The easily recognizable paintings of Li Jin's (b. 1958) middle period present scenes of consumption and sexual intimacy, filled with images of food and quirky figures reveling in the pleasures of the flesh. The color and subject matter are so beguiling that the brushwork can go unnoticed. Now, having explored the subtleties of color washes for two decades, Li Jin has translated them into a masterful and yet free-spirited control of tonality—the "five colors of ink." It is as if he has constantly honed his brushwork behind a veil of color and humor, and now finally lifts the veil for us to appreciate the results

Li Jin paints at an immersive scale on both the floor and on the wall, wielding specially-made large brushes and alternating between expressive gestures and meticulous drawing. Exploiting fully the interplay between figuration and abstraction, and between conscious control and the accidents of liquidity and gravity, the works recall historical paintings associated with Chan Buddhism and the xieyi and "splashed-ink" manners of traditional masters like Liang Kai, Xu Wei, and Bada Shanren.

By embracing the self-portrait, Li Jin harkens back to the very origins of the aesthetics of Chinese painting—portraiture of moral paragons and extraordinary persons such as the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove. Here his quasi-autobiographical figures are no longer contemporary merrymakers, but resemble ascetics and spiritual adepts of a timeless past. Animated by the calligraphic expressivity of literati painting, the figures capture the subtlest nuances of human emotion and existence. Vegetables and cuts of meat, too, gain personalities and moods of their own as independent subjects rendered much larger than life.