It's been said that Paris would be a nice city if it weren't for all the Parisians. The same can be said of the world of art; the aesthetic would improve greatly if artists simply hung their paintings and left, taking their chorus of oohing and aahing sychophants with them. Listening to artists wax philosophic about art can be excruciating. Even more excruciating is reading a critic pontificate on what an artist said about their work.
"Have you ever looked at the rain or the snow falling down?" writes Jhim Lamoree, the art editor of Dutch journal Het Parool. "Did you ever stop on the top of a hill to contemplate the panorama? Stood still for a flower in blossom or the leaves on a tree? ... Have you? Have you really? If so, welcome to the universe of Li Xiaofeng."
Is Mr. Lamoree serious? Is he? Is he really? No wonder no one goes to art galleries.
In deference to the artist Lamoree writes about, Li Xiaofeng (李曉峰), the paintings currently adorning the walls of the Chin Der Jyu Gallery (沁德居藝廊) are pleasing to the eye -- some of them even captivating. Others look like artwork for a calendar. Fittingly enough, visitors to the gallery receive just that; a calendar of 12 types of flowers painted by Li which can be found in China during various months of the year. It's lovely and stylish and would beautify any refrigerator to which it were stuck. What it is not is representative of Li's work.
Born in 1968 in China's Sichuan Province, Li graduated from his local art academy and went on to study painting at what is now Qinghua University. After spending a few formative years in the Czech Republic and Italy, he moved to the Netherlands in 1994. Amsterdam has been his home ever since, though he still spends several months of each year in China painting those lovely calendar flowers.
It was during the early 1990s that Li painted the works which can arguably be called his most captivating. Perhaps the most remarkable of these is Children of Mythology (神話的子民). Painted two years after his arrival in his adopted hometown, the piece leaves viewers wondering where in Amsterdam the artist was spending his time. Any attempt at describing the work (pictured above) would quickly deteriorate into the aforementioned art-critic psychobabble. Suffice to say it's worth an in-person study; reprinting it in the pages of this newspaper does it no more justice than a gift calendar does to Li's floral paintings. The same is true of another painting titled Supplication (許願圖) which took the artist five years to complete.
To be fair, many of the floral paintings are striking when seen up close, but not for the idealistic beauty of the flowers. The blossoms themselves are set off by the intricacy of their backgrounds. Li first covers his canvasses with seemingly infinite layers of paint, each subsequent layer hiding the technique used to apply the layer before it. On top of it all is a spattering of gold or silver flecks that catch the eye and make the flowers dazzle.
But enough talking about what obviously must be seen to understand and appreciate. Li's works are excellent examples of how art criticism is often insufficient in addressing an artist's work and how it can fail art patrons. Reading another's impression of Li's art is no substitute for viewing the pieces personally. They are inviting and calming.
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