Zhou Li: Closest Yet Farthest

Text by Shu Kewen

1.

Let’s begin with the flower.

Solitary yet resilient, the flower is weighty in hue and intricate in form – unwavering yet at ease. For those familiar with the narrative of Chinese ink and wash, such “imagery” does not point toward the coordinates of abstraction or figuration; the act of seeing and stream of conscious association are inseparable. Amid a mingling of sensations, a fleeting sense of motion and a quiet stability coexist – closest yet farthest.

“It takes a certain moment for the soul to resonate with the surroundings.” In works such as Shadow of the Wind, Rose of Light, and Tracing Peach Blossom Spring, Zhou Li conveys her encounters and perceptions through distinct hues and temperaments, each unfolding a unique realm of life experience. Her work features both the appearance of modern painterly expression and lines characteristic of Chinese ink and wash. Though they may easily lead to the impression of abstract painting, the inner logic is in essence not abstract. Abstraction, as a modern form, is founded on a concept with deep historical roots. It is probably too profoundly entangled with reductionism, having evolved from western traditional painting’s pursuit of representing objects - a fundamentally cognitive act. However, what would it become in a pictorial context that does not pursue representation?

The flower at the entrance seems to signify the context of its own – the place where it grows: two paintings, in starkly contrasting red and black face each other, stretching open the space between them with swift meandering lines and layered planes. It seems the interplay between colors and lines and the contrast between red and black are neither structurally complementary nor visually inter-explainable. Instead, they sustain their own vitality and are in nature self-contained and alive. But they are not entirely unrelated. Any elements wandering within seem to be complementary in a sense. The seemingly spontaneous wandering is of course meticulously orchestrated: the blending of pigments, the choice of canvas materials, even the installation…nothing is unusable. With “imagery” embedded in the “image”, the relationship between the works and the viewer no longer rests at the visual level alone. As the old Chinese saying goes: all things are endowed with light from the heaven and vitality from the earth; when the two converge, the spirit becomes whole. When the ancient meets the present, vicissitudes of time reveal themselves.

Walter Benjamin once took astronomy as the earliest and most exemplary instance of modern science, using it to illustrate how modern technology had transformed the relationship between humanity and the cosmos into a purely “visual” one, or say, a cognitive one. Vision may grant access to more information and knowledge; but in the meantime, it can also result in the collapse of meaning. In One-Way Street, Benjamin wrote that the most striking difference between ancient and modern peoples lies in that ancient people could immerse themselves in a cosmic experience, sensing their own being from somewhere that is both closest and farthest and communicating with the universe through a rapture of shared feeling. Modern people, by contrast, either fixate on the trivialities of the concrete world or construct metaphysical systems.

How to translate such life experience into forms that are both visible and shareable? One might liken it to an aspect of the Romantic Movement – the exploration of infinite possibilities through intuition. The movement was a reaction against the relentless overemphasis on reason, against the dominance of the intellect, and against “disenchantment”. In other words, it’s a kind of “re-enchantment”. According to Foucault’s “archaeology”, mind, language and community exist as living organisms, shaped by shared emotional and aesthetic habits. Each culture, therefore, follows its own path of re-enchantment. It provides a pathway for the rhythmic sensitivities of bodily emotions to find direct manifestation: Romanticism is but one of them. The globally connected art world keeps developing these pathways; however, within the increasingly complex variations of concepts, painting today faces a far more complicated reality than in Lin Fengmian’s time. But in the meantime, it also harbors more possibilities.

2.

In Lin Fengmian’s time, questions of how to apply color, use line and arrange composition were all matters of reconciling Chinese and western art. However, for contemporary Chinese painters today, the distinctions between Chinese and western art in terms of line and color have already blurred. The old systems of rules have long lost their external restraining force. But they remain present, exerting influence while intricately entangled. At this point, how to disentangle them becomes the real issue. Wouldn’t that be and act of severing all ties with oneself again? Nevertheless, even so, every point of departure still lies in a different direction – east, west, south and north.

As an immigrant city in China, Shenzhen gathers people from all different places and backgrounds. Mandarin of all kinds of accents can be heard here. A new point of departure for many, the city offers infinite possibilities for life. Shenzhen, a city that is neither a center nor a periphery, resets the linear order of time, as if extending straight towards the future. Zhou Li migrated to Shenzhen when she was a teenager. She has learned Chinese ink and wash since childhood and spent years living in France. From the art collections in her studio, it could be perceived that there’s something akin to the temperament of the city. Among the collections, there are students’ exercises works, exchanged gifts among friends and works that she has acquired over the years. Covering the walls and shelves, they reveal no evident aesthetic preferences – non-central, non-marginal, unmistakably Shenzhen.

In an interview, Wu Hung asked Zhou Li to review her artistic journey. She replied that during those years, she had experimented with everything in the western art history, trying to understand why western artists chose to express in that way. Later she realized that what she was truly proficient in – and the original source of her artistic vitality – was Chinese ink and wash. In her paintings, a tactile quality steeped in ink and wash could be intuitively perceived. While reading Wang Bomin’s Quotations on Painting from Huang Binhong, she was impressed by Huang’s approaches to use ink. According to Huang Binhong, “I use layered ink to seek depth and dimension within ink.” “It’s not the thousand layers of ink that one should fear, but the lack of mastery that makes them dull and lifeless. When mastered, even after a thousand layers of accumulation, the ink would remain vibrant and full of life.” He further explained, “ink-breaking (po mo) technique involves using dense ink to penetrate and break through light ink on paper, or light ink to break through dense ink, using a vertical stroke to break through a horizontal one, and vice versa. It must be done when the ink is half-dry, taking advantage of its natural diffusion in water. This technique not only captures the contrasts of light and shadow (yin and yang), front and back, weight and texture of the subject, but also keeps the ink tones fresh and vivid – as if moistened by rain and dew, never dry, yet fully alive on paper.”

Zhou Li’s paintings do not rely solely on ink and wash. Her palette bears the traces of a complex blending and layering of multiple media such as ink and acrylic, among others, attesting to her ongoing experiments with the different textures and “temperaments” of color. The way she deals with color, line and layered effect retains the translucence characteristic of ink: rich in tonal depth yet free from murkiness, while maintaining the stability of the materials. For Zhou Li, the discipline of using ink and line began as a childhood practice – an early and persistent daily practice that over time has matured into true mastery. It goes beyond manual technique and embodies the rhythms of her inner emotions and sensory perceptions, as well as an intuitive imagery direction arising from them. In this sense, her creative methodology is not an abstract pursuit, but rather one infused with subtle narrativity. In Lin Fengmian’s time, painting was a classic modern construction of imagery – much like Romantic painting – “aestheticizing mountains and rivers as the landscape of the nation.” Today geographical boundaries are no longer obstacles; mountains and rivers have been mapped and reshaped by modern technology, and notions of local culture have become increasingly abstract. Personal cultural experience, therefore, takes on greater importance. This is why Zhou Li says that the landscapes in her heart are deeply personal. In the meantime, we can also sense from within her work that nothing “personal” can ever fall outside culture. Without the concept of a shared culture, how on earth could there be an awareness of the self?

In the discourse of contemporary art, there’s a self-evident concept – the so-called modernity and the use of Chinese cultural resources. Chinese resources generally refer to both social critique and traditional forms. The idea of “Chinese forms” first emerged in the 1930s and 40s under the circumstances very different from today. At the time the coastal regions of China were at the frontline to encounter western modern culture, leading to experience sharply contrasting with those of the vast traditional hinterlands of China. How could the cultural forms of traditional society be employed in a modern way? The political and emotional implications of this question were central to the then modern nation-state’s cultural aspirations. The context for today’s contemporary art, on the other hand, feature the relationship between China and globalization: how might traditional cultural elements be used and interpreted within the contemporary and international frameworks? Or say, how can art be generated from within these two cultural resources? At this point, might the so-called “personal” become an internalized perspective within culture itself? Such awareness can only arise after one has come to understand the external world and its complex web of mutual influences. People then cease to rely on symbols – such as ink and wash, Chinese characters or chopsticks that signify cultural differences; nor would they use any particular concepts as absolute measures. Therefore, I think the lines and ink washes in Zhou Li’s paintings are used more in an analogical sense. They are acquired sensibilities, a cultural way of perception and discernment on a methodological level. It’s a way of engaging with the present moment, concretely rather than conceptually.

3.

The evolution of cultural perceptions enables us to realize that the true opposite of rationality is never sensibility, but irrationality; and likewise, the true opposite of sensibility is not rationality, but numbness.

Facing each other across the gallery space, the two large-scale paintings The World in a Flower and Night reveal a consciously rhetorical arrangement. Despite their meticulous composition, they feel as effortless and unforced as a whisper of nature.

Sensibility is always rooted in personal experience; and painting serves as a natural linkage with the painter’s emotions and lived reality. The strong ties between artwork and the artist’s personal experience takes a pivotal role in the discourse of contemporary art; and of course, their relationship is crucial. However, to what extend can artwork restore experience? Or say, in what ways can the credible value of experience be restored? As a matter of fact, work of art doesn’t necessarily reveal its maker. The painter could remain invisible behind the painting. The experience of frustration is among the most typical of modern experiences. The paradox lies in that individual is both the object of modern progress and the subject of its construction. The way people define reality vary; their subjective experience, on the other hand, is always concrete and precise (though it may form a kind of cocoon). The breadth of today’s artistic space does not arise merely from the disciplinary evolution of forms, as described by historians. Rather, it stems from the complex entanglement of multiple historical threads within modern experience– threads that each individual may reorganize in profoundly different ways.

Zhou Li’s painting gives out a steady yet weighty sense of motion – an equilibrium in flux where emotions flow, tonal rhythms shift and layers of sound and silence unfold. The sense of motion arises from the dialogues among all beings, the mutual resonance between things – questions and responses, a perpetually ongoing process extending toward boundless depth. Rather than going a step forward to reveal the concept behind form; it goes a step backward, descending into the realm of everyday experience where there is no clear boundary between the subject of viewing and object to be viewed, between the internal and the external. Compared to the sense of frustration or pain associated with modern aesthetics, her painting retains the various elements of experience, dynamically balancing their multi-layered interrelations and hence creating a texture of ceaseless vitality. This embodies the philosophical temperament long sought in traditional Chinese painting. As Wang Guowei once wrote, “one must immerse himself in, yet also transcend beyond.” In this regard, painting and the act of viewing the painting become the process of re-identifying experience – a search for affirmative potential energy. Here, personal experience is no longer the object to be represented, nor a one-way expression from the expresser. Instead, it’s a bridge, an ancient winding path towards self-affirmation – one that must pass through the tunnel of modern rationality.