CONTEMPORARIES
Out of the Hothouse Ying Li’s paintings during a time of solitude reveal a profound connection to the landscape. INTERVIEW BY CHRIS BYRNE
Ying Li in her studio. Photograph by Holden Blanco.
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orn out of sol itude during the pandemic, Ying Li’s exhibition Hothouse at Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden presents paintings made on the deserted campus of Haverford College. Immersed in the wild, untamed beauty of an uninhabited landscape, Li painted en plein air, allowing the energy, light, and atmosphere of each location to guide her.
Chris Byrne (CB): Hothouse is your current exhibition at Valley House. How did the show come about? Ying Li (YL): During the COVID 19 pandemic, Haverford College, where I have been teaching since 1997, shut down. The students all went home. I painted on the deserted campus, with basically nobody around, through the pandemic. I set up at the locations I wanted, just painted, and didn’t even think or worry about whether I was making a good painting or not. It’s just to paint, to focus, to go through that very difficult time. The campus was glorious and wild because of no interference from humans, and the plants, flowers, and the animals around, they were very happy. That’s how I painted these pieces. They are the paintings that came out of that strange and vulnerable time. A selection of those works showed in my solo exhibition entitled Blossoms in the Time of Sudden Strangeness in the Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery at Haverford College in 2020. Then this show, with additional work, traveled to the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University in Virginia. Cheryl and Kevin Vogel at Valley House Gallery and Sculpture Garden liked the work and suggested to have a show on this theme. So the show is partly pandemic paintings, combined with some of the most recent work on the same theme. CB: In 1983, you moved to the US from China to continue your studies at the Parsons School of Design. When did you first encounter Western painting? YL: My very first exposure to Western painting was as a little girl looking at reproductions in one of my father’s Russian magazines.
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Ying Li, The Land of Timucuan, Fort George Island #2, 2022, oil on canvas, 24 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist and Valley House Gallery.
He was a Russian scholar, in China. I remember in the same page there were two images. One was of Picasso’s Harlequin. The other one was Matisse’s Goldfish in the Pushkin Museum. The bold color and the mysterious atmosphere in those paintings made a deep impression and just stuck with me as child. I was teaching at Anhui Normal University in China in the early ’80s after the Culture Revolution ended. I remember seeing reproductions of Western paintings—for example, of Picasso’s work—but I had never seen any Western painting in person until I landed in New York in 1983. I went to MOMA the day after I arrived in New York, and the first painting I encountered was Cezanne’s big Bather. It’s painted with subtle grays and blues, nothing flashy, a little awkward, but it felt monumental. Then I saw the de Kooning retrospective that fall, at the Whitney Museum. That show blew me away. The way he handles paint and his subject matter, for me at the time, was unthinkable, because I was trained to paint in the social-realistic style. It was really eye opening. Following that, the Bonnard show I saw at the Phillips Collection in DC—The way he used color and also the abstraction in his painting has been a big inspiration since. CB: Following your show at Valley House Gallery, what upcoming projects can we look forward to? YL: I have been working on the theme of jazz for the past decade. I’ve been traveling with Eddie Palmieri’s orchestra, the Mingus Big Band, the Latin Side band, and also a couple of others. I wanted to explore this because I feel for me that it’s the same way that the jazz musicians approach their music. I have finished on site a series of mixed-media works depicting musicians and music scenes in different clubs around the world. I am planning to do big-scale paintings based on my studies. For another project, the poet and art critic John Yau has proposed a three-person show on variations of abstractions including three painters: Stanley Lewis, Eric Aho, and me at the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation in New York City. P