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.