Exception or shift?   ——about Li Jin's new work

Wang Min'an

For a long time, Li Jin has left the impression of a painter who loved and embraced worldly life. He was obsessed with orgiastic feasting. More specifically, Li Jin painted a great deal of food, especially great wine and meat, and his paintings are an ode to wine and meat. He also paints human bodies like food; they are fat, plump, and swollen as if spawned by those high-calorie foods in the picture. In turn, these foods were painted so vividly by Li Jin that it seems as if they too can speak and move, as if they have their own lively life on the plate. Here, the people and food in the images generate each other, constituting an overflowing corporeal configuration on paper. However, in this latest exhibition, Li Jin appears to have made a significant change. He has weakened the original sumptuous, sensual atmosphere, and the fullness of flesh and gourmand pleasures have disappeared.

These new paintings by Li Jin tend to be darker (predominantly black and white). The picture is often one or a few solitary figures (his previous images show figures gathered in groups for revelry). They are usually not placed in a realistic and concrete background, only showing their state through their faces and poses. Most of the figures in the picture are neither joyful nor relaxed; instead, they appear either somewhat lonely, confused, humble, idle, anxious, skeptical, distracted, transcendent, sad, or desolate. The common feature of all these changing mental states they display is that they no longer laugh and drink - Li Jin's previous crowded carnal world is diluted. We might even say that the euphoria that characterized Li Jin's previous works has been removed. Instead, the states of the figures in these new paintings all implicitly include an inexplicable silence. Perhaps this is the epidemic's effect on Li Jin - the de facto orgiastic feast no longer exists, and the mental state of feasting, which is also the state of the picture, has naturally disappeared.

Suppose the figures in Li Jin's previous paintings always appeared in a non-thinking state, an animal state, because they were so devoted to eating. In that case, the figures now show an inner spiritual state, a state of thinking or doubting, because they are detached from food. These are two different kinds of people, despite the similarities they share. Li Jin now begins to draw a person trapped inside and no longer a person who always enjoys the present. Stuck and lonesome, this is perhaps Li Jin's emotional state in the present moment. Li Jin is always painting himself. He is not a painter who objectively depicts external objects but incorporates his tendencies and temperament into his works. Even if sometimes his figure does not appear in the picture, he always lives in it in various ways. He is definitely a painter who expresses himself. Now in his recent series, instead of the hustle and bustle of the gathering, his images show the solitary mutter of a man; no longer food but Chinese calligraphy - the images thus appear quiet and literate. It is as if Li Jin is withdrawing himself from this noisy world: the drinking and feasting become a low wandering, the overflowing wine becomes a sentimental poem, the glutted body becomes a silent heart, the red and green colored festivity becomes a black and white intertwined loneliness, the climax and clamor of the scene become a personal whisper and hesitation, the secular bustle becomes a monologue of the mountains.

This change also leads to a sense of freedom in Li Jin's paintings. If a climactic and exhilarating experience requires the careful framing of a large format paper to present a sensory impact, then one's solitude can be outlined in a few words. Many of Li Jin's recent paintings are short in size and the smaller they are, the more relaxed, casual, natural, and skillful he is in painting them. He does not fix himself on a particular subject matter, does not set limits, does not allow himself to devote much energy to making large-scale pictures, and will not let himself engage in a fight to the death with painting. Now, the image is self-explanatory but fluid, short but concise. Li Jin respects his own experience and will. Like a literatus who keeps a diary, he painted by following his immediate thoughts and emotions. In this way, he breaks through the various norms and institutions of painting. His painting shows a brilliant combination of intuition and experiential wisdom: no excessive decoration and deployment, but only the flow of life and the spreading of the mind. Li Jin's brush strokes can be both neat and reckless, that is, clear and abstract, detailed and bold. Li Jin's skillful and fluid strokes come through freely on the paper – he is generally considered a contemporary ink painter. Still, his painting technique undoubtedly embodies the typical experience of traditional ink painting: few strokes, but vividly lifelike.

For Li Jin, he could draw all types of paintings and write different kinds of Chinese characters. It isn't easy to talk about these characters from the perspective of calligraphy; I prefer to see them also as a form of drawing. These writings have different brush strokes, just as paintings have different brush strokes. Sometimes the writing is manic, sometimes meticulous; sometimes square, sometimes skewed; sometimes vague, sometimes solid; sometimes lean, sometimes lumpy; sometimes close to a specific established classic style, sometimes wholly disregarding any of them; sometimes well-trained, sometimes haphazard. It is an experimental game of writing as if he is trying to approach a particular classic while deliberately discrediting it. The writing style of Li Jin is in such a wrestle. In this way, Li Jin frees his writing from the system of Chinese calligraphy, not by training himself according to institutional standards, but by breaking them with his spontaneous strokes.

On top of that, he transcribed a large number of poems and texts, as well as his occasional sighs in these writings. The form of his writing seems to be responding to its content. These poems and occasional sighs are the expressions of his heart. If painting is not enough to express all his feelings, writing can be a complement to the picture. In this respect, Li Jin is getting closer and closer to the traditional Chinese painting with the juxtaposition of drawings and writings. Therefore he transcribes and writes a great number of verses on paper. Not only does he allow these writings and paintings to have a meaningful match and echo, but more importantly, he gives writing and painting a commonness of form. The writing not only matches the image but also becomes part of it. Some works are even entirely writings without any images. Or rather, Li Jin's writings struggle to approach the very essence of an image. They even look like images. Li Jin intentionally dismantles the distinction between writing and painting. If writing is closer to a diary, then here, too, Li Jin is demolishing the difference between painting and diary, between life and artistic creation. One can see Li Jin's paintings as diaries, as a way of life. These delicate works and painting diaries go beyond even the category of mere painting or writing: this is simultaneously painting, writing, daily practice, labor, retreat, and a specific way of life itself. For Li Jin, everyday life is not revealed in painting but is spent through painting, and the painting itself is life. More specifically， these delicate paintings by Li Jin are his way of life through the epidemic. The state of daily life is not only presented in his works but also in the act of painting.

It is evident from these new paintings that Li Jin is more interested in Buddhism and nature - rather than sensual pleasures. We see many extraordinary figures like arhats and Jigong come to life in his works. These are Li Jin's most evocative depictions of figures. He sketches them briskly with smooth, winding, and bold curves; These lines are the temperament and personality of these figures as Li Jin imagines them. We also see plants, flowers, and landscapes frequently appear in his paintings. They exist on the paper in a very free manner, utterly devoid of any fixed format, sometimes as mere embellishments for the figures in the picture and sometimes as pure backgrounds. Li Jin completely disregards the fixed pictorial patterns; in terms of the forms themselves, these natural landscapes are sometimes scribbled, arbitrary and abstractly suggestive, and sometimes very carefully and neatly depicted. I believe that Li Jin created these delicate freehand paintings based on his state of mind during his daily practice. We can see both classical laments such as "Grass and trees are also affectionate" and "Share this grateful moment even thousand miles apart" inscribed on the picture, as well as life aspirations such as "Wine and meat pass through the intestines, but Buddha stays in the heart." We can also see the ideal of life, such as "raising the head to look at the bright moon, leaning against a tree and listening to the flowing spring." That indicates a return to tradition for Li Jin: there seems to be a tradition and a paradigm of living - not just the carefree drinking in modern days- that deserves to be traced and remembered.

Is this a sudden shift for Li Jin? Or is this an effect of the epidemic of the past few years, or is the age at work? In any case, Li Jin has placed more emphasis on using ink as a way of painting. Li Jin indeed paints with more variety, freedom, relaxation, and carefreeness. However, his established kernel of fascination with sensual life still appears in his paintings from time to time. He could not help but give strong sexual connotations to radishes, cabbages, and plants. Once he painted a large picture, once he had to complete a "work", once he had to make a layout, he would still choose those crowded scenes of gourmets, that meat-and-wine-filled orgiastic world, those plump and happy eating men and women. Sensory pleasure never really disappears in Li Jin's case; it only deviates from Li Jin's attention at such a specific moment; or rather, Li Jin is aware of its limitations. The question is, are these new series, these daily practices, and retreat-style works, these delicate paintings, a long-term shift, or a temporary exception for him?