Li Jikai Solo Exhibition

Museum Jan van der Togt exhibits Chinese artist Li Jikai

From December 10. 2014 until February 1. 2015 Museum Jan van der Togt shows paintings and work on paper by the Chinese artist Li Jikai. The exhibition – organized and under guardianship by Selena Yang – is the collaboration between Museum Jan van der Togt in Amstelveen, the Netherlands and the Wuhan Art Museum in Hubei, China, where work of Li Jikai already has been shown.

In 1999 Li Jikai (1975) graduated in Oil painting at the Academy Sichuen, where most of the famous Chinese artists in the West have studied. Five years later – in 2004 – Li Jikai completed his study with a MA in Fine Arts.

The large masses in China, ever present, screaming billboards and the media are an everlasting bombardment of images that comes to him. This abundance and aimlessness have strengthened him to search for his innerself.

Li Jikai has found an unique form to capture his world in paintings and sculptures. A lonely boy is usually the most important element in his work. It is a reference to the loneliness and one-child policy in China.

His paintings shows a hushed quality with all the attention for a little reality. Sometimes, you can see a distant relationship with the drippings of Jackson Pollock. But these traces can be better interpreted in the tradition of an ancient Chinese painting technique called pomo.

* The opening of the exhibition takes place - in the presence of the artist - on Thursday December 11 at 7:30 p.m.  Mirjam van ’t Veld, Mayor of Amstelveen, will open the exhibition, after Michiel Bicker Caarten, media entrepreneur and journalist, has given his vision on the work of Li Jikai.