'Little worm' crawls out of the darkness

Li Yansheng changes strokes to paint miners' grim reality, Zhang Kun reports.

Li Yansheng believes ink art should evolve with the changing times, which explains why he has moved on to depicting miners instead of focusing on auspicious animals, such as the deer, or celebrity portraits.

The artist knows mines all too well: he spent eight years in one over 40 years as a young graduate from the China Art Academy in Shanxi province.

"I wasn't as fortunate as my more politically active classmates, who landed positions in big cities," said Li. "All a little worm like me, who followed the anti-revolutionary artist Pan Tianshou, could do was crawl down a hole and disappear from view."

He didn't work as a miner, though. Instead, he was expected to paint propaganda portraits of the miners.

"The only acceptable way was to portray the miner as heroic, clean and powerful," he recalled. "But miners cannot be clean when they finish their day's work. They are covered in dust, too drained to show any kind of patriotic spirit."

When the political pressure eased up, Li went on to portray miners in his own style, drawing on his training in traditional ink art. He used thick blobs of ink to present the miners' faces in a more visceral fashion, and splashed ink on the rice paper to portray details such as the coal-dust mixed with sweat.

"I've always believed that new subjects call for new techniques," he said.

The 67-year-old is now proud to show his works as part of a retrospective exhibition at Shanghai Art Museum. The show runs until Oct 7. It presents his works over the last half a century, starting with his 1970s propaganda paintings and including his more recent epic-historical paintings.

"When we were young, the old masters used to tell us how important it was to paint with ink and brush from real life, because this builds up your ability to represent any image, and the Chinese brush is different from any painting tool you have in Western art," he said.

"Only later did I realize the truth of these words. Now I tell my younger students the same thing, but of course they don't listen, just like me."

Li has developed a strong ability to represent images with Chinese ink. This is most evident in his serial portraits of celebrities, ranging from Chinese writers and artists to foreign leaders.

His portraits won such high praise that they were compiled into a book and recommended to primary and middle school students all over China by the country's Ministry of Education.

Shandong province's craftsman Li Ziyuan even reproduced the portraits last year as ceramic carvings, an art form unique to Zibo, in the latter's home province.

"It's a combination of Chinese ink art with a treasured craft. You will appreciate the strokes of the Chinese painting brushes, as well as the carving chisels," said Li, the painter.

If you go

Until Oct 7

Shanghai Art Museum, 325 Nanjing Road W

021-6327-2829