Li Huayi
Li Huayi (; born 1948) is a contemporary ink artist whose admiration for the monumental landscapes of the Northern Song dynasty with his training in both traditional Chinese ink and Western art, inspired him to create his own style of ink painting. Li currently lives and works in Beijing. Li has established a distinct connection between contemporary and traditional, and nature and humanity, by integrating his contemporary perspective with the eternal values of traditional literati painting. Li Huayi's works are collected by museums worldwide including the British Museum, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Art Institute  of Chicago, the Harvard Art Museums, the Brooklyn Museum, the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Suzhou Museum, M+ Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Early life. Li Huayi was born in 1948 in Shanghai, China. At the age of six, he learned the art of traditional ink painting under the tutelage of Wang Jimei in private. When he was sixteen, Li began his studies of Western art with Zhang Chongren, who had studied at the Belgian Royal Academy and who was known for his realistic watercolors. During the Cultural Revolution (1966 - 1976), Li was exempt from being  sent to the countryside and allowed to remain in Shanghai to paint Soviet-style propaganda murals as a result of his dexterity with brush and ink, and his training in Western art. In the late 1970s, after the Cultural Revolution, Li Huayi traveled throughout China's significant scenic, historic and cultural sites including the monumental peaks of Huangshan in Anhui Province, which are often depicted in many of his paintings. In Gansu Province, Li studied the Buddhist cave temples at Dunhuang, teaching himself the early history of Chinese painting and gaining an understanding of religious painting. In 1978, Li traveled  to Beijing where he saw his first Northern Song landscape painting and first major exhibition of modern Western art; both of which left him with deep and lasting impressions. Move to the United States. In 1982, Li Huayi and his wife immigrated to San Francisco. There, he enrolled at San Francisco's Academy of Art University to study Western art and he completed his master's degree in 1984. In the same year, Li held his first one-man exhibition in America at the Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, featuring a combination of his Dunhuang-style paintings and his 'Abstract  Expressionist' works. His abstract paintings received critical acclaim from the art historian and scholar of Chinese painting, Michael Sullivan. Artistic development. Inspiration and early works. The following decade, Li experimented with abstract forms of splash-ink, combining some elements of collage. During this period, he discovered his artistic calling to create something new in the most important traditional Chinese painting theme: landscape. The Northern Song School tradition kept looming over Li Huayi. The first Northern Song painting he saw was Fan Kuan's "Scene Under Snow", in 1978 at the Beijing Palace Museum. In 1989, Li visited the National Palace  Museum in Taipei, where Guo Xi's "Early Spring" left lasting impressions. Monumental landscape. Li’s works of the 1990s evoke the landscape imagery of Li Cheng (919-967), Fan Kuan (active 990-1030), and Guo Xi (after 1000-ca. 1090). The faceted cliffs and gnarled pines in his compositions remind many of Huangshan's mountain peaks in Anhui Province. However, instead of the traditional mountain landscape paintings depicted at a distance, Li provides close-up details and places his viewers intimately within the landscape. By pulling the cliffs and pines in the center of the composition close to the  viewer, he or she directly feels the monumentality of nature. Multiple screens installation. Since ancient times, painting on screens has been common practice in the East, providing a bridge for the artistry of two-dimensional surfaces to three-dimensional works in physical space. Having considered the viewing experience of his audience, Li aimed to produce greater visual impact through the format of a screen. By placing a landscape hanging scroll in front of a backdrop of large, ink-and-brush filled panels, Li creates works of three-dimensional space in the form of installation art. This combination of traditional brush -and-ink painting with a contemporary presentation, suggests Li’s innovative approach and opened up the potential of physical space in his art. Gilded Screen series. In recent years, Li Huayi has experimented with painting landscapes on gold leaf. He has accepted the challenge of applying ink and pigments to the smooth polished surface of gold leaf, which is vastly different from the surfaces of absorbent paper and silk on which he previously worked. Li has even purchased unpainted antique Japanese screens surfaced with gold leaf in order to explore how earlier Japanese artists used their pigments and ink on  such a surface. After experimenting for years, he has arrived at painting landscapes of ink brushwork on gold leaf. Recent developments. Since the 1990s, Li Huayi has participated in solo and group exhibitions on an international scale at Stanford University, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Art Museum of China, and was part of "China 5000 Years Exhibition" at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1999. His solo exhibition "Fantasies on Paper and Enchantment in Gold" was exhibited at the Suzhou Museum in China. The exhibition presented 18 paintings from different periods of Li's artistic endeavor , covering representative works selected from the "Monumental Landscapes series", the "Water Scenes series", the "Multiple Screens Installation series" and the “Gilded Screen Series”, offering audiences a comprehensive understanding of Li’s artistic developments over the prior 15 years. In May 2018, international publisher Rizzoli and Kwai Fung Art Publishing in Hong Kong published a monograph on Li Huayi. The comprehensive publication includes more than 160 works representing each major period from 1993 – 2017, together with insightful art analysis, and provided bird’s eye views as well as microscopic details of the artist’s work. In August 2019, the Honolulu Museum  of Art in Hawaii hosted a solo exhibition for Li Huayi. This exhibition traced the artist’s career over three decades, including works never before seen by the public, as well as highlights from various stages of his artistic growth, in formats from hanging scrolls and gold screens to installations. Collections. Li Huayi’s works are widely collected by worldwide museums and institutions including: