Art Review | Li Ziyu's First Hong Kong Exhibition: Landscapes of the Mind

In Li Ziyu's first Hong Kong exhibition titled "Landscapes of the Mind," colors splash freely within elegant frames. There are bold ink clouds and playful simple strokes. As Pai Hsien-yung noted in "Images as Voice of the Heart": "Li Ziyu seems to write lyrical poems - from spring to winter, from soft yellow and tender green to icy gray and blue. Her abstract color paintings have the exquisite delicacy of Tang dynasty quatrains; her paintings contain poetry. Li Ziyu's work follows no school, emerging naturally without artifice as outsider art. Through her paintings, she expresses her inner voice, telling colorful stories that words cannot fully capture."

Why title it "Landscapes of the Mind"?

Li is also a writer who published an art-literary work of the same name, openly discussing her four suicide attempts and long battle with depression. Her husband, Professor Leo Ou-fan Lee, a literary scholar who taught at Harvard and Princeton, wrote in "Ziyu's Paintings": "Her paintings express deeply personal emotions. They serve not only as daily therapy but also aim to comfort and resonate with friends and strangers struggling with emotional illness."

In her book "Memories of Food," Li reveals a childhood spent largely in gloom. Her mother lived in England, writing just one letter monthly. Growing up without parents, she lived with her grandmother and brother. Her grandmother cooked for them until age made it difficult, leading Li to learn cooking herself. During those days, her grandmother frequently longed for news from Li's mother. In winter, she suffered asthma attacks at least monthly, spending sleepless nights propped up on pillows, struggling to breathe. Li lived in constant fear of becoming an orphan, saying "My childhood was spent in perpetual anxiety."

"Countless times, usually at month's end when money ran out and grandmother fell ill, she would suffer terribly without funds for medical care. What could I, so young, do besides worry? Someone told me you could communicate with distant relatives by calling their name behind a door while thinking of them. Countless times, I called out three times daily behind the door, begging for letters and money to save us from our desperate situation. But this method proved ineffective - nothing would arrive before the start of the next month."

Is life a continuous process of healing one's childhood? Freud's psychoanalytic approach saw the past as deterministic and believed treating depression required understanding the unconscious through exploring past traumas to understand the roots of one's thoughts. His student Adler, however, advocated focusing on positive futures and reshaping goals to treat depression. The popular psychology trilogy "The Courage to Be Disliked," "The Courage to Be Happy," and "The Courage to Accept Happiness" by Ichiro Kishimi draws from Adler's theories.

Li found healing through painting. Her work's significance lies not in competing with Renaissance masters or academic precision, but in a spiritual connection with light. Her paintings tell every person suffering from depression: "If I could overcome it, you too can find your life's direction."

Finding direction, overcoming depression, living with strength - like Sisyphus eternally pushing his boulder upward.

Soviet psychologist L.S. Vygotsky compared the human mind to river flow in "The Psychology of Art," varying with riverbed contours, temperature, and rainfall - sometimes calm, sometimes turbulent, sometimes circuitous or even reversing course. Depression's complexity lies in this unpredictability of mental states, like the "Mary's Room" thought experiment showing we cannot fully share another's subjective experience. We are each like "brains in vats" floating in vast waters.

Li's paintings bare her mind's flowing waters unreservedly to all viewers.

Neoplatonist Plotinus (205-270) said a stone sculpture's beauty comes not from the stone itself but from the "form" of beauty the artist imbues from their mind - its beauty measuring how fully the stone submits to the artist's spirit. 1700 years later, Vygotsky echoed: "Art is social technique of emotion."

In our society, especially Hong Kong's bustling streets, everything including art carries a price tag. But can art's metaphysical significance be reduced to rational tools or art historical conventions? How can we quantify art's impact on the human spirit?

In Chapter 4 of Six Lectures on Humanities, Mr. Lee Ou-fan discussed the difference between Chinese and Western novels in terms of tradition, elegance and vulgarity, and it seems that it can also be applied to the discussion of art: both Chinese and Western novels started from vulgarity, but gradually became elegant, and even assumed a major social mission. When Marcel Duchamp submitted his signed urinal "Fountain" to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition, he likely didn't anticipate launching contemporary art's new wave. How much historical and technical weight should artwork carry? How should artists be packaged and evaluated while preserving authenticity and innocence?

Shklovsky noted in "Literature and Cinematography": "Art's inheritance passes not from father to son but uncle to nephew." Lee interpreted this as different artistic currents taking turns at prominence, with former "low" forms potentially becoming canonical. As Shklovsky said, "Blessed are the lower artistic forms, for theirs is the future kingdom."

Perhaps the boundary between the refined and the vulgar isn't so clear, and art and spirit are interdependent. Without genuine feeling, how can art come alive and move us?

Perhaps we should all pause to contemplate our inner landscapes.

This misty Hong Kong autumn invites us to experience the landscapes through Li's eyes.

• 明報月刊：心靈的風景——李子玉香港畫展（楊曉雯）