BEYOND WANDERING

Li Xin at the Golden Gate Palace

I come from a Hakka family. For reasons tied to history, my ancestors traversed much of China, settling in the south before migrating northward again. As I now divide my time between China and France, I often reflect on the meaning of such journeys. From a contemporary perspective, I have never truly “immigrated,” yet I am constantly moving. During these travels, I feel precisely like a migrant—and the sight of clouds viewed through airplane windows fascinates me. Their motion is free, without any destination. Lighter than us, they drift from place to place as they please, changing forms endlessly. This touches me deeply.
Even though my journeys are not immigration in today’s political sense, when I travel, my mind and body undergo a process of exchange, movement, adaptation, and transformation. And the same is true regarding my participation in the exhibition at the Musée de la Porte Dorée, I felt I should draw inspiration from the fluidity of clouds, setting the ink adrift on the expanse of rice paper.

LI XIN, A WATER ARTIST

Henri-François Debailleux

“I’m not a painter.” Li Xin immediately announced. Faced with his works and this disconcerting affirmation, we can only wonder what he is. And what he does. “I make images. Painting is rather decorative. What interests me is to dialogue with the universe in the manner of the ancient Chinese scholars who sought harmony between man, nature, and the universe”. A way undoubtedly to point the brush on the first characteristic of his work, this surprising feeling of tradition and at the same time of great contemporaneity.
Li Xin continues the tradition by focusing on nature and water as its main subjects. In this way, it is part of the history of Shanshui, a style of Chinese painting that depicts landscapes, particularly mountains (shan) and water (shui).
Li Xin uses contemporary techniques that are different from traditional methods. He mainly practices two techniques: one involves working on canvas and the other on Xuan paper, where he creates a subtle range of greys.
For the canvas, he dilutes his oil paint with turpentine essence to make it very fluid. He then applies it to a canvas previously covered with a bright yellow background. This process brings out a splendid light from within the painting, which is both subdued and prominent.When working on Xuan paper, he uses very liquid Chinese ink. He explains: “I am more of a water than an ink artist. But since the water is transparent and cannot be seen, I am obliged to add a few drops of ink”.
Because the poetics of water remains the central subject of Li Xin’s work. The water of rivers, waterfalls, rocks, flows, and waves, allows contact and direct dialogue with the universe.
For the artist, water is also an ideal metaphor to talk about time: it evokes memory and the present, the past, and now, flowing time or suspended time. It is also a source of contemplation, meditation, reverie, and spirituality.
Contrary to what it may seem, Li Xin is not an expressionist. He exercises great restraint, enabling him to control the movements and flow of water, harnessing its natural force and gravity to create images by guiding the waves and allowing them to cover the canvas gradually. This approach also allows him to halt the ink’s progression guided by chance, intuition, and knowledge, precisely where he deems fit, ensuring the mass, balance, depth, and harmony are as accurate as possible. It’s a delicate balance of spontaneity and control.Li Xin appreciates precision. He doesn’t hesitate to use a magnifying glass to inspect the smallest details, looking inside the fibers of the paper, delving into it, and discovering micro-universes. The infinitely large and the infinitely small are within reach, a tangible sensation.

In an age of pandemic, defined by isolation and unspoken words, our yearning to speak to the divine has never felt more urgent.

As wars rage, conflicts persist, and information explodes, division has become the norm and silence a luxury. Does the resonance of human connections seem to be a distant dream?

Standing as a pinnacle of Lyon’s architectural history, the Chapel of the Hôtel-Dieu distinguishes itself with its Baroque adornment. For centuries, it has nurtured countless bodies and souls.

Li Xin’s work, employing ink and Xuan paper, is concise and ethereal. It carries both the elusive poeticism of Zhuangzi’s butterfly from traditional Chinese painting, and a deeply moving attention to this very moment in time and space.

His project unfolds within the chapel’s interior: three monumental ink paintings, each nearly four meters tall, hang in the middle of the chapel. Devoid of concrete imagery, they are permeated with gray ink. As the ink settles, droplet by droplet, it flows like rivers into the sea; its shades, deep and light, rise like curling wisps of smoke. Ink, originally made from pine soot, becomes smoke again within the painting. Everything begins in nature and, in the end, returns to it.

Li Xin does not overly refine the details of the paintings. Instead, he emphasizes the resonance between the work and the space. On the one hand, their monumental scale feels majestic and vast, evoking a profound sense of human insignificance when viewed from below. On the other, the Xuan paper—thin as a cicada’s wing—hangs suspended, trembling almost imperceptibly with each passing visitor, each note of choir song and each murmur of Mass. Through this, the viewer resonates with the work in shared frequency. Perhaps the subtlety reveals itself in the space between breaths, in the interval between arrival and departure—this is where silence resides, where time finds its meaning.

The choice of Xuan paper is no accident. This seemingly soft and delicate material contains an intensely raw and organic world within. Its entire production involves over a hundred distinct steps: using the bark of blue sandalwood trees and Shatian straw as raw materials, processed separately into pulp, blended in varying proportions, then mixed with a paper sizing substance made from kiwi vine juice before being formed into various kinds of Xuan paper. This “brutalism” within the paper stands in sharp contrast to the chapel’s Baroque ornamentation—a resilient power residing in simplicity.

In these exceptional times, individuals, nations and the planet itself are undergoing convulsions and torment. We seek solace in art, in prayer, in love, yet still cannot escape the turmoil within.
Yet, Li Xin’s work focuses precisely on resonance, silence, intuition and inwardness. This vision forms not only a symphony with the chapel’s spirit and architecture, but also extends into care and healing of the human—an acceptance and consolation of reality as it is.

If the particularity of the Chapel of the Hôtel-Dieu lies not only in its grand external form but also in everything finely wrought within—trompe-l’oeil, reliefs, or the shimmering gold—then Li Xin undoubtedly echoes it across time. With works of utmost simplicity, he invites each of us for an internal journey.