Essay

Ying Li’s Intransitive Representations

Barry Schwabsky

Ying Li’s works are not exactly landscape paintings in any traditional sense, but they are self-evidently paintings of landscape, and she underlines this fact through their titles, which often incorporate toponyms (Ballycastle, Fort George River, Roanoke Valley) and sometimes indications of atmospheric condition or time of day (dusk, rainfall, twilight) reminiscent of Impressionism. But it’s not only the titles that tell us what kind of paintings these are. The paintings speak for themselves: They are full of space, weather, and the endlessly variable light that one only encounters out of doors. And yet one would be hard put to identify any specific topographical features in them; it seems more tempting to see them as works of abstraction, even if “inspired by” (notoriously vague phrase!) the artist’s experiences or memories of the places named in their titles.

But that’s a temptation worth resisting. While Li’s art cannot be fully appreciated without some awareness that there are impulses at work within it that have nothing to do with representation in any traditional sense and that can therefore be referred to, if only for lack of any better term, as related to abstraction, it’s equally true that her work harbors an essential connection to feelings about nature and place that are quite specific and far from abstract—or again, as with representation, that are far from any traditional sense of abstraction.

And by the way, I think it’s significant that Li’s works are often more than just, as I ventured, inspired by the places named in their title. They are not meditations on memories of a place, as is true of a painting such as, to take a famous example, Camille Corot’s Souvenir de Mortefontaine (1864, Musée du Louvre), which represents not an immediate response to the place itself (in Corot’s case, a village half a day’s walk north of Paris) but a recollection (souvenir) lyrically reconstructed after the fact in the studio. Like the Impressionists (a generation or two younger than Corot) as well as contemporary painters such as Ellen Altfest or Lois Dodd or Rackstraw Downes, Li prefers to paint on the spot—en plein air. But those painters are all more or less intent on describing on a two-dimensional plane things that they see in the world around them. And if you go to the place named in the title of one of Downes’s paintings—the titles of Dodd’s or Altfest’s paintings are less likely to cite a specific place—you will be able to verify the resemblance between what the painting shows and the scene you encounter in person, even though there are certain effects in his painting that are only made possible by, in fact, the process of painting as he has cultivated it for himself.

By contrast, although I have not been to the places named in the titles of Li’s paintings, I feel pretty sure that if I sought out those places, I’d be hard put to identify the spot where she’d set up her easel. I would not be able to make out the points of resemblance between what I see in the painting and what I see in the terrain itself. In other words, contrary to the tradition of plein air painting, her intention is indifferent to description. She is not trying to contrive a likeness to the landscape. She has something else in mind. And what is that something else? Well, because it’s not connected to a defined tradition with clear parameters, I have to be speculative about it, not definitive, but it seems to have to do with the translation of experiences, only some of which are visual, into visual form, rather than with the transcription of visual impressions in three-dimensional space onto a two-dimensional plane. Alberto Giacometti, whom I suspect must be one of Li’s masters, once said that his work’s impetus came from “that desire to find out why I can’t simply reproduce what I see.” Li, however, accepts as a given this impossibility of faithful representation. She revels in the freedom that it allows her. And when I look at her paintings, I sense that what I am experiencing has as much or more to do with tactile and other non-visual sensations—wind or still air, heat or coolness, dryness or humidity, and so on—as with visual ones that we are used to discerning in landscape paintings: relatively stables ones such as the shapes of topographical features (rocks, trees, human-made objects such as buildings) as well as transient ones such as light conditions and the variations in color those conditions cause.

“We cannot understand how a mind could paint,” as the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once observed; to do that, you also need a body. But so much landscape painting has pretended that the body could be reduced to just one of its organs, the eye. Remember Paul Cézanne’s famous simultaneous criticism of and encomium to Claude Monet: “Only an eye, but my God, what an eye!” Cézanne wanted to be more than an eye. (In the end, I believe Monet was too.) He knew through experience that there are intensities that can only be achieved through such a reduction, but was aware that other, different intensities demanded, yes, a more full-bodied engagement with the real.

A more full-bodied engagement with the real—that’s what Li’s paintings as well attempt in their own way. After looking at her paintings, I don’t imagine that I know what I’d see if I were to travel to Ballycastle, Fort George River, or the Roanoke Valley, not at all. Nor do I imagine that I know how I’d feel if I were to visit those places. The paintings don’t offer me that sort of imaginative knowledge (or, rather, pseudo-knowledge; they don’t predict for me a future that may never occur). Instead, they offer evidence of the seeing and feeling that took place when Li was there, and by translating that seeing and feeling into pictorial form, they offer me, in turn, the possibility to experience sensations that have nothing to do with what might transpire with me in those places and everything to do with the sensations I can have in the presence of the painting. In that sense, there is a non-transitive relationship between the painting and the experiences that gave rise to it, on the one hand, and the experiences to which it gives rise on the other hand. I can’t construct a probable account of the painter’s experience while making the painting from my experience while looking at it. That intransitivity is probably synonymous with the “abstractness” of Li’s paintings, but maybe it would be better to speak of an intransitive representation.

Clearly, the physical heft and density typical of Li’s paintings have something to do with this intransitivity. Looking at her paintings, one never stops thinking about the fact that one is looking at paint. Translucency is minimized: We are never looking through one thing to another, but always at something. The paintings are full of layers, but the layers are revealed through materially evident gestures, traces of action upon the painterly matter: paint pushed through other paint, for example, or scraped away. We all know that in museums and galleries, there is a spoken or unspoken “do not touch,” but it’s usually unnecessary because part of what the paintings show us is that we can’t touch what they show. Li’s paintings, by contrast, might call for a sign telling the paintings to refrain from touching the people who come to see them. They give me the distinct sense that they are constantly reaching out, trying to get closer, aspiring to graze, at least, my skin. They want to be felt more than seen.

And yet, after all, see them, look at them, is exactly what I do. Through visual means they lead me through non-visual sensations but always end up back with experiences of seeing. But the result of the excursion is that I understand my seeing differently. And each separate element in the paintings—each piece of paint—appears so clearly, so unequivocally, which testifies to the clarity of mind involved in their making. There may be overwhelming complexity here, but no confusion. As Merleau-Ponty might say, through her paintings I see, among other things, that I see with my body and not only with my eye. It’s true that this corporeal seeing can feel excessive, even almost violent—but my goodness, it seems so real, so undeniable, in comparison to the pleasures (substantial, but very different) offered by landscape painting of the sort that presents us with a place we can see but can’t touch or be touched by!

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