Artist Li Tie and his art become Chinese-American

WHEN LI TIE began to study painting in the United States, he was shocked. In the graduate program in painting at San Diego State University, he was the only student who actually picked up a brush. "It's a painting program and nobody's painting," he said during a visit to Eugene, where he was opening a show of new paintings and drawings at the White Lotus Gallery. "They are doing installations. They are working with found objects and photographs. I am the only one doing painting."

In a sense, though, that was exactly why Li applied to an American art school in the first place, even though he already was an accomplished painter, trained at the Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing. "There are so many things I don't understand here," he said. "There are people doing art I can't understand. Things like performance art and installation. I thought it would be good to learn a basic understanding of American art by going to school."

Li, 36, grew up in Beijing, the son of a military editor and a worker at a printing factory. He began drawing early in life and became serious about art during high school, using paper and ink his mother brought home from work. By the time he was 20, Li was doing woodblock prints, taking his blocks and knives out into the countryside for unusually direct premeditating. "I just did the carving right on the spot - landscapes, people, whatever I saw. It was a way for me to see a lot of things," Li said.

At the Central Academy, Li found himself caught between opposing artistic camps on the faculty. The dominant group consisted of Soviet-trained social realists, who taught a big, bold, realistic style of painting with a focus on serving political ends. The minority group of professors was trained in France, and taught a more abstract, expressionistic and Western style. Li was interested in both approaches. In his paintings and drawings today, you can see the bright, clear imagery of the social realists, but he has continually interwoven it with more subtle touches, using motifs taken from both Asian and Western sources.

For example, in his diptych `Filial Piety 2000' in the current show, Li combines photographs of his Chinese family with an image of Sandro Botticelli's Venus, Chinese calligraphy and the English words "sacred," "beauty," "simple" and "reproduction." It was in China that he met and married an American writer; she brought him to the United States, to live in Boulder, Colo.

Li hated it. "I was pretty miserable," he said. "I didn't speak the language. I couldn't find a job. I was really young then. I wanted to see the outside world, but I didn't know how difficult it would be to live in a different culture." The couple returned to China for a year and then moved to San Diego, where Li entered graduate school. He was quickly immersed in the culture of Western academic art and soon began to adapt what he was learning for his own work. "If you live next to a river, your foot has to get wet," he quipped.

He began to play with new tools - the photographs and found objects of his fellow students. He created installations. "I began a process of realization of myself as Chinese," he said. "In China, you don't realize that, because everything is the same." His thesis show for the master of fine arts degree in San Diego was titled "Resident Alien."

Here in the U.S., Li seems all but completely assimilated. His English is excellent, and he's as comfortable talking about the advantages of living in various American cities as he is talking about traditional Chinese culture. And so, when Li visits China these days, he brings a lot of Western baggage with him.

"I've started to say words like `postmodern' and `multicultural,' which are ridiculous in China," he said. "China is still dominated by one culture. There are 56 minority groups in China, and multiculturalism still doesn't make sense there."

July 2, 2000