Li is currently the chair of the arts department at Haverford College, but she has also worked as professional artist after she moved to the United States from China in 1983. Li's work has been displayed in numerous universities' galleries, including at Swarthmore College, Haverford and Bryn Mawr College.
Li said she always had a love for creating art, but she did not get her start at painting until the Cultural Revolution forced her to leave her high school in Beijing and move to the countryside with her family. Her father was a university professor and categorized as an antirevolutionary, and because of this Li's family was sent to do forced labor and become "re-educated" in the peasant lifestyle, Li said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
In the countryside, Li was commissioned to paint enormous propaganda portraits of Mao Zedong on the sides of buildings and barns, she said.
"Painting Mao was not the fun part, but getting access to paint and a chance to put paint on the surface, to make it into something, that was really such a thrilling thing to me," she said.
Li spent five years in the countryside with her family. When she finally moved back to the city at 22 years old, she attempted to enroll in college.
"In 1974, all the colleges started to reopen," Li said. "I was so excited because I wanted to learn how to paint, but I wasn't qualified to apply because of my political background ."
Li said that her frustration motivated her to stage a sort of protest at the exam school, where she started drawing in the doorway, and the professor giving the exam later fought very hard to get her into the college at which he taught, Anhui Teachers University. After studying fine arts and receiving her undergraduate degree there, Li was invited back to teach in their arts department until 1983, when she immigrated to the United States to be with her Chinese-American husband.
Shortly after moving to New York, Li enrolled in Parsons School of Design, where she earned her Masters in Fine Arts, where she broke away from her former formalized techniques
"In China you learned step by step, you followed instructions and it was very strict," she said. "You studied a lot of technique stuff, but that training gave me a very solid ground to break off later."
Although Li has studied drawing, painting, pastels and sculpture, she has concentrated her career on her drawing and painting. A number of Li's recent charcoal drawings featuring portraits of heads and busts are on display in the gallery. Even though these works are simply charcoal on paper, they feel like complete, finished entities.
"When you draw, you get to to put down something from inside," she said. "It's just a piece of charcoal on the paper, your mind controlling your hand directly."
With painting, there are colors to mix and brushes to clean, which make the art-making process more time consuming, Li said. Oil paint, Li's personal medium of choice, is very malleable and best able to emulate real life, according to Li.
"With oil paint, you can go back, dig deeper, when you're creating a painting," she said. "The most exciting thing about using oil paints is that [the colors] mix and give you a surprise that you don't get from other mediums."
Li's oil paintings in the gallery are characterized by her use of bright colors and dynamic, diagonal and vertical brushstrokes. She boldly overlaps and intersects thick swaths of paint, leaving snappy, playful brushstrokes that give vibrancy to her paintings and pull the images she creates off the canvas.
The ethereal, floating aspects to Li's paintings and her tendency to paint scenes in the moment, outside in the sun, rain or snow, call to mind classical influences from Impressionists like Monet, Pissarro and Sisley. Li's use of bright colors and thick brush strokes, however, undeniably bear resemblance to Van Gogh.
Li said that she does not plan her paintings in advance, but rather paints straight onto her canvases. This way she avoids limiting herself or falling into the feeling that she has already planned out what she wants to do with her painting, she said.
"I don't do drawings ahead of time because I really treasure the freshness when you start a new painting," she said. "I try to have to have that with me through the process."
Li's recent work in the gallery includes scenes she painted on her travels around the east coast of the United States, including scenes from Haverford, Vermont and Maine, as well as her travels outside of the United States . Her newest focus on landscape paintings is a product of the eight summers that she spent teaching at the International University in Umbria, Italy from 1999 to 2007, she said.
Although the boxes in her studio in the Hopkins Center are not yet unpacked, Li said that she is excited to begin painting outdoor scenes around Hanover and experimenting with the printing press in the studio. Li will give her artist-in-resident lecture Tuesday, April 2 at 4:30 p.m. in Loew Auditorium, followed by an opening reception.
