a dream of haptic realism

ying li. recent paintings.

new york studio school 

8 w 8th street

new york, ny 10011

june 6, 2013 - july 20, 2013

confession: i have a b.a. in art, but i never received a proper art education until college. because my mother was a fairly abstract painter and sculptor while i was growing up, the idea of getting a "formal training" rarely pressed me with great urgency, even though she had undergone traditional art curriculi. i drew mostly black and white cartoons and caricatures. i was an attentive observer of the world around me, but what i put down on paper were shapes resulting from my own heavy-duty imaginative filtering process. i owned my medium of expression--or felt my skills sufficient enough. i did not deem it necessary to know about the rules of proportion and perspective.

when i took an actual (the real deal!) painting class in college, i thought it one of the most difficult things i had ever done. i could sketch out a cartoon rendering of a scene or person in a few seconds, but paint would not do what i wanted it to do. this was incredibly frustrating to a person who was used to expressing herself visually. i was at the mercy of paint: i knew what i was trying to paint, but the mysterious mess of my canvas often resembled puddles of decomposed restaurant waste. to avoid muddying my colors, i spent lengths of time just standing before the easel. seeing my timid and trembling brush, my professor came up to me and told me not to be afraid of the canvas. easier said than done, i thought. but when i saw her paint a landscape for the first time, i finally understood what she had meant.

ying (we called her by her first name) and painting have been friends for decades. just like any old friends, they know each other very well--maybe too much. they share stories and laughter; they also fight. "be physical!" she used to tell us. for her, their time together appeared to oscillate between violent disputes and sessions of lovemaking. her land- and seascapes reflect the deep and complicated relationship between them and more.

the richness of her paintings stem from the two having gone to and seen these places together. she breathed the salty breeze of an island shore through the medium of painting. she heaved a bittersweet sigh under a shower of fiery maple leaves through the medium of painting. their memories cross paths but they also diverge. her paintings display a constant negotiation between their shared experience--a tumultuous love evolving as they journey through scenic adventures in nature.

photographic reproductions can never do justice to her work. her paintings are three-dimensional (like tree bark, she has said in an interview); a photograph inevitably flattens her strikingly haptic interaction with her medium. ying sculpts paint: she piles it up, smooths it over, twists, builds, carves paths. though small, her beautifully colorful paintings compete with the immersive experiences of large abstract paintings by pollock or rothko. 

each canvas submerges the viewer in a stream of hazy dreams that dramatically unfold with time. when we dream, our vision is blurry and the details of the scene slip from our memory, but the emotional experience feels more real than in real life. when we awake, the feelings linger, though we cannot recall exactly what we have dreamt. ying gives equal weight to every aspect of being present somewhere. she is a painter, but sight is only one gateway to the mysterious world of dreams, feelings, memories, and thoughts. we feel as we recall. we smell as we reminisce. a landscape may alter very little, but it begins to evolve in our (un)conscious as soon as we leave it. 

ying's paintings faithfully convey how we experience places as they change over time--as we change. we look back at photographs of the past to remind ourselves of things beyond what they contain within their frames. ying's work is her collaboration with her friend and love in their attempts to recreate the visceral, those things beyond the frames. as i stand before each, i willingly stand in awful surrender to how their memories unfold together. i can only dream of such romance between myself and writing.