“I especially envy many ancient painters, who are actually half-travelers. Carrying a bag, the brush and rice paper are all inside, and the bag is walking around behind her back. As long as there is food, that kind of life is too pure, living in the mountains for a while. The landscapes he painted were produced in the mountains. He seems to know every grass, think about that mentality, people nowadays are incomparable.
Now I take some photos and recall the small photos when I go home. Those specific details and feelings are actually greatly reduced. Even if the piece of grass taken from the photo is objectively there is no missing piece, it is not the same as the piece of grass in your heart. If you live in the mountains and you go out every day, you will see that piece of grass. You don’t even take a closer look at how many leaves it has, but the grass is real, because you always seem to bypass it or step on it.”
LI JIN
(b. 1958, CHINA)
WORKS BY THIS ARTIST
IMPRESSIONS OF BALI (巴厘岛印象)
2017, Ink on Paper, 19 x 28 cm
Unlike most of the artists in this exhibit, Tianjin-born artist Li Jin draws inspiration from images not of his hometown, but his travels: contemporary pictures that capture that unique, ephemeral thrill of being a stranger in a new land. Every trip, he says, awes him with its fresh atmosphere—something that is often lost when one stays in familiar places, which can at times feel dull and routine. He envies the ancient painters that essentially lived semi-nomadic lifestyles, who, throughout their travels, would carry around a bag that contained their brush and rice paper, and could paint directly from the mountains and landscapes they visited.
IMPRESSIONS OF BALI (巴厘岛印象)
2017, Ink on Paper, 19 x 28 cm
On the other hand, Li Jin’s process is distinctly modern and intervened by the camera. He begins painting only after he goes home, taking out the photos he took and attempting to recall the scenes—a process that, he admits, inevitably loses much of the details and emotions of the particular moment. Nonetheless, he finds a certain freedom in drawing from both the original pictures from his travels and his own imagination—giving him room to inject his own thoughts and make-believe scenes into his paintings. Like Octora and Bickerton, Li Jin boldly inserts himself in the pictures, oftentimes in awkward and comical scenarios as he partakes in activities both banal and foreign. Yet, beneath the explicit humour in his oeuvre, one detects more implicit, universal tensions with desire, connection and belonging.
IMPRESSIONS OF BALI (巴厘岛印象)
2017, Ink on Paper, 19 x 28 cm
In his series Impressions of Bali, Li Jin recreates a vacation in Bali employing his signature traditional Chinese brush painting technique; skillfully rendered wobbly strokes and watery colours; and candid, voluptuous characters. Depicting vacationers on a beach shore with vapid, perplexed faces, he significantly veers away from the reference images he took, which mostly depict him and his family, smiling leisurely by a beachside lounge. Though he and his family reappear in these paintings, they are, by contrast, charged with unease and a tinge of alienation. Li Jin appears almost as a different character in each painting: in some pictures, he blends in with other vacationers in his swimsuit gear; while in others, he wears clothing one might consider out of place at a tropical beach—a beret, long socks—looking unsure of what to do with himself. In one particular piece, Li Jin appears twice: lying on the beach and talking to a woman; and sitting down next to this scene, wearing a black hat and glasses, inconspicuously watching his other—perhaps more confident—self talk to the woman.
IMPRESSIONS OF BALI (巴厘岛印象)
2017, Ink on Paper, 19 x 28 cm
Situated within an exhibit that engages with colonial photography and wrestles to undo othering gazes, Li Jin’s paintings of himself in a land not his own act as a provocative reversal of depictions aimed to consume and control. In portraying himself as the strange and selfconscious visitor, he sees difference not as a doorway to objectify and exoticise—but as a signal to embrace messier, more uncomfortable realities; and assume a humble position before the unfamiliar.