Small Paintings; Big World: Fifty Years of Art by Li Jin Ming at LC Yilang, Guangzhou

Oct. 16, 2010 - PRLog -- Some people always think that bigger is better, while others realize it is quality, not size, that counts.  When I first began exploring art, in China, I was surprised by the average size of paintings because, although I have collected and dealt in paintings for 40 years, I had owned few that were that large (about meter square or larger); even the world’s most famous painting, The Mona Lisa, is small (only 77 cm x 53 cm).  Dealers and artists told me that the reason is that Chinese buyers think that bigger is better.  In our Leona Craig Art business, selling to foreign buyers, on the other hand, I find that Westerners tend to ask if we have smaller paintings by artists whose work they like, if they have seen only the larger ones on display.  Painting exceptional small paintings actually takes a lot more talent, more concentration, and more work than painting larger ones.  For one thing, it takes a steady hand and a good eye to make small details even smaller, while retaining the essence of the subject.  In addition, it takes good equipment: special small brushes and high quality paint.  

My friend, Jin Ming Lee (Jin Ming Li; Li Jin Ming), can paint great large paintings, just like any other artist, but, for me, it is the many smaller oil paintings, watercolors, and drawings (from around 15 cm to 50 cm square) that he has been making, throughout his whole life, that show his true talent and avocation as an artist.  I first became aware of them in a book that he published several years ago, showcasing some of his small paintings, and there was one, in particular, that I inquired about buying because it was so beautiful.  At the time, he told me that they were not for sale: they were his treasures.  In truth, they are a chronicle of his desire to paint and of his travels: the scenes from his life.  Much like the rest of us take photographs to make memories of occasions, friends, beauty that we encounter, or souvenirs of our travels, Li, instead, has used art to capture those things.  He tells me that, sometimes, he just used a shred of paper or other found items with which to paint or draw, and, sometimes, he painted them, later, from memory.  Indeed, his intentions were pure: he did not make them to sell them, he made them for himself.  It reminds me of what Picasso once told a friend: he said that painters paint so that they will have something that they actually like with which to decorate their homes.

Therefore, it surprised me when, just after opening our gallery, in Guangzhou, Jin Ming told me that he wanted me to hold an exhibition of his small paintings.  He said that I, unlike many Chinese dealers, really appreciate art for art’s sake, no matter what the size or style, and that is why he wanted it to be me who debuts his collection of small treasures to the world.  In truth, unlike many other Chinese galleries who have exhibition after exhibition just to try to get attention or to try to drum up business, I was not planning on having exhibitions except in the very few cases that I feel are exceptional.  However, this request from Li is truly an exceptional event, and I did not even have to give it a second thought: I just said, yes.

So, over the last several months, I have had Jin Ming Lee scurrying around trying to locate all of those paintings and drawings, as there are hundreds of them, dating back six decades.  We have even had fun arranging them on the floor of his studio, laying them out so that there were paths to walk through, calling them galleries one, two, three, etc.  He wanted me to use my eye to decide which ones we will include in our gallery exhibition.  In fact, there are few that I don’t like, but my idea was to make the exhibition have consistency and cohesion, while also displaying a certain amount of breadth, in style, period, and subject, which means that certain of those that could be included were not and ones that he was not, originally, planning on including will be: friendship is always, after all, built on compromise.

In the end, what we have put together is an exquisite collection of beautiful, interesting, and precious little paintings and some early drawings by Jin Ming Li.  The exhibition will include around 100 works, in total, even a few larger ones, so that people unfamiliar with his work will not think that he paints only small paintings.  Yes, they are his personal treasures because of what they represent to him, but they will be treasures to the rest of us to for even more reasons.  For one thing, they show us scenes from Li’s long life, as an artist and as a world traveler.  Some are studies for larger paintings that he would eventually paint.  What is more, many show scenes from China, which no longer exist, like paintings of Dongguan, back when it was simple farming areas, way before it became the factory city that it is today, paintings of Guangzhou, as seen from Haizhu Square and from the Renmin Bridge, thirty years ago, as well as other areas of China that no longer could be recognized.  Always fascinated by water scenes, having been born in Hong Kong and having grown up around the water villages in Heshan and Guangzhou, there are pictures in the collection of the old-style boats with their fan sails, known in the West as “junks”.  There are old pictures for advertisements that Li was asked to paint that remind me of the ads I used to see, in the U.S., in the 1950’s.  There are scenes from Li’s days working on the collective farm, as a teenager, when it was difficult to find art materials, and he would draw, daily, on small sheets of found paper.  There are scenes and ads from the old days of communism, the so-called socialist realism genre, much like those of the USSR, praising the workers’ paradise, and there are scenes from the Cultural Revolution.  Thus, in a sense, they also present a pictorial history of China over almost the entire history of the PRC.  In fact, before seeing these I had only seen such histories, in painting, in the paintings of two of his teachers from the Guangzhou Fine Art School: Tan Xue Sheng and Xu Jian Bai.  I am so pleased to find, not only their artistic tradition of technique, passed down to them from Lin Feng Mian, another great artist from Guangdong and a father of contemporary Chinese art, to Jin Ming Li, but also their tradition of chronicling life in the PRC and other parts of the world, as they experienced it.  These works also show the breadth of artistic style that Li has mastered: from traditional Chinese to impressionistic, from realistic to more abstract expressionism.  He points out that many other artists have taught him other things, as well.

As part of the third generation of artists from the 20th century revolution, in Chinese art, Jin Ming Li is always in demand as part of exhibitions.  Some might say, “Not another Jin Ming Li Exhibition,” and they would be right.  Many of the paintings, included in this exhibition have never before appeared in public but have been part of Li’s personal collection, including his first oil painting from 1961 and his only purely abstract painting, titled, “Garden.”  Li is a master whose work has been exhibited around the world.  His paintings have won national exhibition prizes and are included in collections of a number of museums, both inside and outside mainland China.

Our exhibition, entitled “Small Paintings; Big World: 50 Years of Art by Jin Ming Li:”, will have its grand opening October 23 at 3 p.m. at L C Yilang, 11 Guigang San Ma Lu, Dongshan Kou, Guangzhou, China, and will continue through November 19th.

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Leona Craig Art is a gallery of contemporary Chinese art, located in Guanzhou, China. It specializes in oil paintings, sulpture, Xiangshou embroidery art, and zisha clay teapot art.