Li Jin’s “Flesh and Bone” ink art

Beijing’s INK Studio is holding an exhibition of early works by renowned ink artist Li Jin, titled “Flesh and Bone”. With many pieces on display for the first time, Alan Yeung has curated a solo show that reveals the story behind Li Jin’s artistic formation, and particularly the profound impact of his “self-exiles” in Tibet. The artist’s preoccupation with the human body as subject and medium, as well as the ground for experience and art making, is evident in the title of the exhibition. “Flesh and Bone” also stands as “a metaphor for the interplay of brushwork and inkwork, control and spontaneity, and essence and appearance – mutual dependencies seminal to the ink tradition”, as the curatorial statement explains.

• 

• 

Born in Tianjin in 1958, Li Jin is now best known for his vibrant depictions of sensory pleasures in contemporary China, an evolution from his early attraction to spirituality. When he was a student, he was fascinated by the Buddhist grotto shrines and mural paintings of Dunhuang, which he spent months copying faithfully. His attraction to nature led him to volunteer as an art teacher at Tibet University in 1984-85, and again to Lhasa in 1990 and 1992-93. Ink Studio explains Li Jin’s experience in Tibet as pivotal to the development of his art practice:

Li Jin’s encounter with Tibet’s culture and environment—including a gradual recognition of its essential alienness from himself—transformed his thinking about selfhood and corporeal existence as manifested in his pictorial language and approach to figuration. This experience lies at the heart of both his pleasure scenes and his Zizai series of freehand monochrome ink paintings, which made their debut at INK studio in 2016.

The exhibition is organised into “bone”, a chronology of the artist’s form and style, and “flesh”, an exploration of the various themes in Li Jin’s work. The show chronicles Li Jin’s artistic development during the 1980s and 1990s, from his first attempts at defying socialist realism, to an encounter and fascination with expressionism, and an adoption of spirituality coupled with a literati aesthetic that would define his art practice.

• 

• 

While his student-era portraits defied the current socialist realist dictates, his 1984 “Tibet Series” responded to the avant-garde of the time with an expressionist and primitivist vein, depicting animals and humans as “totemic images of an archaic past”. This is evident in one of the works on show, where a large buffalo head is painted next to a naked woman, floating on an empty background.

In 1985, Li Jin spent a brief period in Nanjing, where he renewed his connection to the literati aesthetic, while at the same time adopting a mixture of elegance and vulgarity to depict new erotic scenes, which he would later take up again as one of his main subject matters.

During his second and third permanence in Tibet, Li Jin turned to painting Buddhist subjects, such as arhats and adepts in the midst of transfiguration. His work took on a spiritual character, expressed through the ink’s liquid and translucent nature used to depict the textures of Tibetan iconography. Li Jin also used the “iron-wire” line drawing, which would “at once estrange and animate the body by dissecting and articulating it into surface ornaments, suppressing a violence beneath quotidian imagery and inscriptions”.

Back from Tibet in 1993, Li Jin settled between Beijing and Tianjin. Seemingly, his infatuation with the spiritual was supplanted with a renewed interest in food, sex and other aspects of everyday life. Yet, the spirituality of his Tibetan subjects persisted in his mundane ones, as if they were floating above and beyond their earthly delights, almost expressing an aversion to the materiality of their actions. His subjects, whether young women at a banquet, or a man sitting a table with food, always seem to transcend their setting, and testify to a feeling of uneasiness in their surroundings.

At times verging on the satirical, Li Jin’s works comment on human vices and desires, while turning a voyeuristic gaze onto intimate moments, suggesting us to look deeper into ourselves. The artist’s journeys in Tibet taught him to accept his own humanity, his “flesh and bone”, acknowledging his materiality in this world in order to transcend it. As Ink Studio writes,

In Li Jin’s ambivalent vision of human existence, our only hope for transcendence lies paradoxically in the acknowledgement that we ultimately remain mere flesh and bone.

The works in the second part of the exhibition are all expressions of Li Jin’s most important themes. Exploiting the ambiguity of ink, with its wash and an expressionistic brushwork, an evocative colour palette, repetitions and realistic drawing, Li Jin depicts solitude, desire, bodily functions, uncanny facial expressions, love and and sexual intimacy. Ink Studio concludes about Li Jin’s work:

His figures suggest the subtlest emotions and states of being without settling definitively on any: they may be monks in meditative concentration or constipated shitters, taking a nap or drawing a last breath, listening to the wind like classical literati or passing time in sheer boredom. Often self-portraits with varying degrees of specificity, they have the vividness and nuance of lived experience even as they are tinged with the melancholy of recollection and the irony of a self-conscious fantasy. Thus Li Jin’s art is as much self-disclosure as self-invention, wherein identity becomes indistinguishable from role. At the moment we seem to have caught the artist in the flesh, he has already slipped away, leaving behind an anonymous everyman whose pleasures and pain, aspirations and foibles are equally, humanly our own.

C. A. Xuân Mai Ardia

“Flesh and Bone” by Li Jin is on view from 22 March to 12 May 2019 at INK Studio, Beijing.