Li Xi
“Lotus Seed Pod in the Dew.”
The Chinese artists are an unusual married couple. They met as teenagers in art school, and both went on to become successful traditional practitioners of ink and brush artistry on rice paper.
The local artist is a laid back but powerful digital photographer of overlooked industrial or commercial sites in New London, New Britain, and New Haven.
On a recent morning these artists from wholly different worlds met, beheld each others’ work for the first time, and realized how much they have in common.
The East-meets-West rendezvous occurred as Tom Peterson arrived at the Silk Road Art Gallery Tuesday morning to hang 20 of his photographs, alongside the works of Fan Fan and Li Xi.
Allan Appel Photo
Artists Tom Peterson, Lix Xi, and Fan Fan.
The three artists’ work comprise “Moving Memory,” the inviting new show at the gallery at 83 Audubon St. that opened last week and runs through Aug. 27.
Credit the gallery’s owner, Liwen Ma, for seeing what they all had in common.
That was the evocation of memory, in its different varieties. Or as Peterson put it, “going into another state, leaving.”
Fan Fan
“Memory.”
Translated through gallery director Dan Li, Fan Fan said that his images, like this lions-atop-pillar series, come form memories of the buildings where people like his grandfather, a distinguished professor at Peking University, lived and worked, before they were destroyed in the Cultural Revolution.
The work Li Xi is showing makes you think that maybe even lotus flowers have a kind of botanical memory, and are perhaps thanking humans for taking care of them, as they droop and ultimately disintegrate into another form.
Gallery owner Liwen Ma with Peterson’s “Open.”
“You have the eyes searching for beauty, even though your perspective is different,” Fan Fan said to Peterson.
“I am honored to be showing with you,” Peterson replied. (Click here for a previous article about Peterson’s work from a recent show at City Gallery on State Street.)
Tom Peterson
“Yellow.”
As the three walked around the gallery and stood beside Peterson’s photograph “Yellow” (pictured), a fragment of an industrial site in New London, Peterson said, “We used to have factories … “
After the translation, Fan Fan quickly pulled out his IPhone and began searching for images of his own work that Peterson’s factory images had evoked.
If the old factories have a kind of nostalgia for Peterson, new factories and other development in China’s radically changing cityscapes are driving Fan Fan’s choices. In his scroll paintings, there are doorways and other architectural elements from his family’s now lost house.
Old hitching posts with lions’ heads, part of Fan Fan’s inspiration for his painting.
Think of the lions and and other sculptural features still extant here and there in New Haven that mark the path to old mansions of bygone industrialists or political figures.
“With development people are looking to the roots of traditional Chinese culture and family and family spirit,” Fan Fan said.
When I asked if an image of a low-riding motorcycle, which seemed to hang incongruously among the other images, might have belonged to his grandfather as well, Fan Fan smiled.
He replied no. He included the image to call attention to the transitions and transience of objects over the generations.
In her “Standing Boddhisattva,” Li Xi explained to Peterson and to a reporter how evanescence and change are captured in the traditional Chinese fine brushwork of the figure’s hands, jewelry, and other details, while the black and white free-hand painting, an older style, frames the rectangular image in the background.
In the end, this quietly powerful show, although themed and titled “Moving Memories,” is really about transience, and memories, as limned by these very different artists, are the visual music that accompanies change.
Referring to Buddhist ideas that transience is not only fine, but a fundamental of existence to be embraced, Li Xi explained that her tall, calm image, which dominates the center of the gallery, “represents the kindness of the whole universe.”
Liwen Ma said that as soon as she saw Peterson’s work she knew that despite its abstraction, the minimalism and sense of memory were such that it could “have a conversation” with her Chinese artists from Xi’an.
“We come from different worlds, but artists’ hearts to pursue beauty are the same,” she added.