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“As time goes by, our memories begin to blur, but the emotions tied to them remain vivid and deeply rooted in our hearts.” - Li Jie
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Memory fades with time; appearances recede, yet emotions endure. What remains is rarely an exact image of the past, but rather an elusive yet profoundly real, almost tactile impression. Li Jie’s poetic words evoke memory not as a fixed record, but as a shifting presence, renewed in the present with each act of recollection. As visual clarity recedes, past joys, losses and warmth continue to resonate.
For his second solo exhibition at HOFA, titled ‘Emotional Residue’, Li Jie presents a body of recent works. He asks how time leaves its mark on us, how memory takes shape in relation to space, and how emotion moves through what we see. In Li Jie’s paintings, recurring groups of people are captured in moments of togetherness. In some works, the depicted crowds are composed of people moving in similar ways who happen to be together by chance, brought together by a place or an event. In other works, human figures momentarily lose themselves in the celebrations around them: the scale of the crowd throws the smallness of the individual into relief, while the collective experience of shared presence brings a sense of release and dissolution.
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Li Jie’s painterly gesture carefully negotiates between emotional intensity and compositional balance: his brushwork is vigorous yet restrained, his colours rich without being cloying, and his compositions deft without appearing contrived, maintaining a state of vibrant tension without excess. Human characters in Li Jie’s canvases appear blurred and indistinct, sometimes out of focus, like photographs held in memory whose outlines remain, or cinematic stills suspended in a state of dissolve, their details already fading. Through decentred compositions and forceful scraping and smearing, his paintings give physical form to otherwise intangible recollections. Layers of paint lend thickness to the picture plane, asserting a tangible, architectural presence on the canvas. Through the rhythmic repetition, obscuration and transformation of oil paint, the works open up an imaginative space beyond the physical forms of reality, one that varies from viewer to viewer.
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More About the Artist
Li Jie | Emotional Residue
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