Philippe Piguet

La chair de l’eau
Shao GuangHua
« Tout naît de l’eau, et l’eau est la matière essentielle de mon œuvre. » Ainsi Li Xin décrit-il son travail. Dans ces œuvres aux teintes grises, sourdes, tout est silence et mystère : l’eau en est le fil secret qui relie l’ensemble. Elle détient le pouvoir de refléter, d’inverser l’espace, de réfracter ou d’absorber la lumière. Ce n’est qu’après de multiples cycles d’imbibition et de séchage que se révèlent les fibres du papier de riz, s’entrelaçant de manière complexe pour former des paysages abstraits. Les pigments à l’huile, fortement dilués dans la térébenthine, inscrivent en une succession de strates chromatiques translucides la durée même du temps.
Cette présence diffuse qu’est « l’eau » oriente la perception du spectateur lorsqu’il est face à l’œuvre : un entrelacement de mouvements et d’immobilités où tout demeure flou, incertain. Sans ce « lavage » répété et non intentionnel — procédé par lequel Li Xin adopte une neutralité presque industrielle, se libérant du cadre traditionnel du « pinceau et de l’encre », voire même de la peinture — une feuille de papier de riz ou une toile ne serait qu’une surface géométrique vierge, un support dénué de sens. Ce sont précisément les traces laissées par le passage successif de l’eau — ou plutôt par la durée de ce passage — qui forgent la texture de l’œuvre sur le plan de la perception et lui confèrent « la chair de l’eau » au sens phénoménologique de Merleau-Ponty.
Dans un certain sens, Li Xin répond, à sa manière singulière, à l’attention moderniste portée au support, tout en s’éloignant progressivement du minimalisme classique dans son exploration de la « matérialité ». Dans la perspective greenbergienne, le support — papier de riz, toile, céramique — est un médium de présence : l’œuvre résulte de la tension entre le contenu pictural et le support matériel. Michael Fried, quant à lui, souligne que le minimalisme valorisait la matérialité brute du support, affirmant que l’essence de la peinture réside dans sa réalité physique. C’est pourquoi, dans leur quête d’une matérialité absolue, les minimalistes en sont venus à privilégier des formes tridimensionnelles, réalisées à partir de matériaux industriels.
Li Xin, au contraire, choisit l’eau : une substance douce, ambiguë, aux antipodes des matériaux industriels tels que l’acier inoxydable, le cuivre ou l’aluminium. L’eau devient le protagoniste absolu du processus créatif, tandis que les opérations méticuleuses nécessaires à l’achèvement de l’œuvre demeurent dissimulées sous le support.
Ce n’est qu’à travers les explications de l’artiste que l’on découvre le nombre de lavages requis pour atteindre l’uniformité et la densité du support, ou encore les manipulations destinées à permettre aux pigments de s’écouler et de s’étendre parfaitement. Quant à la touche finale — décisive — elle relève autant du hasard que de l’imprévisible.
Mais qu’accomplissent-elles réellement ? Et si elles ne sont pas tout à fait de la peinture, comment devrions-nous les nommer ?
Comme à son habitude, Li Xin les intitule par une date précise, jusqu’à l’heure près, à la manière d’un numéro de série industriel ou d’une puce électronique. Le temps est le facteur ultime de son processus créatif. À un moment donné, lorsque les dernières molécules d’eau s’évaporent, le gris cesse de se propager et décide de se fixer. Ce qui apparaît alors est l’enfant inattendu, né de la rencontre entre la peinture monochrome et la peinture de paysage (Shanshui) : des gris vaporeux et diffus s’y déploient en strates superposées, et se font écho. Dans cette gradation infinie de gris, l’individuel et le cosmique se fondent, se transforment ; le temps semble s’y dilater jusqu’à se projeter dans un vide sans référent. Pourtant, un regard attentif et rationnel y discerne des affinités avec le minimalisme : répétition formelle, quête de l’infini, uniformité — rappelant l’« ordre » célébré par Donald Judd, les « empilements » monumentaux de Richard Serra ou encore les compositions « planes » et horizontales de Carl Andre.
Sous leurs airs minimalistes, ces œuvres tiennent à la fois de la parodie de la production industrielle et de la dérision du formalisme. Mais dans la logique interne de l’œuvre de Li Xin, ces traits proviennent avant tout d’un rigoureux processus de simplification formelle : le lavage précis et répété, quasi industriel, permet de dépasser la sacralisation du « pinceau et de l’encre » en Orient et celle du « geste pictural » en Occident. La continuité infinie du gris réaffirme le champ de l’œuvre ; son uniformité abolit toute expression individuelle et toute volonté subjective : seule subsiste une intervention minimale sur les propriétés intrinsèques des matériaux et leurs effets. Avec cette simplification, le processus créatif et le hasard prennent toute leur importance : ce sont les caractéristiques propres de la matière, conjuguées à l’aléa de l’instant, qui déterminent ensemble l’achèvement ultime de l’œuvre.
Cependant, le minimalisme — en fusionnant entièrement contenu et forme —tend à réduire le coeur de la création à une quasi-vacuité. De plus, cette approche créative est en elle-même excessivement rationalisée et conceptualisée, transformant le hasard et l’imprévisible qu’elle revendique en une danse exécutée sous le joug de la raison. Li Xin cherche précisément à s’en éloigner, tant formellement que conceptuellement. Par le choix de l’encre de Chine et du papier de riz, il transforme la rigidité minimaliste en une structure souple et flexible. Il traduit la « matérialité » tangible des sculptures de Judd ou Andre en une « réalité » impalpable, voire imperceptible, qu’il nomme « espace éthéré » : un espace qui, vide en apparence, est en réalité empli d’une substance profonde.
Sans préméditation, les matériaux, la gravité, les pinceaux et d’autres éléments conjuguent leurs effets pour engendrer une diversité de formes. Les processus répétitifs, les cycles de séchage de l’eau ou de la térébenthine, introduisent une dimension temporelle : l’oiseau est passé dans le ciel sans laisser de plumes. Ce qui demeure est le déploiement de l’eau et du pigment dans la durée, les traces qu’ils ont laissées, scellant le temps à leur insu. Quand bien même nous examinerions, à l’aide d’une loupe ou d’un objectif macro, les fibres redressées du papier de riz ou les rapports entre les différentes strates chromatiques d’une toile, cette investigation technique, aussi poussée soit-elle, ne saurait saisir l’essence même d’une œuvre. À l’instar de l’appareil le plus sophistiqué qui ne révèle pas la vie sous son objectif, la perception profonde d’une œuvre requiert un véritable mouvement d’immersion, une descente de l’esprit vers le corps, qui engage tout notre être.
La superposition répétée du premier plan, du plan moyen et de l’arrière-plan engendre chez Li Xin une profondeur spatiale singulière, à la croisée de la planéité moderniste et de la perspective de la peinture à l’encre. Lumière, couleur, détails et matériaux y forment un continuum — des « données immédiates » au sens bergsonien. Et la conscience capable de les recevoir n’est rien d’autre que le sujet lui-même : dans le champ de l’œuvre, le corps du spectateur devient un système ouvert, sensible, explorant intentionnellement le monde et son environnement immédiat. Bien que frôlant l’orée du vide par leur contenu, ces œuvres transcendent la distinction sujet-objet par la relation qu’elles instaurent au gré de cette exploration. C’est là le véritable « champ », l’atmosphère créée entre l’œuvre et celui qui la contemple — une atmosphère qui dépasse la simple perception visuelle et qui engage l’être tout entier.
Comme l’a déclaré Mark Rothko, « les artistes abstraits confèrent à la présence matérielle un champ et un rythme invisibles ». Le rôle de l’artiste étant de construire et de maintenir ce champ à sa propre manière. S’inspirant de cette idée, Li Xin libère « l’état originel de la matière » ou la « force élémentaire des choses », ouvrant ainsi une voie vers la pureté. Son travail consiste à révéler, sous la forme la plus minimale, les possibilités infinies du gris pur. Le gris n’est plus un simple outil d’expression des « cinq nuances de l’encre » ni un instrument de représentation du figuratif, il incarne la quête de l’artiste de la matérialité intrinsèque et lui permet d’atteindre l’essence des choses, dans un état originel qui transcende l’opposition sujet-objet.
Pour que le gris « se donne par lui-même », l’artiste doit lui conférer épaisseur et densité, y sceller et inscrire la durée. Tout le labeur minutieux entrepris vise à éliminer les « impuretés » — goût, style, détails, touches — afin que ce gris infini puisse apparaître en soi, mêlé à la perception et à l’aléa de l’instant. Telles des visiteurs venus d’un espace lointain, ces œuvres ne livrent leur sens que par une perception unifiée du corps et de l’esprit. Dans ce processus d’interaction et de relation — mouvement incessant de génération et de transformation, d’émergence et de dissolution, s’accomplit une odyssée allant de la contemplation à l’introspection. Ce qui importe n’est pas ce que l’on voit, mais la manière dont le gris environnant replace le corps dans le flux du temps, l’ouvrant à l’infiniment grand et à l’infiniment petit, jusqu’à ce que leur regard, « long et tendre », puissent enfin se croiser.

Philippe Piguet

« The subject is you, your impressions, your emotions towards nature. You have to look within yourself not around you. » These words were written by Delacroix in his Journal. Words that particularly resonate when one gazes at  Li Xin’s work. They invite us to take stock of the infinite space that the artist wishes to embrace. The monochromatic tone, the islets of matter, the stream and its breaches, the ebb and the flow all play a part in an artform determined by a mental experience, sensitive and memorable, whose key motif is the Yellow River. The River is in Li Xin, echoing the words by Cézanne : « The landscape is in me and I am its conscience. » The painter’s  actions all lead to the creation of a work articulated around this one and only motif. Although he knows that trying to capture the landscape in its whole, in its absolute fullness, is an impossible challenge, he finds ways to make it an organism that comes to life.
« Water, says Li Xin is my principal medium. » Through it paint comes into existence. It is water that shapes the image through the unforeseen, or even the accidents of its flow. After carefully selecting papers for their power of absorption, the painter says he makes them drink this water. Li Xin’s practice is therefore the fruit of a double osmosis: on one hand the emanations from the ink that he makes himself from rough pigments, and that slowly appropriate the iconic space ; on the other, the artist’s emotions that are chanelled by his body. The end result has nothing to do with flat monochromes. but on the contrary reveals a whole universe where one color goes through endless variations that float bewteen the ultra thin and the dense. In it, one can hear the memorable echo of the Yellow River that imparts a sort of geology to paint, and whose changing moods link to the theory of vitalism, so dear to the Century of Enlightenment, but that the painter prefers to associate with the principle of inner necessity advocated by Kandinsky. Backed by these references, Li Xin’s art defines the terms of a prospective pictorial thinking process that is anchored in tradition but also aims to renew it.

Henry-Claude Cousseau

Li Xin does not consider himself a painter. We can do nothing but agree with him, as strictly speaking, it is hard to categorize his works as oil painting or ink painting: these two branches of painting merge, overlap and relate so naturally in terms of artistic concern and artistic expression. The impression, feeling, landscape and vision he presents and conveys run invariably in conflict. The style may seem highly abstract and unsophisticated, but we can always find them well absorbed into a world that is rendered commonplace by the variety of changes rather than the representation. Everything is unfolded in a distant field, keeping us at bay with calculated neutrality. The space here is both a fleeting instant and extended time that stretches far into the distance. Now we may be able to tell something about the reasons why he is so keen on the following. He delights in watching the pages of a book turning one after another in a cycle, vibrating gently like cicada’s wings. He admires the sense of ritual inspired by ancient Chinese paintings, solemn and mysterious. Infinity and profundity emanating from an unfolded scroll sometimes find expressions in a grave and dynamic screen. He has a particular preference for polyptyches, as is masterfully proved by his large-size oil paintings. Each and every has a style of its own, but there seems to be a magnetic field that unifies them into ongoing orchestra music. The charm of his art, implicit and diverse, can be fully experienced if you visit his studio in Beijing. Brimming with a solemn sense of ritual, the studio is as tranquil as the painting scrolls. Brushes, paintbrushes, easels, tables, furniture, collection, colors, materials, even the tea set and musical necessities, everything there seems to follow a hidden order and tacitly admitted rules and converges in a silent and purely polyphony of communication, giving full expression to the artist’s interior monologue.
This is the essence of art that only captures and perpetuates what in Li Xin’s words the “worthless moments”, that is, simple, modest, elevated but tender eternity and irreplaceable existence. Li usually captures the moments, minor details or momentary glimpses that he experiences in everyday life to break the superficial drabness and engrave the profundity, estrangement or fragility on an alien world of bizarre images. He also recollects some unforgettable vivid or dramatic moments in his life, like his near-drowning in the Yellow River when he was thirteen. The severe trauma he went through opened his eyes to the world, highlighted his life, and gave him the sensibility to the subtle changes in the world. Since then his life seemed to be a supernatural tale that reminds its origin. Like a passionate song, secret and mild, distant and melodious, melancholic and joyful, as grandiose as an epic, and as soothing as a lullaby, it drifts at its own pace in the mild and fanciful light. Thanks to the narrow escape from death, he embraces life in comfort. The experience, like a dream, brought him so close to another world that anything in this world is now worthwhile.
Grey of all shades is the dominant color in Li’s works. Even though sometimes other colors do appear, they are mostly for his monochrome paintings, like indigo-blue, dark brown, sandy yellow, light colors, colors with minor tonal changes or cinnabar. He thinks gray is able to unify other colors. His preference for gray can be attributed to a lot of factors, which all point to his childhood, like the overcast sky in winter, the Loess Plateau, smoke and ash from cave dwellings on the cliffs overlooking the Yellow River, etc. His coloring also features unique Chinese flavor. Gray roofs and facade, as well as muted silver gray, echo sometimes the bright yellow rooftop of the Daoist temple, either brilliant or mild, and sometimes golden silk and satin. The unique tension built by the colors, implicitly or explicitly, adds to magic power of his art. Without exception his paintings choose yellow as base color, which, when used in profusion, bathes the canvas in golden light. A deep sheen penetrates the canvas and kindles the colored painting, but breaks, all of a sudden, the outline to create a delicate aura, enveloping the painting in breathtaking sculptural beauty and formative power.
Ink painting showcases another dimension of the artist’s visual experience. On one hand he admires masters of traditional Chinese painting, Mi Youren and Mu Xi, among others, and on the other, as a contemporary artist who knows clearly the complexity of contemporary aesthetics, he reinterprets the achromatic tradition of the Chinese landscape painting in a meticulous and explicit manner to develop his own technique and establish his own style in the best tradition of Chinese painting and calligraphy, which share the same origin. He is also very particular about Xuan paper, the vehicle of ink painting, particularly its tensility, texture, water-absorbing quality, frangibility, etc., which is very obvious in his ink painting. It is nonetheless not the most important factor. His affinity with traditional Chinese painting, almost supernatural, I think, is based on something else. The value and significance of the dynamic beauty exuded from the hands of a calligrapher or a ink painter lies in the union of the gesture and the ink, as well as the humidity and lustre, the perfect expressiveness of Xuan paper when absorbing ink. Like those great masters, he is able to obtain the effect that can be achieved only in the world of sound. Like the timbre of an instrument, it flickers between density and transparency, presence and absence, and hues and vibration.
However, if vibration is doomed to disappear and the subtle shades of gray are kept to retain the waves that carry it to an imperceptible context, then water becomes undoubtedly the most primeval, fundamental and nourishing element. Here his near-drowning episode is not to be overinterpreted, but it should not be overlooked either. The moment he, driven by an overwhelming urge, plunged into the river with his playmates, his course of life was charted. Water as an element aside, the artist makes the most out of this liquid, also a medium, in terms of technique and imagery, so in this case water becomes an instrument for art in its own right. The beauty of his ink painting comes naturally from his skillful, exquisite, and implicit techniques that give full expression to the intangible and indelible features like splashed ink dots, hollow strokes, and ink traces. These ink paintings are not about lines or traces, and least of all, symbols. Everything is spontaneous, peaceful and lingering. The roar of the Yellow River accompanied him throughout his childhood never leaves, implicit but concrete and tangible. Inspired by two phenomena from his observations of nature, he separates the boundless slumbering space in his painting in two ways. Both phenomena show fluidity, something the artist tries to capture in everything. In an imagined world that is distant and beautiful, layers of waves ripple into the distance as a drop of water falls onto the surface of some liquid. These images work with the exquisite combination of colors to burst from the imperceptible clashes and bloom in space like floating bubbles or weightless spheres. In his more recent installations, the floating bubbles or weightless spheres break free to occupy the neighboring space on the wall. The ovoid and irregular outline is the trace of ink on the plain and white Xuan paper ─manifesto of its breakup with the geometry-based pictorial tradition for centuries.
In his oil paintings or ink paintings, Li Xin does not hesitate to give up his attempt to create a sense of space beyond the pictorial vehicle, whose sole mission, he believes, is to become a locus for “absorption”. There is no perspective or three-dimensional implication but only purely visual expression, so that light or dark, stream, mist, clouds, telluric cracklings, ascending vertigo, distant ridges and peaks can crisscross, overlap, and respond into a secret choir in harmony. Without traditional spacial rank or the concern over depth or width, these paintings pursue brand new ductility, resilience, and extensibility. In his wild imagination, he is able to take his dream in control. To bring the invisible to surface, he indulges himself in studying the almost imperceptible rustles when a painting brush moves on Xuan paper or canvas, the connection between light ink strokes, as well as the sweet interaction between water, ink, Xuan paper and canvas.

By LIN Yunke

In 1887, Albert A. Michelson, who later became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in the sciences, joined Edward W. Morley to design one of the most exquisite experiments in the history of physics. They were trying to save a soon-to-extinct concept of medium: Ether (also known as “luminiferous aether”), an invisible but existent physical particle that was postulated to transmit factual contacts in the way of relaying them. The Michelson-Morley duo built the experimental apparatus on top of a huge marble slab, which was then floated in a pool of mercury, an element of high density, to pursue the most stable rotation possible on the horizontal plane. The scientists were hoping to capture even the tiniest shift in the positions of the interference fringes brought by the “ether wind”, which would then suggest that light collides with a substance that factually exists.
However, the experiment eventually negated the last possibility of Ether’s existence: as it propagates in space, light is obstructed by nothing – such a notion then became a new physical constant, and brought us a universe that’s a completely empty space. Since then, people have only been able to comprehend the relations of bodies through “action at a distance”: isolated from each other without direct contact, they are imagined to influence and even control each other in a miraculous manner.
The Michelson-Morley experiment was exactly what popped up in my mind when I was standing before Li Xin’s works and listening to the artist talking about how he had been developing his ‘canvases’ with extremely delicate processes over a period of more than six months. But few are aware that to prove Ether’s physical existence – a substance that’s supposed to be dense, homogeneous and infinite, the experimental platform built by the experimenters had already pre-simulated Ether’s physical properties. In an era when people still believed that motions and relations occur only through contact, it was the vortices, large circling bands of invisible material particles that could not be torn apart, that maintained the motions and relations between bodies in the space defined by René Descartes, and between these vortices, there were never gaps of emptiness that could lead to possibilities of catastrophe. Even when Sir Isaac Newton tried to use his theory of “universal gravitation” to tear open a weak gap in the infinite substance, he still insisted on Ether’s “solidness” and “impenetrability”, though he reduced direct contact into force between objects kept at an arm’s length. Here, the etheric world that has been forgotten by the modern world seems to have quietly found its way to sneak into Li’s works.
In Li Xin’s studio, his works are placed as if they were experiment benches. Not exploring color spectrum, line, agglomeration and blank in the realms of shape and light, Li has steered his works to emphasize the “density” of his “canvases”. What Li has devoted great energy to create are never vehicles that represent specific images, but a high-density space of painting that the artist himself describes to be “éther durée” (infinite of Ether) – images can’t attach to the space, nor can strokes penetrate it, so whoever tampers with the space can’t either utilize or destroy it. As the painter’s strokes swept the space like light, the “light rays” got captured by the space, thanks to the interaction between substances of close contact. The pure appearances seen in Li’s work are exhibiting the density and transmission of the space itself. Unlike cosmic black holes, Li Xin’s “éther durée space” doesn’t diminish his painted light rays – their stagnated part when passing through the space remains as light, allowing us to observe traces of how the deviation of light is formed. However, we need to keep in mind that the traces are not corrosions or scars of the space, but evidences that the space has accommodated the artist’s painting behavior.
In this so-called “éther durée space”, the interference effect is never limited to a local area, as any weak trace of light will trigger a transmission effect across the entire space – such transmission occurs in hair’s breadth, not allowing viewers to imagine even the smallest motion and the subsequent replacement. Differing with other works that pursue “emptiness” and “doctrine”, the “éther durée space” doesn’t leave an exact position for replacement by providing white space, nor does it use a pretentious approach of “non-intervention” or “abstraction” to highlight the artistic vehicle amid the barrenness. On the contrary, in a space seemingly of nothingness, the abundance of the world gradually emerges – on the border of every trace that seems to be physically present, the closest location is always filled with the appearance of another trace. This is what remains after the artist’s painted light gets eventually squeezed in the space, thereby revealing pressure, gravity, resistance, and fractal… Once the space’s self-expression is inspired, the works will tend to infinite in self-expression, and Li Xin has appropriately fulfilled his role as an inspirer.
Though constrained by physical canvases and confined to a limited scope for the time being, the “éther durée space” presented by Li creates a transmission effect that continues to visually spill over. That marks the reason why the consistency of the space will never break down, no matter Li’s works are executed either in the form of multiple frames of continuous paintings and fragments, or in the form of a single whole picture or large format. Undeniably, viewers may consider his works to be the abstractification of certain existents, such as rivers, clouds, muds or rubbles, but such abstractification only makes sense in the “contact-based universe” of the “éther durée space”. The traces in Li’s works remind people of river banks and isobars, and in these unobservable fragments used to understand nature’s tremendous changes, the world not only appears to be light and erratic, but also reveals a sense of solidness and resistance. Why the world can be seen by others is because it continues to overcome itself as an obstruction. In a field spurred by slices of Li Xin’s “éther durée space”, viewers, ensnared by the space, will inevitably trigger transmission of sight to overcome their own numb gazes. Working like a Klein bottle, the transmission that spills over the canvases in the “éther durée space” will bring everything in the field, including the viewers’ perceptions, back to the canvases again, in an ever-repeating manner that results in infinity.
Isn’t what happens in this space what Michelson and Molly had hypnotized but failed to achieve? If, in their desperate experiment, even the slightest deviation of light had occurred to disturb a tiny corner of the universe by the slightest, people and matters could adhere to the belief that universally-existent contact is still the basis for understanding the existence of the world, therefore a world in which isolation and remote control become the norms would never have befallen.
Those said, I actually felt a kind of humanistic sadness in a neutral, objective scientific experiment that’s associated with Li Xin’s works. But if we don’t focus our attention on the hegemony of the constant speed of light – The devil, howling “Ho. Let Einstein be,” restored the status quo (in which Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night) – and instead, appreciate the experiment itself, what will happen then? Compared with light’s tap-and-go attribute, the stable state in which mercury and marble are embedded in each other while floating, a phenomenon produced by the experimenters, is already a monument to the Ether in itself. People are so obsessed with such an “obsolete” scientific concept, just because it used to extend our perception, rather than just indulging our fantasy. Given today’s development in physics, the outcome of the Michelson-Molly experiment seems to be non-extraordinary and reasonably deserved, but people are still able to fully preserve a world in which matters relate to each other thanks to a mechanism that inter-embedded mercury and marble, and the experiment is indeed remembered for its exquisitely-designed experimental platform. If the English word “art” had both the meanings of “craft” and “art”, why can’t art, exonerated the burden of scientific evidence, devote itself to the thorough preservation and resurrection of a certain world? A world that is most relevant to human life and emotions, though not “science-based”? Such memories of a sensible world of life as well as memories of a world in which loneliness has not yet become the matters’ universal state seem to be slowly reviving in Li Xin’s works.
This kind of memory loss about “duration”, “density” and “transmission” is just a part of the crisis that the art of painting encounters in the present day. As the etheric world got abandoned, the invincible light began to become the benchmark of time and space, and the universal contact with the world thus became unimportant and impossible. But few people have realized that abandoning the etheric world or the space of contact-based transmission has eventually resulted in photography’s threat to or even replacement of painting. In her book On Photography, Susan Sontag defined photography as a quantitative explosion relative to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. With photography, the world is no longer contact-based, but partially relocated, copied and viewed. Therefore, the world gets collected, just as Sontag noted: “To collect photographs is to collect the world”. And with the intervention of the hegemony of light, the “action at a distance” of image-shooting began to affect how painting is perceived, and the art turned into a craft dominated by tracing, copying, and projecting. Images transcribed on paper from elsewhere, however abstract, would need to consider the viewers’ visual experience at a certain distance, but they are now besieged by the “world at a distance” of photography. To seek the internal differentiation between painting and photography, artists started to prioritize texture and spectrum, elements that may beat photography’s pixel values and acquire certain visual effects exclusive to painting – however, that still cannot change the fate in which painting is viewed in the same isolated way as photography: literally, with “sight” being a variant of “light” (light), viewing and gazing are therefore understood as a form of violence in the contemporary society.
Collecting, isolating and viewing, few people realize that the replacement of the etheric world by the hegemonic world of light can be understood as the root of crises for both painting and the world. Fragmented acts of tracing have made painting an infinitely replaceable trade. As long as painting cannot restore the world filled with physical contact and transmission, human beings cannot find shelter in the art of painting. To that end, trying to restore the “Ether” of our world and end the vicious circle of replaceability should be one of the present-day missions for the art of painting, just like Li Xin’s series Oooooooondes that has replaced the lost paintings at the Musée Rodin, which should never be replaced again. However, that irreplaceability isn’t because the lost works won’t be recovered ever, but because Li Xin’s works don’t take up those spots as “replaceables”.
All appearances in the “éther durée space” just represent a “hypothesis” about the etheric world, but the world is more real than visible fragments. Not a single paragraph of language or a single piece of work can portray an entire world, but if the world is able to transmit our concrete perceptions, without any emptiness to be filled by powers beyond us – authority, capital, formula and speed of light, everything will then be accessible and experienceable, just like what happens in the field formed by the “éther durée space” that entangles both its inside and outside. If Ether didn’t die, our current “hypotheses” or artistic creation would be works that provide an overview of the laws of the etheric world, as in Sir Isaac Newton’s famous phrase “Hypotheses non fingo” (“I do not frame hypotheses”). Through the Oooooooondes series, what people see are not the original works or their replacements, but how the original works appear in the etheric world. I haven’t been able to collect any original work or object, nor their images, but as I activate that world, I’m having a direct contact with it.
In the “éther durée space”, the ether wind that Michelson and Molly had been fascinated by will breeze again. When the speed of light stagnates, all traces of light seem to emerge from within.

Philippe Piguet

« The subject is you, your impressions, your emotions towards nature. You have to look within yourself not around you. » These words were written by Delacroix in his Journal. Words that particularly resonate when one gazes at  Li Xin’s work. They invite us to take stock of the infinite space that the artist wishes to embrace. The monochromatic tone, the islets of matter, the stream and its breaches, the ebb and the flow all play a part in an artform determined by a mental experience, sensitive and memorable, whose key motif is the Yellow River. The River is in Li Xin, echoing the words by Cézanne : « The landscape is in me and I am its conscience. » The painter’s  actions all lead to the creation of a work articulated around this one and only motif. Although he knows that trying to capture the landscape in its whole, in its absolute fullness, is an impossible challenge, he finds ways to make it an organism that comes to life.
« Water, says Li Xin is my principal medium. » Through it paint comes into existence. It is water that shapes the image through the unforeseen, or even the accidents of its flow. After carefully selecting papers for their power of absorption, the painter says he makes them drink this water. Li Xin’s practice is therefore the fruit of a double osmosis: on one hand the emanations from the ink that he makes himself from rough pigments, and that slowly appropriate the iconic space ; on the other, the artist’s emotions that are chanelled by his body. The end result has nothing to do with flat monochromes. but on the contrary reveals a whole universe where one color goes through endless variations that float bewteen the ultra thin and the dense. In it, one can hear the memorable echo of the Yellow River that imparts a sort of geology to paint, and whose changing moods link to the theory of vitalism, so dear to the Century of Enlightenment, but that the painter prefers to associate with the principle of inner necessity advocated by Kandinsky. Backed by these references, Li Xin’s art defines the terms of a prospective pictorial thinking process that is anchored in tradition but also aims to renew it.

Shu Yang

The strokes and smudges found in Li Xin’s first mature works, made with either ink or oils, are closer to modern European and American abstract painting than to Chinese tradition. Gradually, European classical painting became influenced by photography, which had been invented in the 19th century and started to free itself from the constraints of the image. The medium ceased to be bound by verisimilitude and became the purely artistic endeavor that would eventually give birth to abstract painting. Chinese tradition, despite the fact that it allows scholars a certain amount of freedom, a liberty of movement, and perhaps even a certain whimsical approach, never produced truly abstract work. It is only in the 80’s that purely abstract ink wash appeared in China, with the surge of a new wave in the art field. It was the time when young artists, trying to create a new and revolutionary trend, started to use western techniques. The art critic Xiaoshan was fiercely opposed to this movement and predicted: « Chinese painting is headed towards ruination. ». To this day, Chinese ink wash still lacks a distinct modern form.
Ink, the medium of choice of Chinese scholars, has a very long history. This tradition developed by scholars after the Yuan dynasty, is nearly unknown beyond Eastern Asia, and remained localized, developed within China, very far still from globalization and the impact it would have on contemporary art. After spending time in France and creating abstract pieces for a few years, Li Xin returned to ink. This decision, resulting from a lengthy personal artistic maturation, may also be seen as a cultural choice, a desire to create a new form of ink wash, unheard of in the Chinese tradition, and which aimed to reposition an ancestral tradition into the contemporary world. This choice belongs neither to recent Chinese artistic trends nor to a particular international context. It reflects more what I would call an « interlocal » vision Li Xin’s new work shows connections – connections of experiences gleaned in different places, his childhood spent by the Yellow River, his artistic training in Beijing, the years spent in France, the acquisition of various artistic techniques. They all constitute the genesis of his work. It is this cultural choice that links everything – a person and his roots, regional diversity, the creative process and the completed piece – and that becomes apparent to the public through the artist’s paintings.
Xin speaks of his creation as « paint rooted in water ». Thus he distances himself from traditional scholars who were mostly concerned with the handling of brush and ink. For his part, Li Xin uses very little ink, only leaving a few smudges that look like water stains. If one compares his work to the eminently physical one of Pollock’s, it should be noted that apart from the involvement of his whole body, the painter also tries to appropriate the water marks left so naturally and so pleasantly on Xuan paper – something he shares with Chinese traditional scholars However, whereas the latter tried to control the natural and haphazard formation of these smudges, Li Xin wants to limit the use of both elements in favor of the work done by water, which becomes the main creative actor, and in doing so, he creates a new form of expression. Despite the fact that this unique approach is somewhat removed from the traditional one, it may still be linked to it. « Images of the highest quality are invisible and the highest quality music is inaudible ». This path towards understanding, through introspection, is as much part of the Chinese classical tradition as it is the key to understanding Li Xin’s work.  In the same way, Li Xin’s work may be defined as the « image of water ».
In Europe, the first theories on abstract painting were based on music. Each of the elements it is composed of: rhythm, melody, mode, timbre, and the acoustic field reflect the work of the mind through time and space, and create a unique and irreplaceable human experience. Water may not be capable of being fixed, but the ink embodies it, forming images on the paper. Ink keeps the shape of the water, leaving its print on paper. Only the memory of it remains, because the water itself has disappeared. Li Xin juggles with water, with ink and paper, retracing his thoughts in the ink wash. He manages to transpose this mental process with an ease freed from techniques and liberated from conceptualization. Whether it wants to advance or to seek artistic truth, to progress and modernize itself, Chinese ink wash must not only accept a technical but also a cultural renewal. We hope that Li Xin’s painting may be the secret formula that will help give this form of artistic expression a place in a globalized world.

Christine Cayol

What strange power compels bamboo to reach for the sky? No one can answer this question without first experiencing the bamboo’s movement itself, understanding its《li》its internal essence, its evolving shape. This is how, for Su Dongpo, the bamboo needs to first grow in a man’s heart before it can be depicted on paper.
Let’s dare ask the same question when we look at Li Xins work what is the inner movement that in each piece makes water flow, lands on the paper, crumples it, risking to destroy it?
The landscapes, oils or inks,《descend》from the sky, water from the clouds joining that which often beads on our faces, tears from the heart tied to faces from the past.
Li Xin follows the movement of weeping water Sorrow but also wonder or joy can make one cry h is essential to let this movement flow and to welcome this water on the canvas or on the face. Today’s tears come from a distant past yet they also are the seedbeds of a future under creation.
Calligrapher at heart, for this staunchly contemporary painter water is not only one element in many but the work’s guiding spirit.despite its instability and precariousness. Water plays the part that scholars assigned to ink in traditional painting. It has to be followed his own path.His silent and becomes one with a wave, dispenser of both shape and possible instant destruction.
For the past ten years, the artist has found and followed his own path. His silent and discreet work which has won the acclaim of the most famous European art critiques and collectors, opens a path to the future for Chinese contemporary art. A path that is narrow but real.《 The man who can comprehend and assimilate our ancestors heritage, can also innovate without being bound by the past. Yet，nowadays, such a man is hard to find…》. Words from Shi Tao, the Biter Gourd monk, in his discourse on painting.
Such an artist defies classification, and from Ma Yuan’s waves to Rothko’s monochromes, the path is anything but linear. But is it a path or a return to roots, to childhood, to distilled time celebrated in soft yet unyielding colors?
Li Xin finds nourishment in ancient paintings, calligraphy and poems. He discovered Rothko only recently and is surprised when one compares Western abstraction’s troubling monochromes to his Zen garden. Perhaps we always need to compare, to elicit and establish filiations. But the only connections formats, the past and the present- silent variations found in a sip of tea.
One will be awed or bored by these grey blue landscapes, A demanding piece of art requires a demanding or even a fully-engaged public who will be able to feel within only one color the chromatic waves of change.
No work by Li Xin resembles another. Because no tear resembles another and because sometimes stone can emulate clouds and stir in an unexpected movement.
《Shi ru Yun dong》, this expression not only defines a remarkable pictorial effect but also a spiritual attitude.When Mi Fu saw a painting by Li Cheng, he suddenly felt the special heartbeat that can cause stones and mountains to move.
《Shi ru Yun dong》: light becomes heavy and heavy becomes light. This could be inscribed at this exhibition’s entrance – a way to reveal the world without defining it.