Listen to Snow NO.11

Li Wei
1979 Born in Harbin Heilongjiang Province
1999 Graduated from The High School of China Academy of Fine Arts
2003 Graduated from The Oil Painning Department of Nanjing Institute of the Arts
2007 Graduated with a Master degree of The Mural Department of The Central Academy of Fine Arts

Li Wei is not a Chinese painting artist or ink artist in traditional sense. Referring to her education background, Li Wei majored in oil painting during her undergraduate years, and chose mural painting as her specialty when she was a graduate student, therefore the training she received was quite different from Chinese painting artists. Perhaps influenced by her education background, Li Wei’s creation techniques are unconventional and changeful. She tries to adopt various artistic media, even including tea leaves, vegetable oil, carbon paper and other non conventional materials.
The most iconic element in Li Wei’s works is “dots”, a unique artistic style formed from her years of skill test and creative practice. By enlarging low pixel images to emphasizing “dots” that form images, painters create new images through the ways of processing and transferring the painting, thus present a continued tension from the balance of abstract locality and concrete entirety, embodying the artist’s pondering on art of industrial age and images copy.
“Listen to the Snow” series exhibited this time still follows Li Wei’s creation way of “dots”. Although the creation materials adopted are traditional silk and ink, this is not the reason we choose the works. What really touch us and fit for exhibition theme is the overall temperament presented in Li Wei’s works - spiritual practice is just like innumerable dots played in the ink and brush game, constituting schema of l i terat i landscape, responding and coinciding with traditional ink and brush painting spirit.
Except from easel paintings, Li Wei’s creations in various forms all reflect the ethos of ink paintings. In recent years, she tries seal carving, mainly because this art form has a high degree of flexibility and can meet the need of free expression. Li Wei’s seal text is not traditional literati name or name of lent chamber, but ref lects artist’s thinking or inspiration, and mostly associates with the character form, sometimes even just radicals or graphics similar to hieroglyphs. The fonts she adopts are purely based on personal preferences or whether they can reflect the content, in short, follow her inclinations without any restrictions. Li Wei is also trying to combine these non conventional seals and traditional paintings that do not follow tradition. After deliberately choice and collocation, they are often associated with each other and compatible with the spiritual substance of traditional ink paintings by literati.
Li Wei used to define herself as ink painting artist. In view of her broad attempts and unexpected artistic experiences, her f u ture creation may go beyond people’s current cognition of ink paintings, which is therefore particularly exciting.
—Chen Lin