This September, Kwai Fung Hin Singapore presents Unity of Man and Nature, Li Huayi's first solo exhibition in Southeast Asia. Featuring more than ten milestone works spanning three decades—from ink on paper to antique gilded screens and gold and silver leaf paintings—the exhibition traces Li’s pursuit of ink's contemporaneity.
Born in Shanghai in 1948, Li moved to the United States in 1982, becoming one of the first Chinese artists of his generation to establish a career there. At the forefront of contemporary art, he turned instead to the roots of Eastern ink. For Li, landscape is a manifestation of inner spirit and cultivation, a realm where self and nature merge. Drawing on Northern Song monumentality, the literati spirit of ink and brush, and the Western approaches to light, material and space, he reinterprets the spirit resonance of landscape with a contemporary sensibility.
Since the 1990s, Li has distilled vistas encountered across China and the West, along with his reflections on nature, into his work. Through dramatic close-focus cropping, he creates compositions that fuse macroscopic grandeur with microscopic delicacy. Devoid of human presence, each work becomes a pure land, inviting the gaze to wander unbound.
I do not paint from real scenery, whether in China or California. The landscapes I depict exist only in my mind. Landscape is the energy inside your chest being released as a painting.
— Li Huayi
In 2008, Li turned to antique Japanese gilded screens, treating gold as colour, light, and symbol of the sacred and eternal. Its radiance lends depth to the flat ink surface, uniting splendour with ink’s composed elegance. A decade later, gold leaf became an expressive language of its own, converging with ink as celestial darkness and earth's primal yellow. Recently, silver leaf has entered his work, its cool, moonlit sheen deepening quiet introspection.
For Li Huayi, tradition is a faith in timeless values; contemporaneity bridges past and present, East and West. "Outside, we learn from nature; inside, we create from our hearts." Landscape flows from within, the spirit roaming freely, until self and world dissolve.
