1.

Let's start with this flower.

It stands alone yet is solid, its color is heavy yet its posture is complex, it is persistent yet free. If one is familiar with the narrative of Chinese ink painting, such “imagery” associations will not lead to the abstract/concrete coordinate system; the sensations of sight and the direction of consciousness are inseparable. The accidental dynamism and a certain stable force, coexisting and interconnected, closest yet farthest.

“As when scene and heart meet, there is inevitably a time,”as seen in works from exhibitions such as “Shadow of the Wind,” “Rose of Light,” and “Peach Blossom Spring,”Zhou Li has marked her encounters and impressions with varying hues and temperaments, with life experience unfolding into entirely different realms through differing tonalities. Zhou Li’s works bear the appearance of modern gestural painting, yet they are permeated with the lines of Chinese ink painting. Although they readily evoke the impression of abstraction, their internal constructive logic is ultimately not abstract. Abstraction is a modern form with deep historical and conceptual roots; it is perhaps too entangled with philosophical reductionism, emerging from the Western tradition’s pursuit of representation and its evolution — a cognitive act. But what about within a pictorial context that does not pursue representation?

The flower at the entrance seems to indicate such a context, the place it has grown: two paintings, in stark contrast of bright red and deep black, face each other head-on, opening up that space, with flying lines meandering, layers upon layers. Whether in the relationship between colors and lines, or in the confrontation of black and red, they seem not to explain or structure each other, each with its own vitality, each self-sufficient. Yet they are not unrelated — any single element drifting within them still mutually completes the other. This seemingly accidental wandering is, of course, carefully orchestrated: the blending of colors, the materials of the canvas, even an approach like installation art — anything can be used. Not only image, but intent; our relationship with it will not stop at the level of visual viewing. In old Chinese terms, all things receive light from above and connect with earth below; when heaven and earth meet, spirit flows through. When past and present meet, the marks of time appear…


Walter Benjamin once took astronomy as the earliest and most typical example of modern science to show how modern technology transformed the human–cosmos relationship into a purely “visual” one — that is, a cognitive relationship. Viewing may bring more information and knowledge, but may also lead to the collapse of meaning. In “One-Way Street”, he wrote that the most obvious difference between the ancients and moderns is: the ancients could immerse themselves in a cosmic experience, could feel themselves in things closest yet farthest from us, conversing with the cosmos in a shared ecstasy — unlike moderns, who either stare at concrete minutiae or construct metaphysics.


How can such a life experience be conveyed into a visible and shareable form? This might be compared to one aspect of the Romantic movement: “exploring infinite possibilities through intuition.” That movement was a rebellion against the excessive intensification of reason — heart against head, a resistance to “disenchantment,” a call for “re-enchantment.” According to Foucault’s “archaeology,” psyche, language, and community all exist as living organisms, each culture having its own path to re-enchantment. It provides a channel for the rhythms of bodily emotion to be directly presented; Romanticism was only one of these channels. Today’s globally interconnected art world continually develops such paths, yet in the complex mutations of ideas, painting today faces a far more intricate situation — and more possibilities — than the generation of Lin Fengmian ever did.


2.
In Lin Fengmian’s time, the use of color according to subject, the use of line, structural handling — all were still part of the East–West synthesis question. Today, for Chinese painters, line and color are no longer easily separable into “Eastern” or “Western”; the various rules have long since lost external binding force, and are so intertwined that to separate them becomes the problem — which would be like cutting off one’s own lifeblood. Yet the point of departure still differs according to one’s origin in east, west, south, or north.

Located in Shenzhen, an internal migrant city within China, people here come from all corners of the country, engaged in various professions, carrying diverse backgrounds, and speaking Mandarin with regional accents. They have gathered at this new starting point to redefine their lives and explore endless possibilities for survival. Shenzhen, neither a central hub nor a peripheral outpost, has redefined the linear order of time, directly connecting to the future. Zhou Li moved here as a teenager, has practiced ink painting since childhood, and spent many years traveling in France. The art collection in her studio is also neither central nor peripheral — student exercises, gifts from friends, works she bought herself, filling walls and shelves, without an obvious aesthetic tendency. Very much like Shenzhen.

In an interview, Wu Hung invited Zhou Li to reflect on the trajectory of her artistic practice. In response, she articulated that, during that period, she endeavoured to traverse the annals of Western art history, seeking to comprehend the rationale behind the manner in which artists articulated themselves. She later realised that she was still best at the “Chinese kung fu” that had first given her an artistic outlet: ink painting. One can indeed sense a certain tactile quality imbued by ink in her work. In Huang Binhong on Painting, Wang Bomin quotes Huang as saying: “I use layered ink to seek gradations within it” and “I am not afraid of a thousand layers of ink, but I fear poor layering that produces dead black. As long as one has the method, even hundreds or thousands of layers will still be rich with moisture.” The 'broken ink' technique involves the gradual permeation of dense ink into light ink, or vice versa, through the utilisation of vertical strokes interspersed with horizontal ones, broken by vertical strokes, and vice versa. This process is executed while the ink is semi-dry, employing the inherent diffusion of water to achieve not only the dualism of yin and yang, light and heavy, thick and thin in forms, but also a sense of freshness and flexibility in tone, as if imbued with the moisture of dew and rain, never fully dry yet firmly established on the paper.

Zhou Li does not use ink alone, but a variety of mixed media — sometimes blending ink into acrylics, and so on. This way of using color, line, and layering still retains the transparency of ink, “layered without dead black,” with stable materials. The training in ink and outlining lines was her childhood foundation, accumulating daily practice into skill. This is not only manual skill, but also an inner rhythm of feeling and experience, and a learned direction for imagery. In this sense, her work is not a question of abstraction, but carries a hazy narrativity. Lin Fengmian’s painting was a classic modern construction of imagery, akin to Romantic painting,“aestheticizing rivers and mountains as the national landscape.” Now, geographical isolation is no longer a barrier; landscapes have all been shaped by modern technology; identification with local culture grows more abstract, and personal cultural experience becomes more important. Zhou Li says her mountains and waters are deeply personal. Yet how could any “person” be non-cultural? Without the idea of a whole culture, could there be a self-aware personal consciousness?

In contemporary art discourse, there is an almost self-evident idea: contemporaneity in relation to the use of Chinese cultural resources — which include both social critique and traditional forms. When “Chinese form” was once proposed, the background was the difference between the modern culture of coastal cities and the traditional society of the vast interior. How to modernize the use of traditional cultural forms, with their political and emotional implications, was the question of the modern nation-state. In today’s context of contemporary art, the background is China’s relation to globalization — how can those traditional elements be used and interpreted within contemporary and international contexts? Can“the personal”itself be an internal cultural perspective? Such self-awareness only arises after understanding the outside world and its complex mutual influences; it will not use symbolic markers of difference — ink, Chinese characters, chopsticks — nor measure by a fixed concept. Thus when we speak of the “lines” and “ink washes” in Zhou Li’s paintings, I think it is more in an analogical sense — as learned methods, as culturally-formed sensibilities and discernment — concrete, not conceptual, ways of entering the present condition.


3.
“The world in a flower” and “Night：Rose of Light”, two large-scale canvases — face each other from afar. Their consciously rhetorical arrangements, though meticulously composed, seem like natural murmurs, appearing unforced and at ease. The shift in cultural concepts reminds us that the opposite of reason is never sensibility, but irrationality; the opposite of sensibility is not reason, but numbness.

Sensibility always occurs at the site of personal experience, and painting naturally connects with the painter’s emotions and experiences. In contemporary art writing, the strong linkage between the work and the author’s personal experience is especially emphasized. This relationship is crucial — yet to what extent can a work restore an experience, and by what methods can such restoration be credible? In fact, a work need not reveal the person; one can see the work without seeing the person. Frustration is a typical modern experience: its paradox lies in that people are both the object of modern processes and the subject constructing modernity. Each person’s way of defining reality may differ; the subject’s experience is precise and concrete — and may also be a kind of cocoon. The reason we can have a vast artistic space is not the academically codified results of formal evolution, but the entanglement in modern experience of multiple historical threads, allowing very different ways of organizing personal experience.

Zhou Li’s paintings exude a steady, weighty dynamism, with flows of various emotions, shifts of tone and rhythm, gradations of volume and presence. It is a movement formed by the dialogue of all beings, the mutual responses of all things — with questions and answers, endlessly extending into infinite depth. This extension is not a further step to reveal concepts behind forms, but a step back, removing the division between inside and outside, without a clear distinction between viewing subject and viewed object. Compared with the modern aesthetic of frustration or pain, her works retain in experience a dynamic balance among many factors, with an unceasing texture. This is akin to the Chinese philosophical flavor sought in ink painting, as Wang Guowei said: “One must enter into it, and also step outside of it.” Thus, her paintings present a process of re-recognizing experience, a search for affirming potential energy. At this moment, personal experience is no longer the object of expression, nor the expresser, but the bridge — an ancient, self-affirming path, which must nonetheless pass through the tunnel of modern reason.