07 Wei li
Title: A Touch on Paint (study)
Dimensions: 12in x 8in
Year of Completion: 2018
Medium: Acrylic & Oil on Canvas
Estimated Value: $350
Courtesy of the Artist
The process of making a painting, for me, is driven by intuition and imagination. In my work, abstracted forms come to me as imaginative figures. I use abstraction as a means to depict things, to compose images, to balance conflicts and to create narratives.
The surrealists approach to generating shapes and forms by automatism inspires me to paint intuitively. The patterns, symbols and gestures in my paintings usually derive from my experience, subconscious and imagination. I'm looking for inner structures, rhythms,
and tensions between the interaction, interruption and overlap of different abstract elements to achieve a certain degree of complexity and diversity in colors, compositions, narratives as well as surface qualities. The canvas itself functions as a vehicle to carry the painters moment of emotion, memory and energy. The end result of my image is hybrid and often visually complicated. By creating a purposefully disorienting and puzzling space filled with contradiction, my paintings are in a broader sense a metaphor for the physical and psychological experience of living in this pluralistic contemporary culture.
Wei Li In my work, I'm searching for a visual language which combines representation and abstract elements to address my own hybrid identity, as well as the subjective and emotional experience of living in a socially and ethnically diverse modern culture.
The experience of being an immigrant to Canada provides me with crucial inspiration in my practice. I grew up in China; however, I trained as a contemporary artist in the West. This dual cultural background not only provides me with a broader ability to see diverse
energies in society but also challenges me to integrate different cultural perspectives. The contradictions inherent in forming a new hybrid identity have entered my work and continue to create tension within it.