As a painter with rich experience, Li Jikai has not changed his painting style much in the past decade or so. Even his subject matter remains largely unchanged. An outside observer would find his language and style quite stable and unified. This does not, of course, imply that he has not attempted to explore new possibilities; it is just that such explorations have unfolded gradually under his masterful control. Through a long accumulation of painting, he has built an independent kingdom, one marked by rich metaphors and unique perceptivity.
The erection of this personal artistic framework has relied first and foremost on a few accustomed images and forms, with the deepest impression stemming from that ever-present little boy. He is the key to understanding Li Jikai’s works. This image began emerging in his earliest works. At a time when anime-style painting dominated, Li Jikai was lumped into this camp, after which he earned acclaim for his personalized schemas. A few years later, as critics were approaching the various issues related to anime-style painting, there was a problem of overly simplified interpretation and criticism. In fact, this style does not necessarily denote naivety and superficiality. The later flood of anime schema should be chalked up to a wave of opportunist copycats. Many painters considered to be part of the anime generation actually presented more personal individual experiences, the cute, rambunctious surface of their works concealing painful experiences from youth. That has been the case with Li Jikai. The figures in his paintings have gradually evolved from the oddball child into a deeply troubled “young old man.” Despite the bold, splashy brushwork, the figures in his paintings are often reserved, their clothing wrapped tightly around their bodies as if protecting from the cold of a strong wind. There is a sense of tension, of self-defense. It forms a thought-provoking contrast between tension and looseness. The painter perceives the changes in the times, savoring the many ups and downs of life amidst the absurdity, sometimes softly chanting to himself. He takes the various forms of joy and suffering in life and kneads them into the stories of his paintings. That little boy is his avatar in art.
Li Jikai has always had a quiet disposition. Even as a child, he preferred spending his time alone, reading and drawing. It was through this process that his individual awareness and aesthetic judgment grew, until he came to feel that there was nothing in this world more interesting, more important, than expressing his thoughts and perceptions. He was born in the 1970s, and like many Chinese, has very profoundly felt the drastic changes that have come to Chinese society in the past few decades. China carried out a total transformation, from ideology to economy, in the 1980s, and his generation has experienced this transformation most deeply. It is only natural for this generation to be plagued by inner turmoil and confusion. Theirs is the first generation in China to have a true awareness of the independent individual, and their childhood experiences are interwoven in a roiling mix of classical and popular culture. He has said that he prefers to only have a single figure in a painting. It just feels right to him. This may be a purely emotional judgment, but it fits perfectly with his extreme faith in individualism. His memories of youth go hand in hand with the rapid development of Chinese urban culture, leading him to semiconsciously reflect on the roots of certain issues in the reality around him. His youthful lullabies were warped by the rumble of bulldozers, turned into jittery wails. That lonely boy in the paintings is a witness to history. He is often surrounded by ruin and rubble, but he seems to care for none of it, his expression often remarkably calm as he is immersed in his own thoughts. The painter is hesitant about reality, anxious, but also hopes to delve into the depths of his own heart to find peace.
The explosive sociological spectacle of contemporary China has provided rich perceptual resources for anyone with keen awareness, but these fragmentary resources do not necessarily have to be directly revealed in the painter’s expressions. Sometimes, when the expression is too close to reality, it appears shallow and meaningless. As someone obsessed with painting, Li Jikai does not enjoy pointing his brush directly at life, and even takes pains to avoid too much direct reference to reality in his works. He seems to turn a deaf ear to the immense changes taking place in contemporary history, choosing instead to hide in his own little world. Though most of his paintings are the story of an individual soul’s wanderings, when they are linked together, these seemingly absurd images radiate with the temperature of the times. It is just that the painter intentionally stands outside the torrents of reality. The great raging beast of history leaves only shallow footprints in the painter’s garden. The contradictory mindsets of solitude and turmoil can only be temporarily unified through quick-witted points, lines and planes. Behind them lies a flood of anxious sentiments that even the artist does not know how to set at ease. These complex emotions are a nostalgia that arise from “circumstantial modernity,” a nostalgia that arises from the confounding tides of history. Chinese modernity was a forced transplant from the West. Chinese society, beginning in the 19th century, not only accepted the legitimacy of modernity, but also found various forms to expand its content and systems. We must not forget that China’s progression into modernity was circumstantial, rather than the result of an active choice, a forced self-revolution. After the reform and opening, this “circumstantial modernity” made its way into the everyday lives of every Chinese person in various guises backed by the combined forces of nationalism, capital and cultural awakening, further spurred by the call to globalization and mixed with the universal dream of a paradise of infinite prosperity. But the change in the pattern of life was too rapid, too strong, pushing a generation of youth, just beginning to taste the fruits of individual freedom, into the throes of a confusing rupture between past and present. This modern nostalgia is a psychological symptom of anxiety, the anxiety of not knowing one’s spiritual home. We yearn for roots, yet cannot find them. The rapid demolition and construction follows the ceaseless spinning of the blender of values as the stability so many desire in life recedes ever further into the distance. With his innocent painting, Li Jikai speaks of the mental state that marks different stages of life, almost as a series of notes. As a painter, he seems powerless beyond his mission of recording his “texture of the times” in the most precise expression possible. All he can do is float down the river of modernity, bobbing along the waves like an apple. He insists on finding himself and affirming himself from within. Perhaps wary of losing himself, he views his own independence as extremely important. The self as he understands it may be tiny and limited, but the protection of this key crux of the corporeal body is his last line of defense against the ills of modernity.
His painting is inextricably intertwined with the modern fate of the individual. In order to convey this ambiguous state in the most precise manner possible, his painting language is naturally filled with uncertain and expandable aspects. He has always used acrylic paints as his main material in order to utilize the powers of serendipity and intensity. The thickness, density and solidity of oil paint seem to render it unable to satisfy his expressive needs. His choice of medium is also perhaps linked to his taste for ink painting. He also likes to work in black and white, though he does use intermediate hues for transition and supplementation between them. The color relationships, however, are mainly moderated through shifts between light and dark. Certain bright colors and anchoring grey tones often serve as embellishments and groundwork, while the main highlights are in black and white. Compared to oils, acrylics dry quickly and lend themselves to repeated application, making them suited to quick, continuous and extemporaneous painting methods. Li Jikai places great importance on the procedural aspect of painting. In his approach, serendipitous effects gradually lead to the “emergence” of various forms of imagery in the painting. Here, painter and painting play off each other as countless serendipitous outcomes accumulate and clash, and a series of instant decisions gather together to form a river that surges across the painting. Li Jikai’s inner emotional temperament is poetic and fragmentary, like the ephemeral flickers of a candlelight in the night. Oil paint is simply not very suited to the capturing of constantly shifting sentiments and thoughts. In the action and process of painting, acrylic can be used with utmost freedom, repeatedly altered and rapidly applied. It has a strong sense of rapidity, and is highly responsive to the whims and sensitivities of the body. Li’s background as an oil painting major has not impeded his use of the language of ink painting in vivid depictions of his perceptions of the moment. He has never felt that ink painting was past its time. Instead, he finds it exceptionally intimate. His linguistic sources, however, are not limited to ink painting. He has a very open aesthetic, and has absorbed some of the coarseness and rigidity of Western modern and contemporary painting, as well as the dripping, scraping and staccato techniques. In the Eastern aesthetic tradition, these are elements of the “other,” but they form another base for Li’s perceptivity in painting. This allows him to avoid slipping into a monotonous, formulaic classical model, while also avoiding becoming too narrow in his painting perceptivity. His emphasis on the language of ink painting is also limited to respect for its material properties. He strives to transform it into new models that can discuss contemporary life, unlike many other painters who simply transfer the old traditional resources onto the new medium of oil paint. Li’s love for the feel of ink painting is completely rooted in its linguistic advantages, rather than some nationalist or dogmatist motives. What matters for the contemporary painter is not the freshness of his language and style, but whether his values and aesthetic judgments are rooted in the contemporary condition. If an artist wishes to truly delve into his contemporaneity and presence through his individual identity, he must first carry out multiple profound breaks with tradition. It is only when the contemporary artist breaks away and escapes from the conventions of history and culture that he can truly possess an autonomous, personal and open contemporary awareness.
New traces began to emerge in his works in 2013. These changes did not mark a major transformative turning point, but instead certain miniscule adjustments in the rhetorical and emotional elements of his painting practice. This is only natural as an artist grows in age and accumulates experience. This is a more introspective selection process, one in which he discarded various familiar, fluent techniques and took on a more freewheeling approach to painting, while strengthening certain scenes and props in his paintings. In his works since 2015, we often see overgrown wastelands and roads stretching across prairies, sometimes under clear skies, sometimes under roiling storm clouds. These scenes are far removed from the bustle of the city, a lone figure walking in these empty lands producing an atmosphere of solitude and isolation. The artist draws inspiration from the imagery Isaac Levitan’s Vladimir Highway, transplanting the visual sense of the road into his own paintings while washing away the politically critical elements of Levitan’s original and peeling back its realist surface. What the artist absorbs here are the simple, stable forms and the reserved spiritual atmosphere. Under Li Jikai’s brush, the road appears more silent and gloomy under the cloudy sky. The road extends to a black hole of indistinct shape, tranquilly flowing into its dark depths. We cannot see the end. It is quite mysterious, the flitting brushwork filling this path with a restless flow of life. Li Jikai’s paintings have always been filled with poetry. He also often writes poetry, using it to draw himself into the “continuous” state of painting. This creative approach also lends his paintings rich literary imagery. This path that repeatedly emerges in his recent works is a path for the release of his inner emotions, an abstract path leading to an unknown destination that links multiple dimensions of time and space in allusions to death, new life, journeys, adventures, escape and desolation, forming a new structure of emotional projection. This is a method in which Li Jikai has long been adept, but in his recent works it has grown increasingly steady and calm. His paintings have flaunted this poetic presence since his early works, and it has only grown in recent years. As the brushwork has grown looser, and the outlines more relaxed, the constraints on the artist’s perceptions have diminished. The textures and brushwork no longer perform the function of depicting specific objects or shapes but instead directly express the experience of life and the energy of emotion. Such expression is much freer.
In his recent works, the protagonist of the paintings—the little boy—seems to have grown up. The proportions of his body more closely resemble that of a young man. Those accustomed to the image of the boy in Li Jikai’s paintings may have trouble getting used to the appearance of the young man in his paintings from 2015 and 2016. The figure is worn and craggy, rather than handsome, as if thoroughly tested by life, tempered by his experiences, and yet marked by a somewhat innocent demeanor, a personality that remains resilient despite a trying life. Having “grown up,” this youth no longer stares off into the distance or plays around like before. Instead, he traverses across the endless wasteland, sometimes even engaging in everyday violent acts such as the slaughter of a pig, rather than remaining aloof from his fellow man. These changes will certainly catch those familiar with Li’s previous work off guard. He has gradually removed the “literary” veil to take a closer look at the world in all its myriad details. The face is no longer so young and innocent as before, now marked by traces of gloom and anxiety. This now somewhat heroic young man stands atop a vast land, bidding farewell to his youthful demeanor as if in a rite of passage, almost a portent of shifts in the artist’s own spiritual history. In these images, I see some of the plainness and simplicity of Vincent van Gogh and Georg Baselitz. He wants to present a new kind of man standing on firm ground and full of vitality. These figures are imbued with certain hopes the artist harbors for humanity. This shift marks the artist’s efforts to shift his sights to a broader world.
In painting, Li Jikai is always entranced by the joys of random change. This is more clearly manifest in his recent works, which are more open and convey the artist’s inner sentiments and yearnings quite directly. This is a departure from his earlier works, which were more isolated and introspective. In his latest works, Li Jikai has relaxed his strictness in the depiction of concrete shapes and details, opting to listen to the spontaneous interplay between the body, emotion, canvas and paint, and seeking out the inner painterly logic within expressive applications of paint, constructing brushstrokes of color and form with an abstracted gaze. Of course, he does not consider the layout of the canvas through the lens of abstract painting; before beginning a new painting, he already has an idea of his expressive intentions. They may be indistinct at that point, but they do touch on specific circumstances, stories and atmospheres, rather than empty ideas. His focus is still on the emotional state and existential experience of people within particular circumstances, though these particular circumstances are no longer a representational reflection of reality but the metaphorical realities of dreams and fantasies. In some of his landscapes from 2015 and 2016, he depicted neutral rural and wilderness scenes in light, soft brushstrokes, but we do not see an intentional esthetic tone. The artist has created an “other” world for disgusting industrial civilization, a place of respite for the soul. This is an “Eden” not too far removed from the real world. It may provide brief respite, but it still cannot escape the shadow of the mortal world. Other artworks bearing the “landscape” title depict the fusion between the cities and outskirts. All objects seem to be in motion, as if the houses and the mountains are alive. These works can be seen as an emotional depiction of the urbanization currently underway.
The nostalgia of modernity continues to cling to the artist’s heart as he conveys his enlightenment about his surroundings through individual introspective methods. This personal composition includes much of an instinctual mentality of resistance—the avoidance of a grand narrative, the rejection of collectivist morals, and the distancing from the surface appearance of reality—that forms the inner impulse within Li Jikai’s works. This obsession with self-exploration has been somewhat diluted in his latest works, but the tense, interactive relationship between the figure and his surroundings has continued, while the thick allegorical aspects have been strengthened. He strives for catharsis on various points of life in his paintings, the texts of memory gradually piling up into a thick collection of notes that encompass not only his own spiritual thread, but a chain of emotions reflecting the real world and the state of our times. This line curves back and forth, disappearing and reappearing, with no clear beginning or end, constantly driving us to ponder.
May 11, 2016
By Wang Pengjie
Trans.by Jeff Crosby
