Heng Li - Poetics of Landscape

Galerie Jahn is thrilled to present the "Poetics of Landscape" exhibition with new works by the Chinese artist Heng Li, showing large-format, virtuoso landscape paintings portraying field landscapes with dramatic skies. The fantastic realism of his works shows an amazing degree of accurate reproduction and at the same time a mysterious, spiritual depth that captivates the observer.

Heng Li belongs to China’s generation of artists who are already enjoying the benefits of a wealthy, internationally highly networked country. He studied painting at the I. E. Repin State Academy Institute for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in St. Petersburg and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg and completed his studies in 2010 as a master student with Prof Ottmar Hörl. Since then, he has been living and working in Munich and showing his works in various solo and group exhibitions, primarily in Europe and China.

The paintings are large-format meadow landscapes in which the artist portrays the world and life. They are reminiscent of landscapes found in Mongolia and Tibet’s high plateau. You can feel the wind blowing through the fields and the clouds seem to constantly change the light conditions over and over again. Added to this, there’s the spectacular portrayal of the sky with its clouds and light phenomena. The artist uses the central perspective to develop the landscapes time and again and in doing so, he composes the images from different vanishing points and perspectives. What’s really exceptional is that he reproduces the sky using wiping techniques and the grass using scraping techniques so accurately but breaks with this realism particularly in the area of the sky by leaving traces of paint that appear like light phenomena. Light phenomena, which we would not assess as being realistic based on observations of the weather or nature. This is where how the images are received comes in. The observer is prompted to understand the phenomena against their own horizon of experience. This is how the artist emphasises the highly meditative nature in the paintings and enables the observer to draw possible spiritual references for themselves. The paintings reflect the artist’s deep roots in the spiritual sources of Chinese philosophy like I Ging and also reveal references to Zen Buddhism. 

Galerie Jahn is showing a wonderfully poetic solo exhibition with Heng Li, which continues its series on realism in painting and at the same clearly expands the gallery programme’s international character with this contemporary art position.