Tiffany Wai-Ying Beres on Huai Li

*All That Grandeur*, 2018-2022, Chinese ink and acrylic on paper, 45 x 100 in.
[Image Description: Dripping blots of black ink against a white background suggest a dense forest of trees or an aerial wall of craggy mountain. A stark blue square hovers delicately in the center of the piece.]

Imagine traveling to a new country where you don’t speak the language and your main mode of expression is visual art. In this adopted land you have the space to be and become whomever you want to be, and yet you are still connected, bound somehow to your past and the place where you came from. To be a diaspora artist is to always be between worlds—an outsider, an insider and both at the same time. It is no wonder then that language, the burdens of history and the freedoms of being in a new place are all themes that resonate in the art of transnational artist Huai Li. A beloved instructor at UC San Diego who has spent the last thirty years making California her home, Li is an artist whose playful and fiercely optimistic work questions geographic and cultural boundaries and defines identity on her own terms.

Li was born in Beijing to an intellectual family during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). During this tumultuous period, her family was quite literally ripped apart: her father, a professor, was falsely accused of being a Russian spy and imprisoned as a counterrevolutionary. As a teenager Li was sent to the countryside for “re-education” to work among peasants for three years. Ironically, it was during this period that Li had her artistic awakening. Because she knew how to write calligraphy, Li was asked to write a for the local government office. “They took me out of the field to help with writing,” Li explained, “and eventually they asked me to make propaganda drawings. I started on small 4 x 6 postcards, faded by the sun, and eventually I got to make lots of large murals, including the portraits of Mao and Hua Guofeng.”

Li remembers this period with mixed emotions; intellectually, she couldn't identify with the images she was making, and yet she was happy to paint and felt liberated to have purpose. When Mao died in 1976, Li was finally able to return to her home and go to college. She entered the Beijing Film Academy where she studied filmmaking and fine art. Self-Portrait (1978) is the sketch that Li used to apply to school. In this pencil sketch, influenced by the Soviet Realist style of propaganda posters and political oil painting portraits, you can see the self-determined look of a young woman ready for her artistic journey. It was there at the Film Academy, in this early moment of China’s opening up, that Li watched her first foreign movies such as Gone with the Wind (1939) and dared to dream of a life outside of China.

Huai Li moved to the United States in 1983, and studied at the California Institute of the Arts, where she received her MFA. Li remembers how her instructors pushed her to experiment and try new things: “In China I received rigorous technical training but it was ‘Peking duck’ training—you were force-fed what to learn and what to create. At Cal Arts, the focus was on critical thinking, a huge contrast with my past. I remember being asked to think and talk about my creative ideas. At first this was something very confusing, intimidating even, but it was also very exciting.” Reflecting upon these differing aesthetic ideologies, Over the Rainbow (1980, reworked in 1996), is a work that was part of Li’s MFA graduation show. The primary background of this mixed media work is a painting that that Li made as a college student in China. She and her fellow students went on an art-training trip to a grotto site in Shanxi Province where they made reproductions of ancient Daoist frescos. This was training to copy the past. Now in America, Li decided to add a complementary layer to her earlier schoolwork. She added ready-made paint chips to form of a red arch over the religious figures below and she stamped the words of the main refrain of the song Over the Rainbow again and again. This new addition symbolized the kind of Wizard of Oz aspirations America offered—the sugar-coated dream of reaching place where all could be fulfilled. However, like Dorothy in the movie, Huai Li remains connected to her home. In this collage of layered ink, pigments, and found materials, Li created her own yellow brick road, a path to the future juxtaposing her past and present worlds.

Contradictions, contrasts and cultural clashes are front and center in the works of Huai Li. Hardly a Dry Eye (2013), for example, is a whimsical reflection on Chinese identity outside of China. Whoever you are, your last name is important because it traces your family linage. This ancestral linage is particularly important in China. In the Chinese language, there is no alphabet, and the written language is made up of thousands of individual characters. Because the hundred most popular Chinese surnames account for nearly 85% of China’s population, more than a billion people, these names are highly unifying—a symbol of common ancestry. But what happens when these identifying markers are transliterated into English characters, extrapolated and taken out of context? In this patchwork of hundreds of pages from the artist’s sketchbook, each double-page spread is printed with a Chinese surname in English characters, e.g. Li, Wang, and Chen, just standardized blue letters printed on the page. Each spread also features a painted Rorschach test inkblot. The Rorschach test is a psychological test invented in Europe around 1921 in which a subject’s perception of abstract images is used to interpret personality and emotion. At first glance each of these blots appears to be a random abstraction. However, upon closer examination, viewers can also make out that each inkblot is a portrait—there are white wigs, eyes, noses and mouths. Presented as a collection of faces and names, piled and jumbled together, Li calls attention to the arbitrariness of the markers that we use to determine who we are, and the overarching systems that we use to define identity.

Li’s works can also be highly retrospective. The series Altered Memories (2010-2022), for example, is a personal reflection on our attachment to history. During a trip to her home country in 2010, Li took over ten thousand photographs of rural Jiangxi province in Southern China. These black and white documentary images capture a bygone era: dilapidated buildings, defaced communist slogans, and rubble. These artifacts are present in the background of ordinary people’s everyday lives, faint and almost imperceptible like ghosts of the past. Of course, these images also raise sentimental questions for the artist who was forced to leave urban Beijing to live and work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. Reflecting on her personal experiences as well as those of the people who now inhabit this space, Li has reworked these photographs to clarify and draw attention to certain details by adding touches color—faint red on the propaganda slogans or thickly painted drips of blue, “a color of vitality,” says Li. The artist also paired each photograph with an abstract graphic representation, forming a set of dichotomies, a dialogue as it were, between the past and the immediate present. According to Li, “memories are the glue that holds the past and present together. They give shape and texture to our identity but they are also fragmented by time and displacement.” In the highly personal act of remaking these images, Li gives shape and texture to her own experiences; she actively fragments memories, resulting in a new and freer space to exist in-between.

*All That Grandeur*, 2018-2022, Chinese ink and acrylic on paper, 45 x 100 in.
[Image Description: A mirrored print of mountains and trees in a dripping, warm orange paint. A black square hovers in the the center of the piece.]

Also reflecting on space, one of Huai Li’s more recent series, All that Grandeur (2018-2022), takes on the orthodoxy of classical landscape painting, one of the most esteemed forms of Chinese art with thousands of years of history. In the Chinese tradition, landscape paintings are mindscapes—fictionalized depictions of nature: mountains, water, trees, rocks, and mist in their most ideal form. Of course, even as invented places, Chinese landscape paintings have many traditional conventions, such as their orientation, the way that their depth is created, or the kinds of craggy mountains and trees that are frequently depicted within them. By ascribing to these conventions, painters throughout the centuries have sought to continue the legacy of Chinese painting, yet to the artist, these representations cannot capture the China of today: “you need to see the rage, the energy, the excitement, the good, the bad, and the ugly, as well as the past and the present, because it’s all there.”

With her bold reinterpretation, Li disrupts conventions and invents an original landscape language. She turns her scenes upside-down (literally), mirroring them across a central access—completely abandoning any sense of depth or perspective. Her attempt to dislocate her landscapes in space continues by keeping the viewer’s gaze at the surface of each work. Each painting is, as she says, “anchored” with a large box of color that sharply contrasts with the landscape surrounding it. In addition, she skillfully marks her landscapes with droplets of liquid: “its blood, sweat, or tears,” says the artist. Beautiful, chaotic, and brimming with life, these landscapes self-consciously subvert the rules of Chinese landscape painting, and exist on a plane all their own.

Huai Li effectively negotiates her own artistic agency through her transgressive incursions against the artificially imposed boundaries of dominant narratives. Whether it is disrupting the conventions of identification or adopting a new perspective on landscape, Li inspires us to think critically about the context of identity while looking beyond for possibility for a shared human experience.

Tiffiany Wai-Ying Beres is a San Diego-based art historian and curator.

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