Li Zi Jian at the Crossroads of Realism and Sentimentality

The current exhibition at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Fine Arts Gallery is a considerable can of worms. It presents some 80 large realist-style oil paintings under the title “Humanity and Love: Li Zi Jian World Tour Exhibition.”

According to the show’s catalog, Li was born in Shaoyang City, Hunan, China, in 1954 and lived in poverty as a handicrafts worker during the Cultural Revolution. In 1977, he was admitted to the Guangzhou Art Institute. Ten years later, he came to the United States, studied briefly at the Massachusetts Art Institute and moved to Los Angeles.

Here, he found a mentor in a contemporary Buddhist monk, Master Hsing Yun, founder of a sect called Buddha’s Light International Assn. He provided Li the equivalent of a fellowship to create a body of work. In an astonishingly brief 18 months, Li produced about 100 fully resolved paintings, from which this show was selected.

That feat accomplished, the artist set up a foundation backed by his benefactor to fund a global tour of the work. Scheduled to travel until the year 2000, it has already been seen in Malaysia, Thailand, Australia, South Africa, Brazil and Argentina. Significantly, the show has been more often displayed in venues like city halls and cultural centers than art museums. Most recently, it was shown in the headquarters of the United Nations. Li did a portrait of Secretary-General Kofi Annan that will be permanently installed at the U.N.

All of which suggests an absolutely admirable exercise of courage, tenacity and entrepreneurial zeal. It also reveals that all this was accomplished outside the normal pecking order and winnowing system of the art world. One scan of the work is enough to convince any aesthetically literate viewer that this is not art-world art.

Li paints scenes of Tibetan shepherds high in the Himalayas, an ancient woman in front of a stone fountain, a series on a baby growing up with its red floral security blanket in a Chinese village. There is no trace of contemporary irony in any of it, none of the nostalgic wit of immigrant artists like Komar and Melamid making fun of their roots in old Soviet Socialist Realism. Not that irony doesn’t get tiresome. At least Li is heartfelt.

There’s a white-on-white series depicting his beautiful wife and baby that suggests thoughts of both Ingres and Whistler. Li stands for unassailable virtues like kindness, love and world peace, but they’re not the only things life is about. Leaning on them as much as he does becomes a form of sentimental propaganda.

Li consciously eschews allusions to modern figurative movements like Surrealism and Expressionism. The closest he comes is “1937 Massacre in Nanjing.” It depicts a couple of Japanese soldiers standing smugly in front of a mound of Chinese corpses topped by a crying baby. The scene is horrific, but the painting has no internal expressive vectors.

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Li works on the visual surface, and he’s really good at it. He’s got an eye like a camera and a fist like a laser. At the same time, he’s given to overstatement, tugging at heartstrings by making a pretty girl look sad while he fudges the formal values. He works like an illustrator. His pieces look better in reproduction than in person. He has a series on homeless people in L.A. that brings to mind both Norman Rockwell and Maxfield Parrish. The style’s too cute for the subject. He’s better in an action scene like “Dragon’s Posterity,” in which he approaches the vigor of N.C. Wyeth.

Li’s a classic case of an artist carried away by his own virtuosity. He needs to stop painting like a machine. If he wants to be an artist who can impress his peers as well as his public, he needs to realize that art is as much an act of intelligence as of talent. A certain amount of discrimination is also required. This exhibition could have looked twice as good if deftly edited to half its present size. It was curated for the Luckman by its director, Patricia Woodlin.

* Luckman Fine Arts Gallery, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive, (213) 343-6604, through Aug. 9. Closed Fridays and Sundays.