Born into a farming family in 1929 in Guangxi, southern China, Li was adopted by an uncle at an early age. After this uncle’s death in the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937 – 1945, Li left for Taiwan, arriving with the Kuomintang as part of a group of orphan refugees in 1949. He moved to Italy in the early 1960s, and never subsequently returned to Taiwan.
In 1951 Li studied Art at Art Education department at Taipei Normal College for teacher-training in Taiwan. In 1955 he also had a military training course.
Li's calligraphic explorations in Taipei combined Chinese tradition with Western abstract art. In his work from the late 1950s, Li set about applying “points” — which he described as being “where all things start and end” — that would become a symbolic form that centered his practice. In Bologna, under the patronage of modernist furniture manufacturer Dino Gavina, Li developed monochromatic paintings that had these points, varying from tiny, graphic marks to larger circular forms, randomly positioned on their surfaces, while limiting his pallette to only four colors. He also helped form another artist group, The Point, incorporating European art trends into its practice. His works gradually reached an ultimate state of simplicity with a series of white, monochromatic paintings, which are now part of Tate’s collection in London, and were also included in the TFAM retrospective.
Traveling from Taiwan to Italy and then to England, Li arrived in London in 1965 to exhibit at Signals gallery and later showed with the Lisson Gallery. After leaving London in 1968, he spent the remainder of his life in Cumbria in northern England where he established the LYC Museum and Art Gallery in his own home. As well as opening his home and giving exhibitions to over 300 artists in a ten-year period, Li continued to be innovative in his own artwork and his poetry. He also continued to evolve his artistic language which was based on the notion of the “Cosmic Point.” That took many forms, some purely visual, others participatory. For Li, the Point was “the origin and end of creation”. He gave it form according to a most refined artistic and poetic sensibility. Gaining increasing recognition for his enterprise, after a year or two Li was awarded funding from the Arts Council, making it possible for the Museum to continue its activities for the ten years he had originally planned. Li Yuan-chia died of cancer in 1994. There was a 1998 memorial exhibition of his work in Taipei. A retrospective of his work and career was shown in London at the Camden Arts Centre in 2001.
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Monochrome White Painting
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Folding Scroll
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Li dared to be simple. Throughout his life, he tried to make his thought as accessible to others as he could. Its beauty is inseparable from its simplicity. The ‘tiny dot’ was Li’s great visual invention. It was the physical and metaphysical emblem of his art.
Quotations: “The simpler a thing is, the more likely it is to be misinterpreted or even dismissed. This tiny dot can mean all or nothing to you.”
Li Yuan-chia was one of the Ton Fan group that formed in Taiwan by 1956, also known as Orient Movement or Dongfang Huahui.
