SIMPLE PLEASURES: LI JIN WITH ROGER LAW – Press release
'We are good friends and share the same path in art.'
Letter from Li Jin to Roger Law, 2003
18 April 2024
Simple Pleasures: Li Jin with Roger Law is a new exhibition celebrating the friendship between the British caricaturist behind Spitting Image, Roger Law (b. 1941), and Chinese painter Li Jin (b. 1958).
Active since the 1980s, Li Jin is best known for his playful and witty work which subverts the classical themes of an ideal, elegant and serene life in Chinese literati painting.
After producing 'Spitting Image' for more than a decade, Roger Law moved to Australia in the late 1990s and discovered Li Jin's work, then travelled to China to meet him. They have since formed a lasting friendship.
As the first solo show for Li Jin in the UK, this display introduces the artist’s signature subjects and style, featuring works recently presented to the Ashmolean by Roger Law. In contrast with traditional Chinese painting or imagery, which has often been loaded with symbolic meaning, literature references, and moral indications, Li Jin’s works acknowledge and celebrate the ‘simple pleasures’, and the existence of ordinary life in its own right.
A selection of Roger Law’s drawings and ceramic works will also be displayed to highlight their sharp observations of life, and artistic inspirations.
Aside from Li Jin's paintings, the exhibition will include works by Zhou Sicong and Zhu Xinjian, the two artists who most informed Li Jin, tracing the development of his distinct style and his extraordinary choices of ordinary people's lives as a major subject of his works.
Meanwhile, correspondence between Roger Law and Li Jin feature in the show demonstrating not only their friendship but also their mutual interests and shared sense of humour.
Roger Law comments:
'Li Jin’s work has a simplicity and immediacy and is full of life and wit. His work celebrates the most basic of life’s rituals and pleasures – sleeping, eating, drinking, etc. His brush paintings are a revealing, pictorial diary chronicling his love affairs, sumptuous banquets, his fantasies and occasional regrets. Or just simply sitting about at home.
'Stylistically Li Jin fuses traditional brush drawings of the past with the present making his work startlingly fresh. He is painting China now, celebrating a story of increasing prosperity for those lucky enough to find a way to obtain it.'
The exhibition is guest-curated by Dr Yi Chen, former Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum, and curator of Early China at the British Museum.
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CONTACT DETAILS
Sarah Holland, Press Officer
sarah.holland@glam.ox.ac.uk
press.office@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
T+44 (0)1865 278 178 | www.ashmolean.org/press | @AshmoleanPress
NOTES TO EDITORS
Exhibition: Simple Pleasures: Li Jin with Roger Law
Dates: 4 May to 17 Nov 2024
Venue: Gallery 11, Ground Floor, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK.
Admission: Free
With special thanks to Roger Law.
All works in the exhibition are ©李津工作室Lijin Studio unless indicated otherwise.
PRESS IMAGES & CREDITS
Press Images for editorial use are available here
Press release images:
Cool and Sleek (header detail) 潤澤清涼, 1998
With inscription and five artist’s seals
Ink and colour on paper / Ashmolean Museum
Nude figure diving, 2001
With two artist's seals
Ink and colour on paper
©李津工作室 Lijin Studio / Ashmolean Museum
Accepted by HM Government under the Cultural Gifts Scheme from Roger Law and allocated to the Ashmolean Museum, 2021.
