There’s something primal about Ying Li’s paintings. They are the result of strenuous physical activity – the gestural application of color using brushes, palette knives, or squeezing paint directly from the tube. Take “March of the Daffodils” – an almost comically incongruous title – a painting in which Ying squeezes, scrapes and smears her paint across the canvas to create blue and purple crags, which erupt in an explosion of white, black, green, and yellow paint. This muscular treatment, combined with the startling instinctiveness with which she handles line and color, leaves an earnest viewer a little destabilized, and a little breathless.
Indeed, to look at any of Ying’s paintings is to be pulled into the rapids of artistic creation. We as viewers are privy to the bends and swerves of bringing paintings into being in the open air as weather changes, light shifts, sights and sounds come and go. The protean environments in which Ying immerses herself are expressed in currents, undulations, and contradictions of color and line, which create a supersaturated sensory impression, as though you were suddenly to awaken from a winter hibernation into a world teeming and seething with life.
In “Wintry Gleam,” a brilliant light breaks in on the implied winter landscape, until only flashes of blue and white vie for recognition amongst a riot of pinks, oranges and yellows, with a gash of green near the center of the painting. Gazing at this frenetic canvas, one begins to feel swallowed up within its magma-like surface, dazzled by the electric hues and percussive rhythm of Ying’s marks.
In “Watermelon, 1968” – an enigmatic and, given Ying’s personal history, somewhat ominous title – the red of the fruit is truncated by white and yellow slices of paint, applied directly from the tube, calling to mind the gesture and sensation of cleaving the watermelon’s hard rind and soft flesh. Meanwhile, the dark, churning background and smeared suggestion of a horizon line (one of the few in Ying’s paintings) give a sense of drama, as though the fruit itself were a character caught mid-scene.
To look at Ying’s works on canvas is an immersive experience, and the longer you look, the more you discover to see. Although many depict – or refer to – landscapes, the heavy application of paint creates new topographies: tsunamis, Alpine peaks, and meandering rivers, all in paint. It is both a thrill and a bit of a shock to realize that the process of really seeing one of these paintings might never end.
Thus, it is a pleasure to include a series of Ying’s works on paper in this show, to provide a visual respite, but also to help us see her work more clearly by isolating elements that appear in the oil-painted heavyweights. In her works on canvas, Ying luxuriates in paint, but her works on paper demonstrate an economic side to her artistry. In “Francavilla Al Mare #5” she plays heterogenous marks against each other, creating an intense impression of suspended action using only a handful of strokes. The paper pierces through between colors like whitecaps on waves: in Ying’s tumbling composition, we can clearly see the glimmer and dance of the Adriatic.
Because the compositions tend to be simpler – with “Napoyca (Amelia Island) FL, #1” as a notable exception – Ying’s works on paper offer a delicious opportunity to see her calligraphic dexterity, not just as an artistic tool in her considerable toolkit, but at play in a medium that is more recognizably Chinese. In some of these works, particularly “Castelo de São Jorge, Lisbon” and “Pula Croatia #1,” there are marks that resemble Chinese characters embedded in the scenes. They register to the viewer like fragments of memory, conjured haphazardly by the view before her.
One final word about the show’s title, Traveling Light. First, it is a paean to the nature of light across landscapes, particularly as depicted by Ying – capricious, ever-changing, ever-new. Second, it speaks to an important element in Ying’s artistic practice. The keen observer will have noted that Ying doesn’t seem stay in one place for long. She is a seasoned traveler, participating in residencies across Europe and America, and accompanying her partner, jazz trombonist Conrad Herwig, when his band goes on tour. Just while preparing for this show, she spoke to me from six different countries in Europe, painting everywhere she visited. Like many plein air painters, Ying has become adept at bringing still-wet paintings across international borders, having developed her own secret strategies for packing and transportation. One would hardly call flying with wet oil paintings, some of which weigh as much as fifty pounds, traveling light.
Ying travels light in another, deeper sense. Through her work, she approaches each place, each environment, with an almost radical curiosity and responsiveness. As Jennifer Samet points out in her essay in this catalogue, freedom of movement, and of expression, came to Ying only after her time spent in China during the Cultural Revolution, when she became all too familiar with its opposite. The works in this show – indeed, all of Ying’s paintings – glow with a simmering delight in these freedoms. In Ying’s compositions, one can perceive her training in Chinese art and her appreciation for the great Western artists like Soutine and de Kooning, but even more apparent is her joyful sense of liberty and sheer love of paint. With such winds at her back, Ying can, and does, travel light.