The forcefulness of Li Xin's work reminds people of the Five Dynasties & Two Songs landscape style embodied in Fan Kuan's masterpiece titled Travelling Through Xishan: a remote, desolate, tranquil and mysterious land like the stillness at the dawn of time. Artist Li Xin’s nostalgia seems to reside in a vast cosmos. Lothar Ledderose believes that traditional Chinese landscape painting was an outgrowth of religious landscape art (such as the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang) as religious values gradually morphed into aesthetic values and came to influence aesthetic perceptions. The ancients' retreat into the landscape was an act of spiritual awakening and elevation. Li Xin's works transcend specific landscape and have a lofty and solemn atmosphere. In his work Mirror Image of the Mountain, the classic Chinese image form of vertical symmetry turns the mountain into an abstract, primitive totem, profound in its dignity. The abstraction in Li Xin’s Landscape paintings is manifested in his exquisite rendering of the textures of mountains and trees. Here, chains of mountains become the body of the metaphysical spirit, encompassing a vast and relentless internal power. Sometimes the sense of mass is no longer important; the heaviness recedes into the distance with the clamorous uproar, while the solemn and heavy grey tones are brimming with the primordial essence of the mountains and rivers, giving a sense of the bizarre powers of timelessness within the stillness.

image @ gallery and artist