1. Volcanism: Ying Li
From the Series of Essays,
Ritual Practices
By Elaine Smollin
Crusty Sky, 2014, oil/canvas 12 diameter
Beyond the norms of conventional vision, dreams and our instinctive need for
encounters in the wild help us to defy the confines of habitual logic. Often we free our
vision from these realms, like the tantalizing promise of unfulfilled freedoms, or entry
into primal behaviors, by gazing upon a mysterious artifact.
Those inanimate fossils, stone gods, ancient glass or even meteorites solicit from us
sufficient admiration that we might even project our estimation of prehistoric life on
them, or at least, we admire the dignity of handwork that survives for millennia.
The earth, the caretaker of these charms, is never as unexplored as when we admit what
we leave unexperienced. Through no intended sins of omission, here we are without
realizable fusion of our mental, spiritual and physical worlds that might reveal our
capacity for more than wonder, for real lived experience without convention, beyond the
reach of social hierarchy.
Empire State Building 2014 12 inch diameter

2. Li is providing us with that experience in her current exhibition at the Painting Center
through November 22 as she did in Staten Island in 2013.
Ying Li’s paintings, when seen in an urban environment, fulfill expectations of fully
explored potential of material and matter. Not really paintings, per se, these lava plates
of pigment ask me, for one, to lighten my attachment to modernism for clues to her
purpose and deepen my awareness of the symbolic needs projected through revelatory
use of pigment, perhaps like those of alchemic painters of the late middle ages.
City Series #13, The Big White Storm 10 x 10 inches
Ying Li’s paintings are a bit like apprentice writing tablets, like those of scribes of the
worlds’ earliest societies who delivered thought through symbols. They projected a
profusion of concepts through a few pictographs, while here Li tries to tell the modern
viewer, in their abstract language, how fusion of an aesthetic vision, direct impact of the
environment, and, sustained experience of the external, spatial realm in remote and
extreme climatic situations can impact our sense of being.
Li’s new rondo paintings embrace an image of the world from within the confines of
downtown Manhattan to reveal how strange a place the earth can be. Topographical
evidence of its mantle, crust and core may be as self-evident as the properties of clouds
in “Crusty Sky” to our initial view. But there lingers there an associative image of the
earth, and with it our innocent indifference to what we now harvest from its core. The
average cell phone while staking its claim as the essential messenger, our new spiritual
medium, plastic carrier of our sentiments, is also the site of rare earths next to our
cheeks.

3. Turner’s skies, none too indifferent to the cataclysmic social and technological changes
of his time, seem quaint in comparison. The attachment to the beautiful and the
sublime even when so turbulent as a Turner can be, speak for end points in history.
Li’s experience strides beyond painting altogether as a means to portray conditions in
nature in this new exhibition. Neither are they sculptures as much as I’m tempted to say
they are.
They are a crystallization of the solid-liquid material status of paint that suggest a
transfer of what we usually acknowledge as mass- away from the pictorial surface into a
far more buoyant projection of matter. Is this a painter’s vision or her tactile reaction to
the sense of compression that urban spaces of Manhattan can create? If it is, the beauty
of her forms is their power to release the pressure of that urban condition to show how
her allusion to nature as substance can reset the quality of our vision.
Ascona Rain 2013 18 x 12 inches
A year ago, in high altitudes of the Swiss and Italian Piedmont mountains of Valle
Onsernone, her works made on site expressed a commitment to make our vision
attentive to transformative acts of seeing. In Ascona, Rain we feel the edge of
believability that separates our imagined idea of the Alps from their otherworldly truths,
those we can only know through the sensate logic of being there- among vapor and cloud,
where the edge of the earth’s crust and its attending mantle and core become familiar.

4. Valley, Mist 2005 20 x 24 inches
Montecastello Sky #7 2005 24 x 30 inches
Nearly a decade earlier, much closer to sea level, in Italy, in 2005, we can see her
preparation for more extreme visions as with Valley, Mist she attempts to draw vapor
into pictorial space and then in Montecastello Sky #7 perhaps we see a premonition that
when she reconciles the crust of the earth with the pressure of clouds, a precedent for
her 2014 rondo Crusty Sky had already made it appearance.
PAINTING CENTER OCTOBER 28 – NOVEMBER 22, 2014
All images courtesy of the artist.