Li Tianbing’s paintings make use of image composition, blending together sources that are often difficult to distinguish. Some elements reference memory, others the present, but in his paintings, the boundary between memory and reality disappears. In these overlapping scenes, reality becomes memory.

Despite his use of realist imagery, Li does not seek to express realism. His visual language undoubtedly transcends the constraints of temporal reality. His paintings can be viewed as explorations of self-memory that go beyond space and time. On the one hand, his personal memories are filled with a dramatic sense of history—he has experienced the rapid transformation from a rural upbringing to a postmodern urban life. On the other hand, the moment of viewing these memories coincides with China’s continuing transformation, almost like a rebirth. Thus, not only does the sense of present reality fade, but reality itself takes on the texture of memory.

Due to over two thousand years of cultural continuity, Chinese art—especially Chinese painting—has long employed a language based on memory. Traditional Chinese literati painters depicted people and landscapes from memory, but this memory was not about the physical form of objects; rather, it was the artist’s inner spiritual sensation upon encountering these objects and scenes. This spiritual essence is known as qiyun (spirit resonance). Objects infused with qiyun were not meant to be realistic depictions; a vague resemblance to natural form was enough.

Li Tianbing’s painting method borrows from Western realism, a style introduced to China during the modernization period at the end of the 19th century. On the one hand, China’s defeat in the Opium Wars prompted the acceptance of realism as a part of scientific modernity. On the other hand, as China entered modern society, the rapidly changing urban life, political landscape, and individual liberation required a realist language to represent these daily transformations. After 1949, realism was adopted as the designated artistic language for political propaganda, but gradually, by the 1990s, it distanced itself from political expression.

In terms of realism, Li absorbs new contemporary techniques such as photographic imagery, collage, and surrealistic visual methods. Yet he is not creating a fictional surrealist world—his focus is on the authenticity of memory. Unlike the older generation of artists who embraced a collective history that predated their own birth, Li emphasizes the social and historical changes present in his personal memory. He never depicts historical resources from before his birth. In this regard, his works consistently feature a symbolic boy or child—often a metaphor for himself—who appears in each memory-laden landscape or overlaps with imagery of remembered scenes.

The intentional use of subjective color tones in Li’s work also suggests that these are images belonging to memory rather than naturalistic representations of reality. He often employs dual-tone monochromatic palettes: the boy might be painted in soft reds, blue-greens, or pale pinks, while the landscapes behind or overlapping with him—forests, alleys, theaters, propaganda walls—appear in greys, sapphire blues, or bluish-greens. These color treatments prevent the realist painting from forming a deep, photographic illusionistic space. Instead, they create an overlapping visual effect akin to a memory flashback, evoking the authenticity of remembered experience.

Through photographic imagery, surreal collage, and carefully tuned monochromatic tones, Li Tianbing fuses memory and realism into a unique form of Chinese visual memory. This allows Western visual language to blend with traditional Chinese spiritual concepts—such as the belief that souls from the past can reappear at certain moments, not following chronological sequence but rather manifesting simultaneously in a single scene. This aligns with a higher spiritual state in Chinese Buddhism, where there is no beginning or end, and spatial-temporal boundaries dissolve. Only differing layers of happiness and spiritual order remain.

Li’s generation lived through the later years of the Cultural Revolution, the social reforms of the 1980s, and the rise of capitalism in the 1990s. The extreme contrasts and historical scope of these experiences created a dramatically surreal sense of reality. In a certain sense, reality and memory are interwoven in his painting. His backgrounds contain historically specific elements—rural isolation, propaganda-covered walls, contemporary advertisements—all populated by a symbolic boy. This figure is not a literal self-portrait, but rather an embodiment of innocence and the ideal human state when facing society. The boy lives within a world of play and purity. In Li’s paintings, this symbolic child is not the main subject; the focus lies in his relationship with a turbulent, sickly, impoverished, and politically closed social environment.

In the past decade of Chinese contemporary art, realism has become a means of expressing the rapidly shifting personal experience. In some ways, it serves as a reflection on meaning through visual imagery. Li Tianbing expresses a sense of impermanence in the face of social and political upheaval, along with a melancholic dramatization of history. In just thirty years, his generation witnessed three major transformations in politics, society, and values. His work seeks to portray how these shifts have deeply distorted the individual’s experience. His paintings are like a journey of an innocent boy traversing time and space, but this journey carries an anti-capitalist and politically critical tone. The early rural life appears as the most idyllic; the Cultural Revolution walls, covered in slogans, evoke political terror; and capitalist ads and piles of money appear pathological.

This suggests a sense of lost innocence and a looming crisis in the new era. Yet Li is not trying to express a direct critique through painting. In fact, the boy in his images embodies psychological traits of psychoanalysis—anxiety, tension, helplessness, and loneliness in the face of an ever-changing world. In a sense, his paintings focus more on abstract existential meaning and the personal condition. The boy he creates conveys a profound sense of spiritual solitude—this metaphysical quality is central to the images’ emotional resonance.

Unlike the detailed realism in his large canvases, Li’s watercolor-on-paper series titled Orphans more closely embodies this spiritual aspect. His watercolor techniques draw from the Chinese painting tradition of “ink divided into five tones.” The transparency and multi-layered effects of ink washes express the shadow-like, immaterial state of the soul. These works transcend time and historical specificity, as well as reality and self-identity. They represent a more metaphysical form of language in Li’s practice.

In fact, this approach represents a meaningful experiment in the language of Chinese portraiture. Over the past century, Chinese painting has focused on using ink to imitate the structure and shading of Western realism, while overlooking its own tradition of expressing spiritual essence. Li Tianbing has discovered a form of spiritual realism that captures a modern sense of self—one defined by solitude and metaphysical presence.