Curator’s Note

Ying Li paints as if memory were made not of thought, but of pressure. Her canvases—dense, prismatic, and alive with gesture—are not depictions of landscapes but enactments of their becoming. In her hands, pigment refuses to lie flat: it heaves, churns, clots, and blooms. Color insists on its own muscularity. Form slips between observation and sensation. The result is painting that is neither representation nor abstraction, but something more ancient and urgent: painting as contact.

Li’s brushwork, at times furious, at times tender, is layered with the physical residue of time spent with place. Her years working en plein air, her walks through rural Ireland, Pennsylvania woods, Chinese mountains, and urban scaffolds, all become sediment pressed into the surface. But what the viewer confronts is not the trace of nature, but its pulse. Her canvases are weather: unruly, generous, and thick with atmosphere.

In a cultural moment prone to polish, to digital fluency and flatness, Ying Li offers resistance through tactility. These paintings demand that we slow down, feel, look again. They do not yield easily, and therein lies their beauty.