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Li Yuan-chia 李元佳
Untitled 無題
1960
Li Yuan-chia was the first Chinese post-war artist to embrace conceptual art, and he pioneered the adaption of Taoist philosophy to visual art. In Taiwan, he co-founded the Ton Fan Society in 1956, whose mission was to integrate Western and Eastern visual languages and media. He drew inspiration from Wassily Kandinsky’s colours, lines, and planes, and blended these with the lyrical spaces of Chinese landscapes. Li worked in various media but remained committed to minimalism throughout his career. He is known for his vocabulary of invented symbols, and especially what he called the ‘Cosmic Point’: the beginning and end of all things.
Untitled (1960), was created in Taiwan, two years before Li moved to Bologna and joined the movement Il Punto in Milan. This work reveals his early interest in elemental shapes. It creates striking combinations of delicate points and lines that move over the scroll’s surface quickly and with calligraphic rhythm. The composition is dualistic in nature: Li signed and dated it at both ends and seems to encourage an ambiguous reading. Read from right to left as an abstracted landscape, or from left to right as a set of stylised musical annotations, the work is permanently open to interpretation.
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