Li Huayi

The Landscapes of Li Huayi, Kaikodo, New York, 1997.
The Monumental Landscapes of Li Huayi, Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, 2004, cat. no. 9.

Kaikodo Journal IV, New York, 1997, cat. no. 9.
Melik Kaylan, "Calm, Cool, and Collected", Town and Country, vol. 151, no. 5210, Hearst, 11/1/1997.

Overall in good condition
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The phrase "The tall pine is green (chang song qing qing)," appears in some of China's earliest surviving poems. One of the four great masters of the late Yuan dynasty, Wu Zhen, inscribed it on his famous “Twin Pines” painting that is now held in the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. Li Huayi visited the collection to view this painting as early as 1989 and its lasting impression is captured in the present painting. The meaning of chang can be interpreted as “tall” or “wide”. Li Huayi composes his painting with a dramatic horizontal composition to draw the focus directly to the centre and convey the pine tree’s power. 

Substance, Surface, Spirit, and Space: On the Landscapes of Li Huayi *
Arnold Chang

One might not expect to find in a catalogue of paintings by a contemporary artist an essay on painting from the 8^th to the 12^th century, but in the field of modern Chinese painting studies such an inclusion is warranted. In the case of Li Huayi more than for most Chinese artist working today, comparisons with the great masters of China’s art historical past are fully justified. It is easy to find in his remarkable landscape references to Chinese painting of earlier periods. In the rarefied game of traditional connoisseurship, identifying the stylistic sources for virtually every tree and rock is a challenge that even modern specialists cannot bring themselves to decline. One of the peculiar characteristics of the Chinese painting tradition is that it is self-referential; in order to be embraced by the tradition, the work must demonstrate the artist’s understanding of historically accepted modes of subject matter, format and medium, compositional structure and brushwork…

Those of us trained to look at classical Chinese paintings in the “old-fashioned” way take delight in recognising in Li Huayi’s landscapes references to Five Dynasties and Song dynasty painting. We discover in his works the monumentality of Fan Kuan, the grandeur of Guo Xi, the power of Li Tang, and the clarity of Li Cheng.  Being good connoisseurs, we can detect the influence of later artists as well. We come across passages that remind us, in their sparseness of form and elegance of line by Ni Zan, because of their sombre, desolate mood, evokes the style of 17^th century painter Gong Xian.

Certainly in structure and conception, the influence of the late Ming painter Wu Bin is irrefutable. James Cahill’s description of Wu Bin’s paining can be used to demonstrate Li’s conceptual as well as stylistic indebtedness to this Ming master:

Wu Bing evokes the grandeur of the monumental landscape mode. His superior technical ability allows him to reproduce aspects of early style that Dong Qichang could not, particularly those that gave to the image a sense of real presence. What is presented however is the landscape of dreams, or visions, in which twisting and arching masses of rock enfold caverns and ravines or disappear bewilderingly into fog. Painting visionary scenes in a painstakingly representational manner (as surrealist painters have done in the twentieth century) demands from the viewer an ambiguous response in which belief and disbelief interchange and collide in an unsettling ways. The style asserts the reality of the image, however implausible that image may be.

Like Wu Bin, Li Huayi relies on meticulous detail and flawless techniques to create imaginary worlds that seem totally believable when viewed close up, one section at a time, yet are often impossible to accept as real landscape when viewed close up, on section at a time, yet are often impossible to accept as real landscape when viewed overall. The reality of the carefully articulated and very convincing rock-like textures of the overlapping boulders shown in a detail of “Rock Returned to Landscape 2” (Lot 2862)  is contradicted by the flattening and blending of the forms when seen from a distance. Li Huayi’s manipulation of space relates to Wu Bin, but his brushwork far surpasses that of the 17^th century artist in variety, subtlety and naturalness. In his use of the brush, Li has not only learned from the Song masters but from the great painters of the Yuan dynasty as well.

Having thus fulfilled our scholarly obligation to unveil some of the many layers of stylistic influences that appear in Li Huayi’s painting, it is clear that we are indeed dealing with a painter whose works is firmly rooted in the Chinese landscape tradition. In fact, Li is schooled so well in the history of Chinese painting that he is able to integrate disparate elements chosen from within that entire history into cohesive, original works of art…

It remains for us to discuss and explain why Li’s paintings look so different than anything we have seen before in the history of Chinese painting. What accounts for the contemporary feeling and the modern sensibility of these works?

Li Huayi’s treatment of surface is perhaps the key to his modernity. The act of creating a landscape painting, for an artist of any time or culture, involves the translation of the tree-dimensional objects that the artist wishes to depict, such as rocks and trees, into the two-dimensional world of shapes, colours, and lines that constitute a painting or drawing. One of the challenges of early artists, Eastern and Western alike, was how to create an illusion of space and depth on a flat surface. The previous essay outlines some of the solutions to this problem developed by early Chinese landscapists. In the West, the technique of one-point perspective invented by Filippo Brunelleschi (1377 – 1466) during the early Italian Renaissance has become so much a part of our way of looking at painting that it does not require any explanation. In fact the rules of perspective became so ingrained in Western consciousness that it took the modern revolution of such abstractionists as Picasso, Matisse, and Braque to remind us that there are other, equally valid ways to represent the natural world…

The paintings produced between 1993 and 1995 are explorations of patterns and texture, spirit and mood. In these works, the large compositional movements and broad bands of texture or colour seem designed to suggest various moods and emotional themes, while the passages of trees and other narrative details add visual interest and appeal to the viewer’s imagination. The landscapes can be divided into dozens of small details, each of which will look like an abstract painting. Like a Western painting, nearly every inch of the surface is filled; shallow recessions into painting are usually abruptly terminated by the sudden appearance of vertical cliffs. There is never a sense of sky and rarely a hint of rivers or lakes. We view Li’s mountains from somewhere in the middle. Bathed in mist, without top or bottom, we cannot see beyond them.

Li Huayi’s paintings created from 1996 and 1997, are more specific and less generalised landscapes with somewhat less abstract compositional structures. Although they still make a powerful first impression, they display an increasing clarity of vision and unity of conception. While still exploiting abstract surface tensions, they are at the same time more convincing in conveying a sense of volume and depth. Trees and rocks are investigated independently, each being allowed stage centre in productions designed specifically to showcase their best qualities. In his two paintings of huge garden rocks, for example, Li Huayi presents each stone as a living organism placed within a landscape painting. Although drawn with meticulous care, as if the hundreds of crags and fissures of actual rocks had been visually dissected and faithfully reproduced through the artist’s powers of observation, these rocks are actually products of Li’s imagination.

To combine East and West, to link the old and the new – these are the basic artistic challenges of our generation.  Li Huayi has already developed a manner of painting that goes a long way in bridging the cultural gap between “traditional Chinese” and “modern Western”. His landscapes are extraordinary. They are assuredly modern and yet seem classic. From a distance his paintings are stunning, up close they are intriguing we marvel at the artist’s power, we admire him for his subtlety. By Chinese standards, these are still “early” works for the artist but their great originality and sophistication augur much for the future.

*Text excerpts reprinted with permission from the author and publisher. Chang, Arnold. “Substance, Surface, Spirit, and Space: On the Landscapes of Li Huayi,” Kaikodo Journal IV, New York, United States, 1997, pp. 25-33.