LI HUAYI (b.1948) Landscape, 2010-2011LI HUAYI (b.1948)Landscape, 2010-2011Ink on paper, signed on the bottom right, framed and glazed. 180cm high x 91cm wide (71in high x 36in wide). 李華弌(1948年生) 山水 水墨紙本 鏡框 2010-2011年作Published, Illustrated and Exhibited: Michael Goedhuis, The Ink Art of China, London, 2019, pp.18-19. 展覽著錄：Michael Goedhuis著，《水墨中國》，倫敦，2019年，第18-19頁Li Huayi is internationally renowned for his meticulously detailed landscape paintings that are reminiscent of masterworks from the Song dynasty (960–1279). He was born in Shanghai in 1948. As a child, Li began studying ink painting with a family friend, Wang Chuantao (1903-1978), as well as Western-style painting with Zhang Chongren (1907-1998), who had trained at the Royal Academy of Arts in Brussels. Li was thus trained well in the technical skills of European painting and traditional Chinese painting. Li can thus be said to have inherited Shanghai's cosmopolitan past. As a young man growing up in China during the Cultural Revolution, however, artists and art students were expected to produce the Socialist Realist propaganda images demanded at the time. By the time the Cultural Revolution ended following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, young artists were eager to experiment and develop new ideas about making art. The open-door policy initiated in 1979 opened up new possibilities and in 1982, Li Huayi emigrated to the United States to find an art world in transition from abstraction to post-modernism. During his graduate studies at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco, he began to concentrate on subtle abstract compositions, unlike anything he had attempted in China. After a decade in San Francisco, Li Huayi's artistic experimentation and transformation bore fruit. Li travelled to China's famous mountains and to the Buddhist caves of Dunhuang, as a means of rejuvenating his art through the inspiration of natural beauty. He once again turned his attention to the classical masterpieces of Chinese landscape painting - in particular the masters of Northern Song dynasty monumental landscape painting such as Fan Kuan (c.960-1030), Li Cheng (919-967), and Guo Xi (c.1020-1090); see Eskenazi Ltd., Waterfalls, rocks and bamboo by Li Huayi, London, 2014, p.11.Li Huayi's careful study of the classics of Chinese and European painting, as well as the modern American practice of abstraction, yielded paintings that are at once firmly rooted in the history of Chinese art and instantaneously meaningful to contemporary viewers. As Li said himself: I began to incorporate elements from traditional Chinese arts in my own works. Tradition is the spiritual core of every form of Chinese art – porcelain, pottery, rubbings, carvings, everything. But each of these arts also contains an abstract side; see M.Knight, The Monumental Landscapes of Li Huayi, San Francisco, 2005, p.2.The solid pine, the mist that both divides and unites the mountain peaks, the overhanging cliff, the tree clinging to rocky precipices, all echo the most potent motifs of Northern Song painting. Li's synthesis of styles is achieved through fastidiously rendered brushstrokes and a unique sense of composition that is inspired by the past and wholly his own. The dreamlike contrasts of pale mist and dark mountain cliffs also resemble works of the seventeenth century artists of the weird and fantastic, most notably Wu Bin (1573-1620) and Gong Xian (1618-1689), who created bizarre images of completely impossible mountains and rocks. The meticulously detailed trees and rocks in Li Huayi's paintings are convincingly naturalistic, but they are placed in impossibly dangerous mountain settings. Clearly imaginary, they are powerfully persuasive.Li applies ink on the paper first, and then allows the composition to take shape in response to the density of the ink. This element of chance brings his work close to late or post-modernist ideas. His success at unsettling or disturbing the viewer seems grounded in our shared conviction that the universe is indeed an orderly one and that both artist and viewer share this knowledge. This order, so well understood and recreated by the great landscapists of the Song dynasty, has in the artist's work, slipped only temporarily out of our grasp, like an interrupted dream. As modern as they are antique, these paintings persuade us that they are part of a cosmic whole and that they exemplify a universal harmony.Li Huayi's paintings are in many prestigious museums across the world, including the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Museum of Tokyo; and Brooklyn Museum, New York. See a related landscape painting by Li Huayi, painted in 2008, which was sold at Christie's New York, 10 November 2022, lot 180.