Ying Li weather report
I am profoundly grateful to Haverford College, especially The John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, the Phlyssa Koshland Professorship Fund, the Ballinglen Foundation, the Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve, and the Frances Niederer Artist-in-Residence at Hollins University. My deepest thanks to Matthew Seamus Callinan, Barry Schwabsky, John Goodrich, Conrad Herwig, Jenine Culligan, Elise Schweitzer, and Corinne Fenner. Your wisdom, support, and guidance made this exhibition possible.
—Ying Li
Front/back cover:
Roanoke Valley, Twilight (detail)
2024 oil on linen 16 x 20 in.
This page:
The Witness Tree #1 (detail)
2023 oil on linen 17 x 21 in.
Ying Li weather report
This volume is published on the occasion of the exhibition Ying Li: Weather Report, a joint exhibition at Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery and Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia, PA. Support for the exhibition has been provided by The John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Haverford College and Gross McCleaf Gallery.
© Copyright 2024 by Ying Li, Barry Schwabsky, and The John B.Hurford ‘60 Center for the Arts and Humanities, Haverford College. 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.
John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities
Koshland Director: Zainab Saleh
Associate Directors: Matthew Seamus Callinan and James Weissinger
Assistant Director: Kelly Jung
Post-Baccalaureate Fellow: Manasi Eswarapu
Administrative Assistant: Kerry Nelson
Exhibits Co-Managers: Ela Kowardy and Jack Stadnicki
Exhibits Assistants: Adriana Cruz-Soto, Lakshmi V Natesan, and Lucy Frank
Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College haverford.edu/exhibits
Gross McCleaf Gallery, Philadelphia, PA grossmccleaf.com
ISBN: 978-0-9998518-7-6
Catalog design: John Goodrich
Printed in Canada
Ying Li weather report
Ying Li’s Intransitive Representations
Barry Schwabsky
Ying Li’s works are not exactly landscape paintings in any traditional sense, but they are self-evidently paintings of landscape, and she underlines this fact through their titles, which often incorporate toponyms (Ballycastle, Fort George River, Roanoke Valley) and sometimes indications of atmospheric condition or time of day (dusk, rainfall, twilight) reminiscent of Impressionism. But it’s not only the titles that tell us what kind of paintings these are. The paintings speak for themselves: They are full of
space, weather, and the endlessly variable light that one only encounters out of doors. And yet one would be hard put to identify any specific topographical features in them; it seems more tempting to see them as works of abstraction, even if “inspired by” (notoriously vague phrase!) the artist’s experiences or memories of the places named in their titles.
But that’s a temptation worth resisting. While Li’s art cannot be fully appreciated without some
Fort George River, Pink Flair (detail) 2022 oil on linen 16 x 12 in.
awareness that there are impulses at work within it that have nothing to do with representation in any traditional sense and that can therefore be referred to, if only for lack of any better term, as related to abstraction, it’s equally true that her work harbors an essential connection to feelings about nature and place that are quite specific and far from abstract—or again, as with representation, that are far from any traditional sense of abstraction.
And by the way, I think it’s significant that Li’s works are often more than just, as I ventured, inspired by the places named in their title. They are not meditations on memories of a place, as is true of a painting such as, to take a famous example, Camille Corot’s Souvenir de Mortefontaine (1864, Musée du Louvre), which represents not an immediate response to the place itself (in Corot’s case, a village half a day’s walk north of Paris) but a recollection ( souvenir ) lyrically reconstructed after the fact in the studio. Like the Impressionists (a generation or two younger than Corot) as well as contemporary painters such as Ellen Altfest or Lois Dodd or Rackstraw Downes, Li prefers to paint on the spot— en plein air. But those painters are all more or less intent on describing on a two-dimensional plane things that they see in the world around them. And if you go to the place named in the title of one of Downes’s paintings—the titles of Dodd’s or Altfest’s paintings are less likely to cite a specific place— you will be able to verify the resemblance between what the painting shows and the scene you encounter in person, even though there are certain effects in his painting that are only made possible by, in fact, the process of painting as he has cultivated it for himself.
By contrast, although I have not been to the places named in the titles of Li’s paintings, I feel pretty sure that if I sought
out those places, I’d be hard put to identify the spot where she’d set up her easel. I would not be able to make out the points of resemblance between what I see in the painting and what I see in the terrain itself. In other words, contrary to the tradition of plein air painting, her intention is indifferent to description. She is not trying to contrive a likeness to the landscape. She has something else in mind. And what is that something else? Well, because it’s not connected to a defined tradition with clear parameters, I have to be speculative about it, not definitive, but it seems to have to do with the translation of experiences, only some of which are visual, into visual form, rather than with the transcription of visual impressions in three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane. Alberto Giacometti, whom I suspect must be one of Li’s masters, once said that his work’s impetus came from “that desire to find out why I can’t simply reproduce what I see.” Li, however, accepts as a given this impossibility of faithful representation. She revels in the freedom that it allows her. And when I look at her paintings, I sense that what I am experiencing has as much or more to do with tactile and other non-visual sensations—wind or still air, heat or coolness, dryness or humidity, and so on—as with visual ones that we are used to discerning in landscape paintings: relatively stables ones such as the shapes of topographical features (rocks, trees, human-made objects such as buildings) as well as transient ones such as light conditions and the variations in color those conditions cause.
“We cannot understand how a mind could paint,” as the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once observed; to do that, you also need a body. But so much landscape painting has pretended that the body could be reduced to just one of its organs, the eye. Remember Paul Cézanne’s famous simultaneous criticism of and encomium to Claude Monet:
Land of Timucuan, Fort George Island #2 2022 oil on canvas 24 x 30 in.
“Only an eye, but my God, what an eye!” Cézanne wanted to be more than an eye. (In the end, I believe Monet was too.) He knew through experience that there are intensities that can only be achieved through such a reduction, but was aware that other, different intensities demanded, yes, a more full-bodied engagement with the real.
A more full-bodied engagement with the real— that’s what Li’s paintings as well attempt in their own way. After looking at her paintings, I don’t imagine that I know what I’d see if I were to
travel to Ballycastle, Fort George River, or the Roanoke Valley, not at all. Nor do I imagine that I know how I’d feel if I were to visit those places. The paintings don’t offer me that sort of imaginative knowledge (or, rather, pseudo-knowledge; they don’t predict for me a future that may never occur). Instead, they offer evidence of the seeing and feeling that took place when Li was there, and by translating that seeing and feeling into pictorial form, they offer me, in turn, the possibility to experience sensations that have nothing to do with what might transpire with
Left:
The Witness Tree #1, Kingsley Plantation, 2022 mixed media on paper 9 x 12 in.
Right:
Fort George River (Dawn) 2022 oil on linen 20 x 24 in.
me in those places and everything to do with the sensations I can have in the presence of the painting. In that sense, there is a non-transitive relationship between the painting and the experiences that gave rise to it, on the one hand, and the experiences to which it gives rise on the other hand. I can’t construct a probable account of the painter’s experience while making the painting from my experience while looking at it. That intransitivity is probably synonymous with
the “abstractness” of Li’s paintings, but maybe it would be better to speak of an intransitive representation.
Clearly, the physical heft and density typical of Li’s paintings have something to do with this intransitivity. Looking at her paintings, one never stops thinking about the fact that one is looking at paint. Translucency is minimized: We are never looking through one thing to
Left:
Fort George River (High Tide) 2023 oil on linen 36 x 36 in.
Right:
Napoyca (Marsh), Amelia Island 2024 mixed media on paper 11 x 14 in.
another, but always at something. The paintings are full of layers, but the layers are revealed through materially evident gestures, traces of action upon the painterly matter: paint pushed through other paint, for example, or scraped away. We all know that in museums and galleries, there is a spoken or unspoken “do not touch,” but it’s usually unnecessary because part
of what the paintings show us is that we can’t touch what they show. Li’s paintings, by contrast, might call for a sign telling the paintings to refrain from touching the people who come to see them. They give me the distinct sense that they are constantly reaching out, trying to get closer, aspiring to graze, at least, my skin. They want to be felt more than seen.
Left:
Fort George River, Turquoise 2022 oil on linen 12 x 12 in.
Right:
Fort George River (Shore) 2024 oil on canvas 20 x 24 in.
And yet, after all, see them, look at them, is exactly what I do. Through visual means they lead me through non-visual sensations but always end up back with experiences of seeing. But the result of the excursion is that I understand my seeing differently. And each separate element in the paintings—each piece of paint— appears so clearly, so unequivocally, which testifies to the clarity of mind involved in their making. There may be overwhelming complex-
ity here, but no confusion. As Merleau-Ponty might say, through her paintings I see, among other things, that I see with my body and not only with my eye. It’s true that this corporeal seeing can feel excessive, even almost violent— but my goodness, it seems so real, so undeniable, in comparison to the pleasures (substantial, but very different) offered by landscape painting of the sort that presents us with a place we can see but can’t touch or be touched by!
Photo: Xiaofu Wang
Barry Schwabsky is art critic for The Nation and coeditor of international reviews for Artforum. His recent books include The Perpetual Guest: Art in the Unfinished Present (Verso, 2016) and The Observer Effect: On Contemporary Painting (Sternberg Press, 2019), as well as two collections of poetry, Feelings of And (Black Square Editions, 2022) and Water from Another Source (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023).
Fort George River, Pink Flair
2022 oil on linen 16 x 12 in.
Above:
Amelia Island
2022 mixed media on paper 18½ x 66½ in.
Right:
Under the Witness Tree, Fort George Island
2024 oil on linen 30 x 40 in.
Left:
Right:
Tabby Cabins, Kingsley Plantation, FL #2 2022 mixed media on paper 9 x 12 in.
Napoyca (Woods), Amelia Island 2022 mixed media on paper 11 x 14 in.
The Ruins of Slave Cabins, Kingsley Plantation 2022 oil on linen 24 x 30 in.
Above:
Napoyca (Amelia Island, FL) #1
2023 mixed media on paper 12 x 32 in.
Right:
The Ruins of Slave Cabins, Kingsley Plantation 2022 oil on canvas 20 x 24 in.
Left:
Fort George River, Riptide 2022 oil on linen 19 x 19 in.
Right:
Alicamani, Pale Green Morning 2023 oil on linen 24 x 24 in.
Left:
The Witness Tree #2
2022 oil on linen 24 x 12 in.
Right:
Land of Timucuan, Fort George Island #1 2022 oil on canvas 24 x 30 in.
Above:
Blossoming
2024 oil on linen 30 x 80 in.
Right:
Roanoke Valley (Twilight)
2024 oil on linen 16 x 20 in.
Eclipse #1 2024 oil on linen 18 x 24 in.
Roanoke Valley #1
2024 oil on linen 18 x 24 in.
Above:
Roanoke Valley #2
2024 oil on linen 24 x 78 in
Left:
Window on Spring
2024 oil on linen 40 x 30 in.
Roanoke Valley #3
2024 oil on linen 30 x 40 in.
Roanoke Valley #4
2024 oil on linen 30 x 40 in.
Left:
Chasin’ Rainbow (Lavender) 2023 oil on panel 20 x 20 in.
Right:
Ballycastle (Sunlit), County Mayo 2023 oil on linen 18 x 24 in.
Left:
DownPatrick Head (Twilight) 2023 oil on linen 12 x 18 in.
Right:
Towards DownPatrick Head
2023 oil on linen 24 x 18 in.
Ballycastle (Misty), County Mayo 2024 mixed media on paper 16 x 20 in.
Chasin’ Rainbow (Pink), County Mayo 2024 mixed media on paper 11 x 15 in.
Ballycastle (after Rain) 2023 mixed media on paper 9 x 12 in.
Chasin’ Rainbow (Green) 2023 mixed media on paper 9 x 12 in.
Ballycastle (Sprinkling), County Mayo 2024 mixed media on paper 11 x 15 in.
Wings over Belmullet 2024 mixed media on paper 11 x 15 in.
Clockwise from top left:
Left:
Chasin’ Rainbow (Hotpink) 2023 oil on panel 20 x 20 in.
Right:
The Witness Tree (The Election Day) 2022 oil on linen 60 x 48 in.
2024
15 x 11 in.
2023
12
2024 mixed media on paper 10 x 7 in.
Left:
Ballycastle (Deep Fall), County Mayo
mixed media on paper
Right:
Ceann Dhún Pádraig (Downpatrick Head)
mixed media on paper
x 9 in.
Chasin’ Rainbow (Red), Broadhaven Bay, County Mayo
Rainbow Farm #1
2022 oil on linen 18 x 24 in.
Rainbow Farm #2
2022 oil on linen 18 x 24 in.
Ying Li, an American painter and art educator, was born in Beijing, China and immigrated to the United States in 1983. She received her BFA from Anhui Normal University, China in 1977, and her MFA from Parsons School of Design in 1987. She is the Phlyssa Koshland Professor of Fine Arts at Haverford College.
Li’s work is represented by Pamela Salisbury Gallery in Hudson, NY; Gross McCleaf Gallery in Philadelphia; Alice Gauvin Projects in Washington, D.C.; and Valley House Gallery & Sculpture Garden in Dallas, Texas.
Her work has been exhibited internationally in Centro Incontri Umani Ascona, Swizterland; ISA Gallery, Italy; Enterprise Gallery, Ireland; Museum of Rocheforten-
Photo: John Snyder
Terre, France; American Academy of Arts and Letters, The National Academy Museum, The Hood Museum, NH; James Michener Art Museum PA; The Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, VA; The Aspen Institute, CO; Chautauqua Institution, NY; Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve, FL; New York Studio School, Lohin Geduld Gallery, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, Lori Bookstein Projects, Tibor De Nagy Gallery, all in New York City; Gross McCleaf Gallery and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. She was the recipient of Edwin Palmer Memorial Prize and Henry Ward Ranger Fund Purchase Award, both from National Academy NYC; Donald Jay Gordon Visiting Artist and Lecturer, Swarthmore College; Artist-
in-Residence, Dartmouth College; the McMillan Stewart Visiting Critic, Maryland Institute College of Art; Ruth Mayo Distinguished Visiting Artist, The University of Tulsa; Visiting Artist, American Academy in Rome; Ballinglen Foundation Fellowship; 2024 Fraces Niederer Artist-in-Residence; as well as the recipient of various Residential Fellowships in Switzerland, Spain, Ireland, France and Ireland, and at Kingsley Plantation, Timucuan Ecological & Historic Preserve, FL.
Li’s works has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, The New York Sun, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Hyperallergic, Artcritical, and The Washington Post, among other publications.
Top: Roanoke Valley #1 (detail) 2024 oil on linen 18 x 24 in.
