Press Release | Artist Biography | Images | Catalogue | Review

For her third show at the Painting Center, Ying Li presents landscape and landscape-inspired paintings from the last three years. The work was painted in Italy and Vermont.

The Italian paintings were done in a small Umbrian hill town, high above the Tiber River. They convey moods shaped by changing weather patterns and light. In Vermont, she captures the lusciousness of the painter Susan Walp’s garden, finding an underlying order beneath the seeming disorder.

Ying Li works in the zone where abstraction and representation shade off into each other, using bold colors, earthy textures, and calligraphic lines. Her training in Chinese painting and calligraphy helps her to form a brushwork that is both free and disciplined. Color is the core of her painting. She uses it to convey mood and memory and to express particular feelings and a sense of place and time.

Ying Li’s work has been summarized by the art critic and curator David Cohen:

“She has a touch to die for in terms of bravura painthandling and innate good taste. In her best works, she manages to endow brushstroke with the power of metaphor. Different brushes and their tips sometimes converge in a single canvas in a Dionysian orgy of painterliness . . .Ms. Li’s best paintings pulsate with emotional and pictorial complexity.”

Artist Biography

Born in Beijing, China, painter Ying Li studied at Anhui Teachers University and earned an MFA from Parsons School of Design, NY. She is currently Associate Professor and Chair of the Fine Arts Department, Haverford College, PA. She has been on the summer faculty of the International School of Art, Montecastello di Vibio, Umbria, Italy, since 1999. She has been a visiting artist and critic at the MFA program, University of Pennsylvania; the MFA program, Brooklyn College; the MFA program, Syracuse University; Maryland Institute College of Art; Swarthmore college; Dartmouth college; Western Carolina University, among others. She lives and works in New York City and Haverford, Pennsylvania and is represented by The Painting Center, NY.

One-person exhibitions include The Painter Center, NY; Elisabeth Harris Gallery, NY; the ISA Gallery, Italy; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College; Marie Salant Neuberger Campus Center Gallery, Bryn Mawr College; Bowery Gallery, NY; and Enterprise House, Ireland. Group exhibitions include the Museum of National Academy, NY; Lori Bookstein Fine Arts, NY; Chris Naptune Fine Arts, NY; Korous Gallery, NY; the Westbeth Gallery, NY; Museum of Rochefort-en-Terre, Brittany, France; Pennsylvania Academy of Art; List Gallery, Swarthmore College; Hermitage Foundation Museum, VA; and the Denise Bibro Gallery, NY.

She is the recipient of the Edwin Palmer Memorial Prize for painting in 2004 from the National Academy Museum, New York; two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships; Art Colony Fellowship, Enterprise House, Ireland; a French Government Art Grant, Rochefort-en-Terre; an Aspen Institute Scholarship; and a Lindback Faculty Research Grant. Her work has been reviewed in New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, The New York Sun, Art Cricital.com, and The Philadelphia Inquirer.