Wei Li's 'Curious Things'

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Wei Li, "Long Way Home," 2017

acrylic and oil on canvas, 40" x 60", image courtesy of the artist

Wei Li’s colourful and complicated paintings are impressionistic abstracts, full of motion and confident brush marks. But there’s something substantial and illustrative about them too. They look real world – just not our particular planet. With bulbous tubers, rounded corrugations and a definite, if crowded, feeling of life, you could interpret the 11 oils and acrylics in Curious Things, on view at Edmonton’s Harcourt House until Sept. 22, as landscapes, vibrant dissection trays or even figurative portraits – yearbook poses straight from another dimension.

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Wei Li, "Diptych (Left)," 2016

acrylic and oil on canvas, 60" x 48", image courtesy of the artist

Li admits she sometimes sees faces in the paintings as she works. There’s surely at least one pair of mismatched eyes and lips in the unframed canvas, Diptych (Left), which hangs beside the show’s title. And while she uses the word landscapes to describe her newer work, she concedes the human linkage remains. “I still think I deal with people, with emotions and feelings. Because I’m concerned with how people feel, the starting point is from our bodies, from inside. And all mixed together. Different perspectives, all happening at the same time.”

Li emigrated in 2010 from Chengdu in south-central China, a city some 15 times as populous as Edmonton. “That’s where pandas come from,” she says with a laugh. Throughout the show, the tension of overcrowding is palpable. Thickly painted elements seem to cry out as they’re squished together. Some paintings feel dark and toxic. Others look almost edible.

Li brings her emotions to the canvas, but they sometimes lead her to unexpected places. “It’s interactive,” she says. “There’s a different pace in each painting. I let it happen, try to do things intuitively. Doing what I feel at the moment. So every painting is different.”

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Wei Li, "Inside Out," 2016

acrylic and oil on canvas, 36" x 30", image courtesy of the artist

Alberta is oil country, of course, so it’s tempting to assume Li’s inside-out organs are an environmental warning. Several local artists, including Sean Caulfield and Paul Freeman, regularly summon apocalypse with their mutant life forms, and Li studied under the latter at the University of Alberta, graduating with a BFA last year. “I can only say I guess,” she says of the suggestion. “I will say I feel pressure because of the economics here, a sense of worry that’s in my paintings.” But she emphasizes that the core of her production is hybridity. “For me, there are big differences between Western and Eastern ideas, and I try bringing them together in my work.”

Li is one of 15 finalists in this year’s $25,000 RBC Painting Competition. The winner will be announced Oct. 17 at the National Gallery of Canada. The finalists’ show, which opens Sept. 1, includes her painting Obsessiveness and excitement, never growing out of them. “It feels unbelievable,” she says. “The National Gallery – I never thought my work would show there.”

The painting, already shipped to Ottawa, isn’t in the Harcourt show. But Curious Things shows the twists and chaos of Li’s topographical range. It’s easy, maybe even a little dangerous, to get lost in them.