Li Qunli focuses on seemingly ordinary things in life. These things have surprising emotional effects on him, leading him to capture their looks through his own sensual experience via the media forms of photography and painting. His works construct a wonderful intertextual network, reflecting and contrasting with each other, creating a unique creative map of Li as an artist.
"The Impersonal Everyday" series originates from moments when the artist was emotionally enraptured by everyday scenes - views often overlooked, but when seen through Li Qunli’s eyes, they emanate a breathtaking beauty. With his lens and brush, the artist picks up the fragmented scenes behind the urban landscape, presenting simple streetscape and industrial images openly to the viewer. With the approach of a gentle observer, full of patience, enthusiasm and sensitivity, his vision captures the unnoticed corners of beauty in an almost instinctive way. These paintings and photographs ultimately lead to the moment of "discovery" - it is the action of "discovering" itself and the process of visual translation that enables ordinary things to evolve into aesthetic objects. This particular point of view continues in the works of the artist that debuted in 2022: Silent and Sky is the Limit.
The paintings from "The Impersonal Everyday" series are often inspired by the artist's own photography. In the process of his painting, Li Qunli follows the traces the emotional impressions given by his photos and strives to make the scenery in his lenses reappear on the canvas. However, Li's depictions are not "reproductions" of his photographic works. They are not about the precise techniques of photorealism, but rather they emphasize the ambience and mood of the photography through careful and intentional recreation of color and light, shaping the forms of the photographed objects. The ingenuity of this approach lies in the fact that these paintings retain the unique flavor of photography as a medium, even when the subjects in them are more or less altered in detail. Gerhard Richter had the notion of weakening the sense of "creation" in painting and "letting the thing just happen naturally". Similarly, Li Qunli hope to provide viewers with a direct pathway to the real world by presenting the purely authentic side of things, even if this world is far too mysterious to be fully interpreted.
This solo exhibition of Li Qunli will harbor over thirty photographs and paintings from the artist's nearly twenty-year career, aiming to present a different visual experience and inspire viewers to further explore the language of photography and painting in a novel way.
