Li-lan: Reaching Across Barriers by Sheridan Sansegundo
As you read this sentence, billions of little paper rectangles are winging around the world: From Fire Island to Tierra del Fugeo, from Kalamazoo to Katmandu, humanity is staying in touch.
But more than happy holiday postcards, what come to mind are divided families, parted lovers, lives changed by bad news, friendships ruined by lost letters, hearts broken by the words "Return to Sender."
The paraphernalia of correspondence - envelopes, postcards, stamps, cancellation marks - have formed a central theme of Li-lan's paintings for many years.
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Inspired by both European and American modern and contemporary aesthetics, Li-lan's work often involves motifs from ordinary, everyday objects, which relate closely to her personal memories and nostalgia. In Li-lan's art, figurative images, though they are not realistic reproductions per se, are mostly aligned in order, or with slightly casual arrangements. This creates an aura of tranquility and contemplation as though it were in a reverie.
The richer my interpretation of Li-lan's art, the stronger is my sense of myself as an interpreter, as one sensibility communicating with another.
Imaginary and real figures. Birds in flight, or still. Eyes looking out, looking in. Animals in black and white or in vivid hues of color - reds, pinks, yellows - stand, fly or float into and out of windows, doors, architectural spaces. They enter and exit dreamlike silent rooms or places that evoke metaphors of landscapes, of thoughts and of dreams.
Empty canvas speaks to me: blankness anticipates a beginning and in the white quiet stillness I find a place for meditation and creation. Architectural imagery from East and West create spaces against the vast areas of white. In these spaces, and on the two-dimensional pure background birds and planes in flight, insects and animals, perhaps an occasional figure, invoke an illusionistic effect of varied perspectives, passages, boundaries: ambiguous transitions.
Li-lan's new work, inspired by the Japanese folktales of Kaidan, from the Edo Period, replete with narrative opportunities, provides free associations between imagination and reality, and guides viewers into her profound reverie.
Li-lan - Jason McCoy Inc. 
Li-lan's paintings may tease at possible interpretations, but their strengths lie in the narrative possibilities that weave in and out of contemplative spaces, both pictorial and literal, striking the strangely tranquil balance that defines Li-lan's limitless imagined worlds.
Yun Gee and Li-lan - Jason McCoy 
Biracial artists like Maya Lin and Li-lan and transnational artists like Yun Gee may be burdened by the effects of racism and bigotry, but the perceptions they gain from their location in the "third space" may provide them with insights that strengthen their resolve and enrich their art practice.
I have included in some pieces an image of my eye fashioned into a repeating stamp motif. It functions not only to represent my own unique vision as an artist, but also references to how others perceive me. Western culture typically uses the eyes as a defining physical feature of Asian identity.
Living between two worlds comes naturally to Li-lan. Born in cosmopolitan New York City, she would be raised between two cultures, Chinese and American. And later, during the 17 years she lived between the United States and Japan, she further learned that borders are fluid, not fixed.
This catalogue celebrates three decades of Li-lan's work. While it is an intimate selection that focuses on recent paintings and pastels, it presents several works dating back to the late 1970s, giving the reader a rare opportunity to experience aspects of her artistic evolution.
Pass on the Paint: Same Family, Same Career - But as Painters They're a World Apart by Karen Rester
Though I understand Li-lan as an allover painter who keeps the edges of her canvases permeable, I don't say it is wrong to see her as a proponent of compositional closure. Interpretations do not come in opposed pairs-one right, the other wrong-and there is no denying that powerful traditions encourage us to see a picture's elements as securely contained by its frame. Nonetheless, the energies of Li-lan's art have the feel of vectors: trajectories with no reason to stop at the edge of the canvas. In her geography, a frog's leap is equal to an air liner's intercontinental flight.
Li-lan is playing a game with us. It's not a competitive game, and if we play along, we all win. It's a sleight-of-mind game, how you see it/how you don't. And it's very much an artist's game, wherein image and meaning are manipulated into a gratifying choreography whose portent turns out to be the viewer's invention, not the painter's.
I visited my father in his top floor walk-up from the time my parents separated, and subsequently divorced, when I was two, until he died when I was twenty. During those years, my father's paintings inhabited my visual world. They covered every bit of wall space in his Greenwich Village studio on East Tenth Street.
Over the course of her career, attempts have been made to correlate Li-lan's work to a multiplicity of styles. Her paintings have been called surrealist, but her work is always about real things. Although they have been identified with Pop art, Li-lan's paintings make a delicacy of the ordinary, and are located within the easel painting tradition. In contrast to Minimalism, her surfaces support complex imagery: the structure of her work is abstract unlike most photo-realist images.
Lonely artists will gaze at small things close to them and tend to see the whole world and its identity in them. As Morandi and Samuel Beckett saw, so did Li-lan.
Li-lan establishes in her work a language system centered on the metaphor of correspondence. She often paints blank envelopes, postcards, postage stamps, cancellation marks and other postal markings, which she uses as a means of correspondence with the viewer. Her meticulous images are improvisations on, not copies of, the postcards and stamps that friends send to her form many countries around the world, such as Malaysia, Denmark and Egypt. The images are often impressionistic, and always interpretive. In the end, her airy and light-filled compositions, and the rich textural nuances of the surfaces are quite far removed from the source material.
A lot of thought goes into these compositions and Li-lan often studies her collection of actual stamps, postmarks and envelopes. "I have file boxes full of stuff, " she explained. "Sometimes I remember things that I want, sometimes I leave them out on my desk when I want to use them." But the final product, she insisted, is intuitive, rather than reasoned out. "Nothing gets done right away," she said. "Everything gets subliminally done many times before it gets put onto the canvas."
With their heightened sense of spatial tension, Li-lan's paintings seem to hover ambiguously between surface and depth. One the one hand, she works her canvases over and over again, highlighting the intricate transition between tonal values and paint layers. On the other, she conjures up complex illusionistic effects through intriguing perspectives. In this way, Li-lan's paintings seem to prompt our imaginary entry into exotic and faraway locales and at the same time pull us back.
This is not a Chinese - Li-lan at Lin & Keng Gallery by Chia Chia Jason Wang
Li-lan - Lin & Keng Gallery, Taipei by Phyllis Braff
The color and imagery in Li-lan's interpretations of postage stamps, along with the tangibility of envelopes, are seen by Ms. Keng as factors that link Li-lan's themes to those of the Pop artists who have been attracting a following in Asia.
Many of the immediately experienced visual aspects of Li-lan's technique - the hard-edged quality that, close up, reveals itself as hand-painted; and the empty spaces that actually center the surrounding, often fragmented imagery - are deftly transformed into their polar opposite. The impersonal quality of her work becomes its obverse: an attempt to present a world that a viewer might like to investigate. In that sense, all the control we associate with her painting can be seen as an expression of care towards her audience.
Li-lan at Art Projects International by David Ebony
Li-lan's paintings are of that rare sort that are meticulously crafted, aesthetically pleasing, and topically relevant. Their sensible arrangements, colors, and subject matter will engage the casual observer, but these painting's true worth lies in the integrity of their underlying language and the wealth of musings they and this language offer up to the contemplative viewer.
Li-lan's manipulation of postal marks, stamps, addresses, etc. establishes a calligraphic play against the minimal and subtle colored backgrounds of cards or stationery. This play is even more obvious when the painting features languages that we may only be able to comprehend by their linear character.
For me, stamps are everyday objects that suggest a world of correspondence reaching beyond national, racial and cultural boundaries, while still serving as cultural icons reflecting the image a people projects of itself.
These greatly enlarged envelopes are what she mostly does now. The envelopes bear postage stamps, as well as various cancellations, postal marks, and stickers. Rarely do we see handwriting on them, though the addresses may be typed on. To keep the pristine look of these works, Li-lan signs her paintings on the back. "I don't want to disturb the image," she explains.
Li-lan, Stationary Images by Robert Berlind
When I asked her what it was about a sheet of postage stamps that originally sparked her interest, Li-lan told me that it was not the stamps themselves, but the printer's color-separation key at the edge, as well as the grid layout of the overall sheet, emphasized by its regular perforations, that intrigue3d her.
In my recent drawings I have been using object and symbols from everyday life - at this moment focusing on a postage stamp motif - and transforming these ordinary items into contemplative icons.
"I want people to be aware of his work; I want him to get his due," said Li-lan, explaining why, despite the dangers inherent in exposing herself to the inevitable comparisons, she "never hesitated for a minute" about joining in the Southampton show, "Yun Gee and Li-lan: Paintings by a Father and Daughter."
I have often been asked if my work is carefully scaled and premeditated. On the contrary. To begin, I make only a rough sketch for composition, but the image is developed as I work and build up the layers of paint.
In China I discovered a vital part of my heritage, a vital part of myself. In my father's birthplace - his spiritual home as an artist and a man - the child in me, with all the pain and elation of discovery, was awakened.
Her paintings were not always sparse. In the early 1970s they included recurring themes, such as nails eggs, and figures. But, as she says, the figures got smaller and smaller and the nails that held up her pieces of paper fell down and disappeared. By eliminating such imagery, Li-lan opened her works even more to the personal interpretation.
I am fascinated by images that surround me, that haunt me, in my studio. A torn piece of paper. A folded corner. An empty sketchbook. Blank pages, diaries or music sheets. Paper and pads in various hues: whites, yellows, soft greens and blues.
Little hand prints - baby hand prints in blue - would mysteriously appear on the walls. Still not two, I would steal into my father's studio and play with his palette - oil paint attracted me. It still does. But, once there was a time when it didn't.
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"Why do you paint those images? Eggs? Nails?" People constantly asked me these questions during my recent exhibition at Nantenshi Gallery in Tokyo. Why, I wonder? For I have heard this question many times in New York too. I usually answer, "I don't really know. The paintings must speak for themselves."
Up to the present, has anyone ever thought of painting paper on canvas? . . . much less white paper! Because paper is something to describe something on, never something to be described. But now Li-lan is painting paper. Enlarged notebooks, music paper, and sketchbooks, all blank. The white tabula rasa on Li-lan's canvas is left completely blank so that the letters, words or musical notes which should be written there keep floating through space.
Prologue ~ from Canvas With An Unpainted Part: An Autobiography - 1976
In her writing, Li-lan looks back to the past, talks about herself and at the same time, New York. Even when the subjects concerned deal with Japan or Mexico, there is a world not of an American in general, but of a New Yorker.
Li-lan, Paintings - at Nantenshi Gallery by Phillis F. Nickel
Silhouettes both still and in motion; a picture within a picture, a space far apart from the other; windows, doors, chairs, and the slender shapes of trees; eggs, apples, oranges, and glasses... These objects, in a sense, live renewed in her from that flowering time of the Renaissance; they are the proofs of her day-to-day life.