Yifan Li: The Visage of Time

In Gallery II, Goldfinch is excited to present the first solo exhibition of Yifan Li, a Chinese painter currently based in Chicago.
 

‘The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. They were only a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.’

These are the last sentences of the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Taking upon himself the task of unraveling the fine mesh of memory, clutching at a few recollected strings, Proust’s narrator ends up spinning himself back in a swirl of events, more vertiginous, more slippery. Walking along a childhood street where most buildings stand more or less unchanged, he himself is the one who has aged, whose feelings ineluctably fade; old bricks keep their silence, testifying nothing but the irretrievability of time.

But must those remembered images remain intangible,a betoken of longing and grief? If the Proustian language, in the end, salvages nothing from our memory and still inevitably mimics its evanescence, what’s to do when certain sights, or touches, or smells haunt us time and again, in days and dreams?

Mulling over the unchangeable past comprises half of our mental distress, and the other half is the concern for the unforeseeable future.

Painting provides me an antidote against such afflictions of time. It might start with a yearning, an instinct to retain something from the past, yet it always flows back to the present. In consecutive mark-making, the vicissitude of time is reenacted, memory stirs -- be it a face, a dream, or a dissolved romance, I try to see it through, see beyond my sentiments, beyond transient particularities, and uncover its bare existence, rid of temporal contingencies. Painting exists in the present tense; by responding to my marks, I attend to my mind; this process allows me to reflect on the true image that ‘lost’ time once impressed upon me, till I see its unpossessed essence -- an essence of the eternal now, the only form of time we live in.

When we hold onto the past, our memories are sealed off in each of our own personal histories, unsubstantial, unrelatable, giving rise to our lonely laments. To paint is to detach the ego and liberate images from our mortal past back to the boundless present, where nothing’s possessed nor lost, where we all belong. The malady of memory is time displaced; in painting, I seek to restore a present where every existence reveals the genuine visage of Time." -- Yifan Li
 

Artist's Bio

Yifan Li (b.2000 Beijing) is a Chinese painter currently based in Chicago. Influenced by Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, she seeks the universal truth of Being, and painting is her vehicle for this pursuit. Mark-making is her practice of mindfulness -- in Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Zen Buddhist teacher’s words, keeping consciousness alive to the present reality -- and through which she contemplates and overcomes her personal attachment to experiences and thoughts, and distills their essence into revelations of colors and light. Through painting, she endeavors to transform the limited individualities into unreserved open phenomena that invite direct responses from feelings and evoke awareness of the present. In paintings, she tries to bring forth the beauty of a rose when Agnes Martin puts it behind her back.

Li holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2024). A piece of hers has the honor of being in the Collection of the Midwest Buddhist Temple of Chicago  (2023).

Image: Yifan Li, Helen, 2024, oil, pastel, and charcoal on canvas, 76 x 60 inches (193 x 152.4 cm)