On Watercolors and Photos and the Importance of Traditional Chinese Painting

Conversation with Gianni Mercurio

GIANNI MERCURIO: Your works tend to be oil on canvas, but recently you've made a cycle of watercolor portraits on paper. What prompted you to use this technique?

LI TIANBING: For these portraits I wanted to do something less realistic. I wanted to feel freer.

Watercolor gives me this freedom because it's a very fluid medium. It's as if I were painting with water. Obviously, it also poses certain limits. For example, you can't define features realistically because the watercolor runs off the brush when painting. I see the color in the water as a means of freedom. These two different mediums inspire me to take a different approach to the painting. The pastiness of oil paint directs me towards realism, the fluidity of watercolor towards expressionism.

GM: This sense of freedom you speak of is also reflected in the use of color: the oil paintings use few colors and often tend towards monochrome, the watercolors are more colorful and varied.

LTB: I've practiced traditional Chinese ink painting on paper for ten years. In Chinese painting on paper few colors are used, so I transgress this practice in a certain way since I experiment with colors that are extraneous to my tradition. I mix ink and watercolor, getting something that I consider unusual. In Chinese painting, moreover, we use special brushes, different from the Western ones. Ours are thinner and have a fine point because they should also be used for writing. Western ones are bigger. Here too I use both types of brushes for my watercolors.

GM: Which traditional Chinese masters have influenced you the most? And how have they influenced you?

LTB: I've always been inspired by Chinese paintings. The list of artists is long, so I'll just concentrate on a few names. The first is Liang Kai (13th century). His “Inkwash Painted Immortal” is one of my favorites. The same simplicity of the “brush and ink” and the state of Zen can also be found in another artist, Ba Da Shan-ren. Especially his way of expressing his attitude towards politics and society indirectly through painted flowers and birds. I think an artist's works should be a reflection of the social context he's experiencing through his own language – I always try to talk about the society around me through my works and the children are just a tool or an intermediate subject. Ren Bonian is one of my favorite portrait artists. His works are both artistic and popular at the same time, something very difficult to achieve. He mixes the realistic sketching of Western painting with Chinese brushwork (the Chinese painting tradition) to create his own style and promote Chinese figure painting at the same time. I do the opposite and try to include Chinese elements into my oil paintings. I appreciate the works of Huang Binhong, who stretches the variety of ink to its limit, which is like achieving different gray scales in oil painting. So in my black and white oil works I always look for this richness in the gray. In Fu Baoshi's paintings, I find great liberty in his brushwork – I need this force of freedom in painting.

GM:  Before putting the color on paper, do you make preparatory drawings?

LTB: Not for watercolors. But I often make a preparatory sketch directly on the canvas for oil paintings. Then I like to change the formal structure while creating the work. I don't like making something preconceived.

GM: Why are your watercolors in a small format and all the same size?

LTB: They're small because I work on a rather small table. In the Chinese tradition, you paint on sheets laid out on a table, so the size of the table in my studio limits the format.

GM: Do you plan to make bigger watercolors?

LTB: I could, although it would be more difficult to control the final rendering. Sooner or later I will, but for the moment I work with small formats to help me get used to this medium. I haven't been practicing it regularly for that long.

GM: Unlike the oil painting technique, with watercolor the brush strokes can't be adjusted to change the image.

LTB: The more you retouch a watercolor in an attempt to improve it, the more it becomes unsatisfactory. Exactly the opposite of what happens with oil painting, which improves with touch-ups. Watercolor is like Chinese painting. If it's successful, it's successful, but if you make a mistake, you have to throw it away. Watercolor painting is close to Chinese painting because of its spontaneity. In it you can find the imprint of tradition, above all the rapid motion of Chinese calligraphy. But you can also find that motion in oil painting. I'm not afraid to experiment with this medium because I'm familiar with calligraphy and Chinese painting. Everything comes with just a few gestures in a short period of time. So you must concentrate hard to the very end. I like that.

GM: And the subjects?

LTB: They're from a photo archive. They're children who have no parents. They're orphans because they were abandoned by their parents or because their parents are dead. I think a lot about their suffering.

GM: Why did you choose this theme?

LTB: The dramas of mankind affect me a great deal, especially those having to do with children. They touch me even more if I think about everything I experienced during my childhood in China. I remember in the eighties, when China had just emerged from Mao's regime, it was as if society had come to a halt because of the one-child policy. We were only children. I felt alone a little like those children who have no parents. That's the past. Through these portraits, in fact, I want to talk about the distortion of the human nature of today, which is often lonely and deformed due to the society we are living in. It's like a bigger orphanage.

GM: Why do you only portray Chinese children?

LTB: Because they refer to my world. And their childhood reminds me of mine. In my paintings I depict imaginary children as my playmates or siblings. Even though I'm referring to real subjects, even though they're children I've never known, they're children who have experienced the same condition of solitude as I have and so it's as if they were my brothers and sisters. I dreamed of having a sibling to play with, a kind of ghost, and I also think I had a brother who was absent because of the one-child policy. It's something that you never stop regretting and which was caused by a policy that marked Chinese society. All children are entitled to have a sibling. If you're a single child, when you lose your parents, as adults you find yourselves alone in a certain sense. Little by little, this condition has shaped the structure of Chinese society, people have become increasingly alone and increasingly isolated. In some of the paintings, the pictures of the children are more a reflection of the adult world. I hope to talk about the real social issue in an indirect way, the Battle series is about the social revolution, the Hospital series is the insinuation of the morbid social context that we are living in…as the Chinese proverb says:The old tippler's delight is not so much in wine…it has ulterior motives

GM: There aren't a lot of young girls in your paintings.  

LTB: It's true. I prefer to paint boys. But that's not tied to ideological issues. The male figure is the subject I prefer because boys like playing together.

GM: So it is not an aesthetic choice.

LTB: I'm quite attracted to boys because they are more like me and I think I understand their feelings, their innermost being. It's more natural for me to portray them and fit them into the setting of the painting. I don't know the life of a girl. You also have to consider that I paint pictures that come from photos I took during my travels in the Chinese countryside. The girls are always shy and stay together on one side, and I only have fun with the boys. I'm fascinated by their energy, especially when they play together, so my Battle series comes from that. I feel a closer interaction with the boys in real life and in painting too.

GM: You said in your painting there's a strong relationship with traditional painting of the great Chinese masters of the past, but I don't see much of this in your paintings, which are instead very realistic and have the three-dimensionality typical of photographic painting. Ancient painting in China is not like that in the West, which tended to be somewhat “photographic”. In ancient Chinese painting you don't even find perspective as it was understood in the West from the fifteenth century onwards.

LTB: In fact it's false, not true perspective. In landscape painting, there's an idea of perspective, but it's false, it's an overlapping of planes more or less brought together. The most important subjects are placed in the foreground or are painted larger than the rest of the scene. Yet everything is equally realistic, very detailed, holographic, even though there isn't much color. There are paintings that are very expressionist. Those are my favorites.

GM: Let's go back to watercolors. Do they have characteristics of Western culture or Oriental culture?

LTB: The question is how that ink and water colors are mixed. It's about technique. As I said before, it regards the different types of brushes that are used. In these watercolors I mix the two traditions: I paint a Chinese portrait the way a Western painter would. Working with these mixtures is now natural for me, because I've lived in Europe for almost 15 years. I've also studied painting here in Europe and so I paint according to my mood in this place. Nevertheless, I remain tied to the way I used the brush and ink when I lived in China. I'm used to the smell of ink. I've used it since I was 8 years old. I used it every day for calligraphy and painting.

GM: Which Western artists and which schools, among those who have studied, have influenced you most? You speak of mixtures of ink and watercolor, but it's not just a matter of technique. You also mix styles.

LTB: The artist who has influenced me most is Francis Bacon because of his way of distorting things. You find his way of distorting things in my first works. But I'm also influenced by Gerhard Richter, especially by his blurred realism. Richter talks about the past of his people, like I do. I'm also interested in Peter Doig, in his landscapes. He's a great painter. Obviously, I've also been influenced by the masters of the past, but contemporary artists interest me more than past masters. Marlene Dumas also does very interesting work. The compositional modes of artists from the New Leipzig School artists are also very interesting.

GM: What did you study when you lived in China?

LTB: In China I did painting, but not at an art school. I studied international politics for four years to become a diplomat. At age 17, I enrolled in a very famous university in Beijing, and then one day – I was 21 – I couldn't do it anymore. I told my professor I wanted to leave, go to Paris and attend an art school.  Everyone thought I was crazy because I had a good job, a secure future. My professor showed me a book about a Western artist who lived on the street, and who had died on the street. Then he asked me why I wanted to go and be an artist in the West. According to him, I wouldn't count for anything here in the West because I was Chinese. But my parents encouraged me a lot, so I went alone to Paris and I enrolled in an art school that I attended for six years. As a child in China, I practiced Chinese painting a lot because I found an old master who taught me a great deal, but I had no systematic education. I got the courage to come here and then I learned oil painting, I learned how to stretch a canvas.

GM: Your watercolors concentrate only on portraits, or have you worked with other elements closer to the Chinese tradition, such as landscapes for example?

LTB: I've made a lot of landscapes. It takes five to ten years to learn to make landscapes and portraits with the brush on a paper that absorbs the color, using Chinese ink used in the traditional way.

GM: What's the difference between creating a Western-style work and a work that recalls Chinese iconography?

LTB: In making traditional Chinese painting I'm strongly influenced by the education I received in China when I was a boy. A rock had to be painted in a certain way, a harp in another. They teach you to paint according to traditional techniques, not to have the freedom to experiment with new techniques or new images. This kind of learning is imitating the great masters of the past, which have to be documented. Learning consists of imitation. I take a lot of liberty with the work I do here in the West because I don't have to follow any models. At the same time I love to practice with ancient Chinese painting, which has helped me acquire good technique and a better command of the use of oil painting. If you have the technique and the freedom to do what you want, you can create good things. Even now, I use black-white in painting because I'm referring to Chinese painting in black and white. For me black represents Chinese ink. It's as if I used an ink paste. The white color is the canvas or the white paper. Gray is the equivalent of ink mixed with water. In my way of seeing things, Chinese painting only uses black, but you can turn it into a variety grays that are very different from one another. I like this very much and that's why I use a lot of white, black and grays in my paintings. This choice of mine derives from Chinese painting.

GM: So you get white by eliminating the intensity of the black.

LTB: The different grays that you find in my paintings are made by mixing black with different whites, a little like Chinese painting does when it dilutes the black with water. One difference between painting on a canvas and using watercolors on paper is the posture you take when you're working. Oil painting is done standing up, with the painting resting against a wall. With Chinese painting you work on a table. Another difference is in the spectrum of colors available to you. In traditional Chinese painting few colors were used. Mostly brown and also green, but very little. In my painting the conflict between these two ways of working emerges, but results in the chance to mix everything.

GM: Ok, everything gets mixed in your art. But having said that, do you think you've become a Western painter?

LTB: I'm Chinese and my painting can't be anything but Chinese. If I were a Westerner, I'd do Western painting. My being Chinese can also be seen in my choice of subjects. I feel as if I'm hanging in the balance between East and West, between these two extremes. You can also find these extremes in the way that color tries to sneak into my paintings, with white and black resisting and in turn taking precedence. With this mixing, I try to build my identity.

GM: In this exhibition at the Hong Kong Art Centre you will also display photographs. It's the first time you do so.

LTB: Yes. I've taken thousands of photographs. They're staged, all catalogued. Some of them later became the idea for a painting. I took them in the countryside in the mountains, where there's no modernization. There the people live in very poor homes, with nothing. I leap back twenty years into the past so I'm in the time when I lived as a child. Now in the big cities you don't see children in the street like in my day. Being in front of those scenes and photographing them was like diving into my childhood. Besides photographing these children, I also played with them. Anyway, I'm well aware that the places I photographed aren't the real places of my childhood. I know that because the things of my childhood are just about gone. The hospitals, schools and buildings that were around then just don't exist anymore. Everything's gone. So there's no way to photograph the real places of my childhood and all I can do is go look for remote places in the mountains. In a certain sense, my painting becomes therapeutic.

GM: Let's go back to the photos.

LTB:  For me, these photos are a kind of preparatory work for the paintings. I love photography. I have excellent equipment. My father and I made photographic sets and we enjoyed it a lot. But I never thought of photography as the final result, but rather as one step in the process.

GM: How do you use your photos? Do you use them as they are or do you manipulate them and use the details?

LTB: I choose the details. Since they are digital photos, I can manipulate them to construct the image. I don't want to have photos with perfect details. I trim them, I blur certain parts and sharpen others. When I tried to imagine them in the enclosed space of a frame I realized that seeing them in the aseptic space of an exhibition, alongside paintings, would have helped me in this sense. At a formal level, a photo and a painting are the same thing: they are shapes, lines and colors that relate to each other. When I took the photos I did it to exploit them, to use them as potential models. Now that I've digested them, I'm displaying them so I can look at them.

Paris, 18 January 2011

Gianni Mercurio is an independent curator, who lives in Rome. Among the many exhibits  he has curated are retrospectives devoted to AndyWarhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Willem de Koonig, George Segal, David LaChapelle, and Roy Lichtenstein. He has also published widely.