Guy Brett, 'Space = Life = Time'
In: Li Yuan-chia: Tell me what is not yet said. Essays by Guy Brett and Nick Sawyer. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 2000, pp. 40-105.
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Despite his lack of official recognition, and his independent way of doing things, Li was not a self-absorbed or maverick figure. His concerns were central ones in the 20th century avant-garde. What is the value of art, what is it for, who is an artist? Can art given an account of our place in the universe? Can it help us to live? Li was constantly reflecting on questions such as these, in both his visual art and his writing. He was a 'visual philosopher', as Sheldon Williams aptly remarked in the 1960s. [4] He was also a man who experienced and suffered. How to tell the story of the objective and subjective sides of Li? His life seems to lead towards a melancholy end if one considers the tragic predicament in which he found himself in his last years. Anger and despair is reflected in his extraordinary late work. But so is happiness and beauty. In fact many kinds of contrary: optimism and pessimism, joy and misery, conviviality and loneliness, articulation and muteness, spirituality and materiality, seemed to accompany Li all through his life, and to become its real drama.
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Sometimes we see the photographic image as a nucleus built up with an incredible delicacy from several layers, or circles, a sort of cosmic metaphor made for whatever is lying around. For example a photo could be shot from above of the head of a rose which is resting in a circular glass dish, itself resting on small glass dinner plate, which in turn rests on a bed of pebbles. The whole image of concentric rings with its dense centre of rose petals is mounted as a mobile Point.
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Of course Li was not the only person to use such methods. What makes his images so special, I think, is his visual sensibility combined with a philosophy. Is it possible to speak of a 'Taoist photography'? We have to be careful here! We know only too well those books which attempt to illustrate the Tao Te Ching with photographs of misty pine trees and dew-soaked leaves. They fail because they remain trapped by the surface, the literal. They cannot convey a connection between the appearance of the physical world and what could be called its life force, what the Chinese would probably call its ch'i, which is always also a question of the inner life, or insight, of the person who handles the instrument, brush or camera. Photography abounds with positive and negative examples. We know, for instance, that Brancusi's sculpture looks qualitatively, even physically, different in the photographs he took of it himself than is does in those taken by professional photographers, even though Brancusi was a beginner in technical terms. In Brancusi's photos his objects expand with a kind of cosmic generality, whereas in a routine museum photo they are simply finite. On the other hand, we see the futility of the photographs of Monet's lily-ponds set beside his paintings. It is never a question of one medium against another but the way each one is handled. Understanding that photography is a phenomenon of light, Li was able to go beyond its literal materiality and discover its relationship to the constant processes of transformation in the universe.
[4] Sheldon Williams, 'Li and the language of Painting', London Look, 9 September 1967, p. 17.