In Li Jie’s works, there are no lavish colors, no hints of excessive polishing, and no unnatural formalism. What’s more, there are no puzzling mind games. Faced with thousands of screws and the elaborate fabric textures, I suddenly feel that time gushes subtly like water for one moment but dissipates gradually into the plain tableau at the next one, and finally vanishes without any trace. The feeling repeats like this. In the appearance and disappearance of time, extreme subtlety emerges.
During our chatting, Li Jie mentioned that her works were more like an activity about time. That’s true, she keeps track of human beings’ life experience about time in the most original way, which is the so-called Sense of Time. It differs from the time concept defined in physics and it stretches in the existence of My Life. The feelings that are so hard to express are displayed in her continuous composing day by day. The process is not so hasty to finish but is coming in a straight and lasting way. It can be seen that Li Jie’s composing process can go on only with great patience and strong will. The composing way is more similar to an ashram. Although it is repeated everyday, it is by no means duplication. What penetrate among them are perceptions and happiness got from each repeating. Only by observing the mental and physical efforts that the writer invests in each stroke, we can learn that at the moment when she is finishing them, she can feel the real existence of her own life. To finish another stroke or to depict one more screw is satisfying.
Appreciating Li Jie’s works in silence for long, I feel as if every screw exists firmly as a concrete life. While they record the precious time, they, as objects, also carry the traces of years that are left in the life of human beings by Industrial Civilization.
