I, which consisted of a silent film and the simultaneous live performance of the piano music that I composed in direct response. The journey progressed from an editorial juxtaposition of pre-existing works to a largely spontaneous generative reaction of one medium to another. In this, our first synaesthetic adventure, the visual stimulus prompts the music. In the second, the process reverses; at the time of this writing, Ying is painting in direct response to a playlist of my compositions previously unknown to her, with titles or other identifying marks hidden, channeling pure sound. Upon completion, it will be my turn again to reciprocate, and a chain of these exercises will be under way. Eventually we might be led to live sound and image improvisation.

6

Remembering the Hudson River 2016 oil on canvas 16 x 16 in.

My association with Ying and her late husband Michael Gasster spans almost 20 years. A love of jazz, an attachment to Italy, and other common interests brought us together. Above all, the dynamism of Ying’s art and the immediacy of creative action projected through it grabbed me right away. Equally important are the dual-

isms fundamental to her approach: the interplay of representational and abstract, visceral and delicate, lithic and diaphanous, propulsive and static. There is the obvious bi-cultural mixing in the work, but one also senses a deep temporal layering predicated on the artist’s passion for and knowledge of the centuries of artistic achievement to which she is heir. We can point to de Kooning as an influence, but just as readily discern gestures and templates reaching from much earlier antecedents, some by known artists and some anonymous. Michelangelo’s excoriated St. Bartholomew from The Last Judgment hovers transformed in the upper left quadrant of Ying’s very recent Remembering the Hudson River (2016); an Annunciation and Scenes from the Life of the Virgin frescoed in a 9th century cave church near Görem, Cappadocia, bear a striking similarity to her remarkable angels of 2001. We can also—as her husband Michael remarked—visualize something new in a painting of Ying’s already familiar to us, a quality in her work that lends it an interactive, playful touch. Including the covers that she has done for my CD releases, I have over a dozen Ying Li works in front of my eyes every day at home. Hardly a day passes that I don’t discover something I hadn’t seen before in at least one of them.

The feature that intrigues me the most in Ying’s canvases since Soft Snow (2009) is their robustly increasing three-dimensionality. The dense application of paint produces a hyper-landscape of its own—spiral and conical, shell-like forms sometimes close to an inch in thickness protrude from the surface; crevices, canyons, and glacial swaths

7 Soft Snow

2009 oil on canvas 18 x 14 in. (not in exhibition)

appear. In Synaesthesis I, I wanted to travel this terrain up close and glimpse its inner chambers.

Working with John Thornton, we were able to capture the topographical uniqueness of a number of Ying’s latest paintings and create the visual narrative that would serve as my musical catalyst.

The movement title is Reflections of Flames on Wet Pavement, and the video artist is Alexej Steinhardt HC 1999; https://vimeo.com/62641225

1

2 Our filmmaker John Thornton assisted with the montage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxLPosUCszc&feature=youtu.be

8

Left:

Mystery City #1 (detail)

2016 oil on linen 40 x 30 in.

Ying Li: Geographies Faye Hirsch

E

ven when standing still, painting on a terrace, Ying Li travels great distances. Born and raised in China, she abandoned her training as a social realist when she moved to New York in the 1980s, embracing Western expressionism and modernist abstraction. She spends months at a time at residencies and teaching gigs throughout North America and Europe, with freshly seen landscapes the trigger for her creative work. A prolific artist who paints rapidly and often strenuously before the views that inspire her, she nonetheless strays far from what

she sees, according primacy to the formal dictates of the work and to her internal impulses. Li has grown more daring over the past four years, the period covered in the present exhibition, in which she carries her signature gestural treatment of the medium to new lengths. The constant shift between the image and its physical conveyance constitutes the excitement of Li’s new work, its intensity and its pleasures. Squeezing paint directly from the tube onto the surface, raking it over the canvas with a palette knife, brushing it in staccato daubs or

overwriting it with swiftly gouged marks resembling urgent but unreadable text, Li pushes her images to the edge of coherence, an exhilarating position for both creator and viewer.

10

Ascona, Nutty Pine

2013 oil on linen 18 x 12 in.

It takes time to read a painting by Li, as it does to decipher a landscape by Cecily Brown or an interior

by Eugène Leroy. Two paintings of trees executed two years apart in the garden of the Centro Incontri Umani Ascona, Switzerland, where Li had residencies during the summers of 2013 and 2015, are instructive in demonstrating the range of legibility that marks her work. In the first, Ascona, Nutty Pine (2013), she directs her gaze to the expanse beyond the garden, taking in not only a pine jutting from a hill but, with equal weight, snow-capped mountains and the sky beyond. Viscous strokes cover all but a tiny patch of canvas, but a diagonal bifurcation into mainly green vegetation and blue-and-white distance ensures that we easily comprehend what is before us. The greenery is articulated in short strokes from smaller brushes, the blue and white in thick, slippery hatch-work. By contrast, in The Old Pine Tree Struck by Lightning (2015), from her later trip, the surface treatment feels more random. The tree, located at the center of the composition (and within the garden itself, close at hand), is a loose gathering of marks, which include, in addition to brushstrokes, lines applied directly from paint tubes or excavated with the handle of the brush. While we still make out the overall disposition nature has provided—a tree, the garden bursting with color below, the perfunctory view beyond—we understand that the scales have tipped toward material and imagina-

11

The Old Pine Tree Struck by Lightning 2015 oil on linen 30 x 24 in.

12

The Last Tree

2015 oil on canvas 20 x 16 in.

tion. It is fitting, given the title of the work, that the entire painting feels electrified, the lines of pink, black, and orange oils constituting visual live wires. Same place, equal passion, but radically different effects: on the one hand, a lyrical take, with a whiff of Chaim Soutine (one of Li’s inspirations); on the other, an explosion into patent invention, as the representation is vanquished, in a sense, by the oils directly comprising it, and by their unfettered deployment.

Emblematic of Li’s quest for intensity is another recent tree: The Last Tree (2015), its subject an oak in her yard at Haverford College which she has painted many times over the years. She says the title indicates that this will be her final portrayal of the tree, for she associates the subject closely with her late husband, Michael Gasster, who died in 2012. In a painting of five years earlier, Common Tree (2010-11), the oak is comparatively tame, set solidly in its yard, properly casting shade as light glints off its trunk.1 Demarcated in “strokes” of black from the tube, the oak in The Last Tree similarly stands at the center of the composition—but, like the old pine in Switzerland, barely holds together. It resembles a skeletal hand, corporeal as much as arboreal; its trunk is the wrist and its characteristic spreading lower branches the fingers. Is the stick-figure hand waving goodbye or clawing toward immanence within the overall jumble of multicolored strokes? Might it not be a distillation of the artist’s own hand, the imprimatur of her fabrication of the image? We feel the scene as penumbral, darkness creeping in at the edge, an artificial yellow illuminating the dissolve of its con-

13

Common Tree

2010-11 oil on canvas 40 x 30 in. (not in exhibition)

stituent substance. We find traces of the long history of the artist’s representation; this tree is almost a shorthand for the common tree we have come to recognize. Such traces help produce, as Roland Barthes might have put it, an excess of bliss in Li’s work: “There are those who want a text (an art, a painting) without a shadow, without the ‘dominant ideology’: but this is to want a text without fecundity, without productivity, a sterile text.…The text needs its shadow: this shadow is a bit of ideology, a

bit of representation, a bit of subject: ghosts, pockets, traces, necessary clouds: subversion must produce its own chiaroscuro.” 2

T

14

The City

2014-16 oil on linen 68 x 38 in.

he paintings in this exhibition sample work made since Li’s last show in 2012 at the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College, where she has been a professor of painting since 1997. Tragically, the night of the show’s opening, Gasster, to whom she had been married for 30 years, suffered a stroke and died within a few weeks. It was a huge blow. Disconsolate, Li moved her working studio to Gasster’s office on the 15th floor of an old Chelsea apartment building with a panorama of the city itself up to the Empire State Building. When she was finally able to work again, she began by painting scenes from the windows—“From Michael’s Window,” as she titled an exhibition of those works at New York’s Painting Center in 2014.3 Her city work is ongoing, and includes grids of mixed-medium works on paper, in which New York is seen in all manner of light and weather. The grid itself alludes to the arrangement of panes in the apartment’s old-fashioned casement windows. Li has since added paintings on canvas and panel in various sizes and shapes, sometimes also arranged in grids.

The City Paintings selected for “Geographies” represent just a handful of the many she has completed.

Time passes in them; the sun rises and sets, buildings are constructed, city lights blink on or off. The work of mourning undergoes its steady course. A notion of constant flux within the same view is essential, referring both to the important relationship between Li and what she sees, and to an internal state of shifting subjectivity and mood.4

15

Michael’s Window

2013-14 mixed media on paper 70 x 64 in.

From the Cities Series: Night and the City

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

16

Right:

From the Cities Series

(clockwise from top left):

Reflection in Red

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

Gently

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

Blue as Night

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

Drifting

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

Night Window on Chelsea

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

Opaque Blue Triangle

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

17

18

Grid of “Cities� paintings (in progress)

All paintings: 2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

19

20

Li met her husband, a renowned scholar of Chinese history fluent in her native language, on Yellow Mountain in southern Anhui Province in 1981.5 “What are the chances?” she likes to ask, for at that point very few Americans traveled in that part of China. Gasster and Li courted and married against tough odds, given the times; Li moved to New York at age 32 speaking no English. One can only imagine how deep their bond must have been. Born in Beijing in 1951, Li was teaching at Anhui Normal University in Hefei, from which she had received a degree in art; she went back to school in New York and earned her M.F.A. at Parsons in 1987. Shortly after her arrival in New York, the Whitney Museum mounted a retrospective of Willem de Kooning; to Li, who had seen little Western art in general (all of it in reproductions) and even less postwar abstraction, the work was revelatory. A vocabulary that had come to seem familiar, perhaps even worn out, to contemporary American artists felt liberating to Li, who began her artistic life during the Cultural Revolution, a teenager painting social realist propaganda in a poor rural village where she had been sent to be “reeducated” by the peasants. Her lifelong adherence to gestural abstraction must be understood in this context; it provides a lesson in the many things a style can mean and reminds us that style is neither formally static nor necessarily bound by period.

In Gasster’s office Li found solace in seeing daily what she knew her husband had seen, and she attempted to capture in her City Paintings the urban energy that he had loved. With her husband, Li delighted in the life of the city she was to paint later

Houston Person

2010 ink on paper 11 x 6 in.

from his window. He was a jazz aficionado, and she immediately began accompanying him to gigs in clubs around town; sketching the musicians during performances, she created a years-long series of portraits that are sampled in “Geographies.” And Gasster supported Li in all of her career endeavors, waiting patiently or sometimes joining her as she traveled to find the landscapes that after 1994 became her steady inspiration. Through it all, she says, he was her closest viewer, so that now she was left to imagine

21

The Hudson River

2016 oil on panel 16 x 16 in.

what he might have observed about the work she was making. The City Paintings began as an attempt to see what he would have seen and hear what he would have said, even as Li cultivated an internal dialogue that was about to revitalize her practice.

The City Paintings group includes the earliest and the most recent works on view in this exhibition.

In the works on paper, using a variety of mediums (pastel, marker, charcoal, watercolor, acrylic, oil stick, etc.), Li repeatedly trains her eye on a roof terrace

22

Above:

The Crude City

2016 oil on panel 18 x 16 in.

Above right:

The Red Winter

2016 oil on panel 17 x 16 in.

across the way and the buildings beyond; on construction cranes; on the Empire State spire rising in clear view or shrouded in atmospheric effects; or on those effects alone, in abstractions of weather and changing light. We see in the development of the City Paintings a trajectory similar to that of Nutty Tree and Old Pine Struck

by Lightning: the most recent works in the series are the most abstract and materially adventurous. In The Hudson River (2016), thick paint is troweled across a 16-inch panel. Is the river that deep blue stretch at the center, the radiant orange a lit city surrounding or a sunset above?

Or is the whole meant to evoke a close-up of water itself, riven by reflections? It is impossi-

ble to say; Li slathers oil on then scrapes it along in thick swipes, with different hues striated side by side in each. At one point the swipes meet in a spike wave of thickly raised edges; behind, glimpsed within the flap, is simply more thick paint, enhancing the impression of impenetrable depth. “A painting closes to open again,” she has said.6

L

i has long spoken of the influence of Chinese calligraphy in her art; in her City works on paper she uses a stamp with the Chinese name, “Bi Ru” (she translates it as “The-Way-It-Is”), given to her by the esteemed calligraphy teacher, Leon L.Y. Chang (1909-2009), with whom, homesick, she began studying privately in the 1980s. Calligraphy is always implicit in the immediacy and specific energy with which Li renders her strokes—in her attempt to capture the spirit of the image in intersecting and overlapping gestures propelled by the wrist. In her most recent paintings, however, both the latest City Paintings (from 2016) and the second Switzerland group (2015), Li began “writing” with the paint, making marks resembling those that constitute script of all sorts, but are especially prominent in Chinese characters. We see them in the tumbling scaffold at the left in The Crude City (2016) and in the dense layering of The Red Winter (2016).

And we see them more delicately dropping from the top of Writing the City (2016), which is among the largest paintings that Li has made. She began this work in the early morning at the Chelsea studio and continued through the night, stopping at 3 AM. In fact, despite what looks like a blue sky, Writing the City is in her mind a night painting, and the many

23

City Series #18 (Housing Project with Blue Fence) 2014-15 oil on canvas 10 x 10 in.

bright colors are fireworks of the kind she would see frequently on holiday evenings above Ascona, Switzerland. In other words, she says, the painting is an “accumulation” of impressions from different places; the crane is there, and a building, but only in the vaguest fashion: the cascading pink “letters” could be a loosely architectonic structure. And a streak at the top that starts in green and blue and trails into orange might be a whistling explosion of fireworks. In a grid of small mixed-medium

24

Writing the City

2016 oil on linen 72 x 48 in.

Above:

Window on the Island

2014 oil on canvas 40 x 30 in.

Right:

City Series #2 (Rising)

2014 oil on panel 10 x 10 in.

26

paintings on panel, the crane appears as an “elegant” or “magenta” ideogram (as per the titles); in one painting the rise and fall of the lines transform the drawing at the center into an ideogrammatic sailboat.

In such passages one feels Li is writing as much as painting, a doubling she shares with a number of contemporary artists; one thinks of Suzanne McClelland or Louise Fishman, among others. As critic Nancy Princenthal describes

From the Cities Series: (left to right)

An Elegant Crane

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

Seagulls

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

Magenta Crane

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

Crane as a Sailboat

2014-16 mixed media on panel 10 x 8 in.

27

a painting by Fishman: “Some straight and others bent, [its] contours…suggest rudimentary letterforms, and also a maze: we are invited to trace—to read—the composition’s passages and blockages as a wordless narrative.” 7 In the case of Writing the City, that “wordless” narrative reads from top to bottom, more scroll than book. Fireworks, the most Chinese of inventions, are triggered by a memory of Ascona and explode in a New York City scene where there

were no actual fireworks; abstract letterforms are embedded in mute gestural strokes executed with the wrist of a calligrapher. We read Li’s geographies across place, time, and genre.

Still, as gestural abstraction, Li’s paintings read first and foremost as Western. Soutine and de Kooning have clearly left their marks. Li’s early artistic training at Anhui is just as much in play, though

Left:

Mystery City #1

2016 oil on linen 40 x 30 in.

Above:

Housing Project (A Perfect Day) 2015 oil on panel 10 x 10 in.

Right:

Housing Project (on a Wintry Day) 2015 oil on panel 10 x 10 in.

29

30

channeled through a different culture’s visual language.8 In an essay for a 2010 exhibition at the List Gallery at Swarthmore College, Andrea Packard wrote, “Li’s creative process models the ‘six principles of Chinese painting’ articulated

by Xie Hie (Hsien Ho) in the 5th century…most importantly, the expression of a ‘spirit resonance’ or vitality.” 9 This refers to the first of Xie Hie’s principles, qiyun shengdong (“spirit resonance, vital movement/producing movement”). In considering the sometimes wild energy of Li’s work, one might also remember Xie Hie’s second rule, gufa yongbi (“bone method, using the brush”), later interpreted as “vigorous strength in brushwork.” 8 Li told William Corbett of having to make “millions of strokes in Chinese painting classes.”

Corbett wrote, “Today she sees that those years of training give her a solid foundation in technique and a tradition that, when the time came, she could break free from.” 11 More specifically, it also gave her the means to occupy that new tradition in a fresh way. Her liberation brought with it a bodily memory of the past.

Indeed, the most primal of Li’s many geographies is her spanning of East and West, the two lives comprising her formative years in China during the Cultural Revolution and her voluntary exile in America. In scrutinizing her manner of expressionism, which she adopted as a language of freedom after the repressiveness of her early artistic education, one discerns a very particular formulation of Li’s identity—at least as it finds an articulation in the painterly language of her adopted

country. One might argue that she is engaging in a “deterritorialization” of Western expressionism, a language not her own, but one that she adopts and transforms, estranging it from its historical context and usages. “How many people today live in a language that is not their own?” asked Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in the early 1980s as they commented on the writings in German of the Czech Jew Franz Kafka. Such a cross-fertilization allowed for an expressive intensity, as Deleuze and Guattari saw it: “To any symbolic use of language,” they urged, “any signifying or even significant use, oppose a purely intensive use.

Arrive at a perfect and unformed expression—an intense, material expression.” 12 Embodying her dual history in the physical execution of her work, Li re-channels the language of Western expressionism—most particularly its constituent gesture, the mark of “authenticity” that has always long signaled a direct relationship to an internal emotional state. Looking closely, we sense her reformulation in the sheer freshness of each of her paintings.

A

quick look at Li’s CV reveals the many (sometimes remote) locales where she has painted; China, significantly, is not among them. She insists that, for her, there is too much emotional baggage in her home country. Hers is not a nostalgic or melancholic art, which makes it all the more remarkable that the vital paintings she has made in the past four years were created in the wake of such great personal loss. For Li, the time is now. Bustling Chelsea, the dramatic moun-

31

Nufenen Pass #2

2013 oil on linen 18 x 24 in.

tains of Switzerland and Telluride, the tumultuous ocean of Cranberry Island, Maine—all have provided her with possibilities in considering the present, what is before her eyes, and of making it feel as though it is unfolding before our eyes.

Even The Last Tree, potentially an image trapped by

the past, is redeemed through the apparatus of its tumultuous making, demanding a reading in the moment.

Li’s initial residency in Switzerland marked her first trip abroad after her husband’s death. She

Left:

Palagnedra

2013 oil on linen 20 x 20 in.

Right:

Ascona, Summer Flowers

2013 oil on linen 18 x 12 in.

Far right:

Ascona, Rain

2013 oil on linen 18 x 12 in.

32

traveled all around, she reports, so that the scenes in the 2013 group were created not only in the garden above Ascona, but before the grand vista of Nufenen Pass, in the Onsernone Valley, and just over the Italian border, in Luino, on Lago Maggiore.13 These divide into two types: more pictorial works, such as the studies of Nufenen Pass, in which we compre-

hend the scene via the green slope on which Li stood and the huge spread of mountains in the distance, or the small church of Palagnedra whitewashed against a purple hill; and abstractions such as the purely atmospheric vertical, Ascona, Rain (2013), or Ascona, Summer Flowers (2013), with its three horizontal blue stripes indicating sky above a patchy netherworld of earthen

34

Left:

Nufenen Pass #1

2013 oil on linen 18 x 24 in.

Above:

Rhone River (Fog Lifting)

2015 oil on linen 16 x 16 in.

Right:

Ascona Valley

2015 oil on linen 30 x 24 in.

36

Left:

Valle Onsernone (After Sunset) 2013 oil on linen 12 x 12 in.

Above:

Valle Onsernone (Passing) 2013 oil on linen 12 x 12 in.

Above right:

Valle Onsernone (Red and Green) 2013 oil on linen 12 x 12 in.

browns and floral yellow and pink. More extreme, and in their striated swipes more indicative of what was to come, are the three Valle Onsernone paintings, small square oils on linen slathered with paint. In one we make out a lake nestled in the valley, but only in the broadest terms; here the point is the energy of broad gestures with the palette knife. “Space without description,� says Li of these works.

Next, in summer 2014, came a residency at the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation on Great Cranberry Island, off Acadia National Park in

38

Maine. For Li, who has long been fascinated by the abstract possibilities inherent in water, the wild coast was a bonanza. One gets a good sense of the site in Red Rock Point #6 (2014), with its outcropping to the right and bits of orange and yellow stuck in the rocks, as surf pounds along an irregular shoreline. In a charming detail of Escaping the Tide (2014), Li incorporates an actual crab she found in one of the rock pools. The water is close, right beneath her. The Foundation transformed old boathouses and outbuildings into studios; one of these is the subject of a large interior, The Old Boathouse with 3 Windows (2014), with its ramshackle construction indicated by wobbling lines of squeezed-out paint, a rollicking orange for the embrasure of the big window.

Above, left:

The Old Boat House with 3 Windows

2014 oil on canvas 30 x 30 in.

Above:

Escaping the Tide

2014 oil on canvas 16 x 16 in.

Right:

Red Rock Point #6

2014 oil on canvas 20 x 24 in.

39

40

41

Left:

The Big Wave #4

2014 oil on canvas 22 x 28 in.

Right:

The Pool (Cranberry Island)

2014 oil on canvas 18 x 24 in.

42

Left:

Ascona (Seen from Angela’s) 2015 oil on linen 18 x 24 in.

Right:

Rhone River

2015 oil on linen 18 x 24 in.

43

After Li’s return to Switzerland, she spent two weeks in the fall of 2015 teaching at the Ah Haa School for the Arts in Telluride, Colorado. Arriving at night, she found her room had a terrace, but she could not tell what she was going to see the next day. Arising very early, she discovered a “fantastic” view of the mountains before her, and she quickly covered the terrace in plastic sheets so she could paint right away. It began to snow, and she worked through the storm; as the day passed, the sun became hot and melted the snow into a slippery mess. Still she continued.

44

Li was stunned by the view and the climate in Telluride, Colorado; she was struck by the difference between these mountains and those of Switzerland. “Fresher, somehow,” she said, “and bulkier.” Four of her Telluride paintings were done on the terrace. The first, subtitled Sunrise (2015), shows the sun a hot yellow above the peaks; its ecstatic execution is reminiscent of paintings by Charles Burchfield or Arthur Dove, in which elements of the landscape seem to vibrate. A lavender square in another of the four is testimony to the purely invented elements of the work; corresponding to nothing in the actual view, it “made the painting a little tender,” as Li has explained, cooling the extreme contrasts of hue in the rest of the scene. Other Telluride paintings, more frontal, were done outside her classroom, often in the waning hours of daylight after her class finished at 3:30. An example is Telluride #10 (Night Falls) (2015), meant to depict, in her words, “that incredible moment when

Top left:

Telluride #10 (Night Falls)

2015 oil on linen 12 x 12 in.

Bottom left:

Telluride #2 (Lavender Square) 2015 oil on linen 18 x 24 in.

Right:

Telluride #1 (Sunrise)

2015 oil on linen 16 x 12 in.

45

46

47

Left:

Telluride #5 (Dancing in Snow) 2015 oil on linen 12 x 16 in.

Right:

Telluride #6 (The Big Storm) 2015 oil on linen 20 x 20 in.

48

Left:

Telluride #7 (Blue Night)

2015 oil on linen 20 x 20 in.

Right:

Telluride #9 (Sliding)

2015 oil on linen 12 x 16 in.

49

the sun drops behind the mountains.”

Bright light is still present near the top of the scene; below, gathering darkness and shadows are dramatically indicated by thick swaths of indigo, cobalt blue and black.

Nature is the trigger, but the painting is truly an imaginative gloss.

50

After the City Paintings, the second largest group in “Geographies” consists of work done during Li’s two sojourns in Switzerland. It includes both oils and a large group of works on paper. This time she took only a single trip away from the residency, working mainly outside in its garden, high above Ascona. Here, she reports, the paintings were determined by her shifting focus.

It was a remarkably hot summer, given the altitude, a fact reflected in the high-key pal-

Top left:

Mist, Lago Maggiore

2013 mixed media on paper 9 x 12 in.

Left:

Towards the Alps #3

2013 mixed media on paper 9 x 12 in.

Right:

Fog Passing

2013 mixed media on paper 9 x 12 in.

51

52

ette of a number of the works. What the Buddha Sees (2015), a trio of vertical canvases, demonstrates Li’s shifting focus; the title refers to a small Buddhist shrine in the garden. The first, subtitled Valley, regards the distant view beyond small flags hanging from the shrine. These are fluttering lines of red, yellow, and green at the left; most of the painting is flattened into cool light blue and white hatching strokes. The second painting is of the garden itself, a riot of pastel colors that flattens into an allover play of quick, truncated lines and gestures. By contrast, while the close-at-hand colors of the garden are present in the third painting, Light, the strokes are thicker and seem to liquefy on the surface, as if melting in the heat. Three small square paintings, 12 x 12 inches, are among the most abstract of the Switzerland paintings; in one, a pale violet squiggle indicates a lizard scurrying through the brush.

Li will continue to travel and is even now planning a third trip to Ascona and a second to Telluride. She said she longs to return to

Left to right:

What the Buddha Sees (Valley) 2015 oil on linen 24 x 18 in.

What the Buddha Sees (Garden) 2015 oil on linen 24 x 18 in.

What the Buddha Sees (Light) 2015 oil on linen 24 x 18 in.

Left:

Ascona Valley (Lizard Passing) 2015 oil on linen 12 x 12 in.

Right:

Ascona Valley (Sunburn)

2015 oil on linen 12 x 12 in.

Far right:

Ascona Valley (Moonburn) 2015 oil on linen 12 x 12 in.

54

Fogo Island, Newfoundland, the wildest place she has been. Back in Chelsea, the city continues to change and she records its permutations from the casement windows on the 15th floor. Her pace is quick; she captures the essence of what she wants of a scene in the space of hours, though she frequently returns to the painting, even many months

later. She may well turn to a less frenetic pace and effort as time passes; the technique plein air is not always gentle to those who rely on it. But for now Li is working at the height of her powers. In each work she strives for an intensity of expression born of the body and the heart, seeking to capture and reinvent the spirit of faraway places.Â

I am grateful to Ying Li for her generous conversations with me in spring 2016. Any remarks by her not attributed to a specific source were made to me during that time.

—F.H.

Li was supported for entry at Anhui Normal University by a professor who convinced administrators to overlook both her gender and her background, which carried the “taint” of her father’s arrest by Communist forces. Li’s father had been sent to a labor camp for ten years as an “enemy of revolution,” and she and her mother were sent off to different towns as workers.

8

Andrea Packard, “Ying Li’s ‘Spirit Resonance,’” Ying Li, op. cit., n. 2.

9

1

It was included with a number of other paintings of the tree in a 2012 exhibition at Dartmouth College, the annual artist-in-residence exhibition, and is illustrated in Ying Li, exh. cat., Hanover, NH, Jaffe-Friede Gallery, Hopkins Center for the Arts, Dartmouth College, 2012.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller, New York, Will and Wang, 1975, p. 32.

2

56

The show was accompanied by a catalogue with a poem

by William Corbett. Ying Li: From Michael’s Window, New York, The Painting Center, Oct. 28-Nov. 22, 2014.

3

4 Faye Hirsch, “The Interiorized Landscapes of Ying Li,” Ying Li, exhibition brochure, Swarthmore, PA, List Gallery, 2010, n.p.

5 Li’s solo exhibitions are often accompanied by catalogues in which there are sketches of her biography. One of the best biographical essays is by Peter Malone, “Inspiration, Influence and Choice: The Education of Ying Li,” in Ying Li: Paintings, Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York, March 4-25, 2009.

6 To William Corbett, in “Ying Li: The Thing Seen,” Ying Li, op. cit., n. 1, p. 4.

Nancy Princenthal, “Louise Fishman: Language Lessons,” Louise Fishman, ed. Helaine Posner, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase New York et al, 2016, p. 51.

7

Grove Art Online, “China,” V, 5: Painting Theory and Criticism.

10

11

William Corbett, op. cit., n. 4, p. 3.

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Robert Brinkley, “What Is a Minor Literature,” Mississippi Review, vol. 11, no. 3 (Winter/Spring 1983), p. 19.

12

A number of these paintings were exhibited at the Gallery of the College of Staten Island, Apr. 9-May 14, 2014; the exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Xico Greenwald.

13

57

Cranberry Island, Red Rock Point #4 2014 oil on canvas 22 x 28 in.

58

Born in Beijing, China, Ying Li graduated from Anhui Normal University in 1977, where she then taught for six years. She immigrated to the United States in 1983, and received an M.F.A. from the Parsons School of Design, NY in 1987.

Her work has been featured internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions, at the Centro Incontri Umani Ascona in Swizterland; the ISA Gallery in Italy; the Enterprise Gallery in Ireland; the Museum of Rocheforten-Terre in France; the Lohin Geduld Gallery, the Elizabeth Harris Gallery, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York; the Gross McCleaf Gallery and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia; and the Green Hut Gallery in Portland, Maine. She was the Donald Jay Gordon Visiting Artist and Lecturer at Swarthmore College and Artist-in-Residence at Dartmouth College, the McMillan Stewart Visiting Critic, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, as well as the recipient of various Residential Fellowships in Switzerland, Spain, Ireland, and France. Her work has been covered in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. Li is currently a Professor of Fine Arts at Haverford College.

Faye Hirsch is an editor and critic who has published widely on contemporary art, including more than 100 articles and reviews in Art in America, where she was a senior editor from 2003 to 2013.

She is co-author of Dancing with the Dark: The Prints of Joan Snyder (2011), which accompanied a traveling retrospective of that artist’s prints organized by the Zimmerli Museum, Rutgers

University. She has written book and catalogue essays on a broad range of artists, most recently Robert Kushner, Claudette Schreuders and Carl Ostendarp. Prior to Art in America she was editor in chief at Art on Paper and senior editor at Print Collector’s Newsletter. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Art from Yale University in 1987, and has taught at the universities of Oregon (Eugene) and Arizona (Tucson), SVA, Rhode Island School of Design, and the Yale School of Art. She is presently an associate professor and director of the MFA program at the School of Art + Design, Purchase College, SUNY.

Curt Cacioppo is a composer of international distinction whose music has been commissioned by the Chicago and Milwaukee Symphonies, the Emerson String Quartet, and many other esteemed ensembles and soloists worldwide.

His work is represented on 16 albums, including the Grammy-nominated Ritornello on Navona Records. As a pianist with an active performing schedule, he programs works of fellow composers as well as his own, and is at home in standard art song and chamber music repertoire. He has collaborated with a variety of contemporaries in the arts and letters, pursuing intersections with the visual worlds of Ying Li, Lia Laterza, Renato d’Agostin, and Vladimir Tamari, and setting poetry of Friedrich Thiel, Claudio Saltarelli, Renzo Oliva, and Luigi Cerantola. Cacioppo involves himself deeply with Native American Studies. Much of his output expresses this aspect, such as the cantata Wolf on a text by Mohawk author and artist Peter Blue Cloud.

59

Avishai Cohen

2016 ink on paper 11 x 8½ in.

Front/back cover

& inside front cover:

The Hudson River (detail)

2016 oil on panel 16 x 16 in.

Right:

Remembering the Hudson River (detail) 2016 oil on canvas 16 x 16 in.

60

Acknowledgements Ying Li: I would like to thank Haverford College, the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, and Magill Library for all their support. My thanks also to the residency programs at Centro Incontri Umani Ascona, Switzerland, The Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, and the Telluride Painting School. Thanks as well to Matthew Callinan, James Weissinger, Terry Snyder, Bruce Bumbarger, John Goodrich, Rachel Xiao, Tess Bilhartz, and Padma Rajendran for making this show possible. I’m especially grateful to John Thornton for his beautiful video film “Synaesthesis,” and to Curt Cacioppo, whose powerful music and passionate understanding of visual art made our collaboration on “Synaesthesis” an inspiring journey. I’m particularly grateful to Matthew Callinan for encouraging me to write “From Michael’s Window,” and to Deborah Roberts for her thoughtful edits. My special thanks to Faye Hirsch for curating the show and writing an insightful essay; it was a great pleasure and learning experience to work with her on this show.

Faye Hirsch: I would like to thank Charles R. Dean, who introduced me to Ying Li’s paintings and has in many ways taught me to see them.

YING LI: GEOGRAPHIES

geographies

HAVER FORD COLLEGE

Ying Li