Li Jin wasn’t a meat-eater until the sky burial. It was the early 1980s and the young painting teacher had been assigned to Tibet University. He spent three years there and during that time was invited to one of the holiest Tibetan rituals, where a corpse’s flesh is carved off its bones and its brain mashed with barley, and both offered to the birds. It’s not something outsiders are meant to see but Li Jin, a broad guy with a long beard, doesn’t look like your typical Chinese guy. He looks like Ai Weiwei.
They told him to shut up and not say a word.
Jia Li / SmartShanghai.com
“I was kind of shocked,” he told me. “I suddenly realized our bodies are no different from other animals, and the meat we were eating. It’s just a vehicle to carry our soul. It enlightened me, made me stop worrying about the small things and to just enjoy life.” It made him into a carnivore.
Li and I were sitting in his massive studio on the outskirts on Beijing, pictures of food and curvy women pinned to the walls behind him. I’d been following his work since seeing a show of his in Beijing about a decade ago, and falling in love with his fleshy and discombobulated representations of people and food at a small solo show. Even then, he was established as one of China’s most talented contemporary ink painters, and had earned the respect of the academic world, though auction prices hadn’t yet caught on.
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
Since then, he has found more mainstream success, holding exhibitions with Sotheby’s, painting for massively popularly TV series A Bite of China, and moving into a millionaire’s gated compound. In April 2017, a piece titled “Feast” sold for 2.84 million HKD. I was looking for a perspective on food from someone who works with it intimately but not in the traditional sense. Li probably spends more time studying the details of what we eat than most chefs, and he had grown into a larger-than-life personality for me. I wanted to have dinner with him.
I had asked Li to pick a restaurant or place that was especially important to him or held some special meaning for him for dinner, something with emotional resonance. Li’s choice was a dinner party at home.
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
My flight into Beijing had been delayed by seven hours, and by the time I arrived, dawn had broken. Exhausted, the photographer and I made our way to lunch, and then Li offered us spare bedrooms in his large, standalone house in the Beijing suburbs. His artwork decorated every surface, from the colorful pillows on the couch to a life-size cartoonish statue at the door to more delicate and classical ink-and-water rendering of pork on the walls, and after a quick round of envy, we promptly fell asleep.
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
By the time we woke up, the guests had begun arriving and it started turning into a real Beijing party. Boiled soybeans and peanuts came out of the kitchen. A calligraphy professor had brought over his special homemade zhajiangmian sauce, which Li said had to have the pork cut just so, and then the guys started pulling out the Moutai. Another friend had set up a massive charcoal grill outside for BBQ’ing, and yet another was sitting outside with a guitar. Most were art professors or artists or calligraphers in their fifties and sixties but they almost all had the vigor of men half their age, with round bellies and the kind of macho Beijing attitude I and a lot of people love about Beijing. Somewhere around here, I learned there’s a name for this particular spirit —ye men’er —and these guys had it in spades.
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
I wasn’t drinking because of medicine but of course they were, and the party moved from BBQ and soybeans inside to everyone sitting around the courtyard/patio outside, smoking, playing the guitar, and drinking Moutai. If Li was trying to show me something, it was that he’s just a regular Beijing guy (even if he was born in Tianjin, thirty minutes away) who happens to be a painter, and that it’s not the food that matters, it’s the people around it.
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
It started to get dark and drunken and I made my exit. As I walked past the group of guys singing, they stood up and spontaneously broke into “A Night to Remember”, the song at the end of every Spring Festival Gala show that signals the hokey TV show has come to an end. Everyone laughed.
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
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The next day Li and I reconvened at his studio. He wore flowered pants and a purple shirt, and sat at one of tables putting the finishing touches on some Chinese fans for a private buyer. He was preparing to go back to Los Angeles the following week, four or months after he gone to the States for Sotheby’s, producing A Foodist’s Journey to the West, a tongue-in-cheek travelogue in which Li traveled the US and painted along the way. The trip, from LA to Vegas to NY and Back, ended up as a special Sotheby’s exhibition in July 2017 in Los Angeles, and an exhibition catalogue called LI JIN: A Devout Foodist’s Journey to the West, a play on the word Buddhist and the traditional Journey to the West story.
Li paints a beautiful hot dog.
Jia Li / SmartShanghai.com
It’s this dedication to the common that I love in Li’s painting, though other gallerists I talked to called out for being hackneyed and obvious. Li doesn’t mind. His career went from being a student to then immediately becoming a teacher (sent to Tibet), and he says he was never “exposed to society”, as it were, never had to pick one of the two paths available to artists back then: join the system and collect the awards, or become the rebel and collect the hardship. He was not interested in either.
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
It was here in his studio that we finally got to talk one-on-one, and Li spoke about his history, his generation’s motivation for food greed, and his ambivalence about realism.
“I’m really self-centered. My works have always been about my personal life. But back then, twenty years ago, personal life wasn’t valued, and painters like me were considered ambition-less.”
The other major difference between Li, whose work has become more popular since the current craze of food worship has struck China, is political and the hunger of a generation.
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
“I’m not the type of person who really enjoys food. I think I may be mentally dependent on it. I enjoy looking at it, allowing it to get me hungry, to make me greedy. Our generation is so passionate about food because we were so deprived of it.”
For a carnivorous guy like Li, making up for lost time, his big appetite for lust often means big hunks of meat, lavish feasts, and naked women. The two pinups behind his desk were a photo of a plus-size model in a skin-tight bathing suit and then his painting of an equally curvy roasted chicken. The resemblance was disarming.
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
“Meat was never featured in traditional Chinese painting. In the past, paintings were always done by the upper classes, who are aiming for something that transcends daily life”, he tells me. “They like bamboo, plum flowers, orchids and chrysanthemums. Meat is too vulgar for them.”
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
And then he tells a story that is almost too vulgar for me.
“Back when I was in Tibet, one of my students brought me to his house for a really special meal, something usually prepared for Tibetan aristocrats or Buddhist leaders. It was a piglet that had been buried alive — underground — for a year. It was coated in a batter, whose recipe remained a secret among Tibetans. But up there on the plateau, the meat didn’t rot – it turned green, soft, smelly and delicious. I understood it as something similar to fermented tofu but with a different aroma and fermentation, since it’s animal protein, not vegetable protein. It looked like dark green mustard, spiced with some peppers and served in a silver bowl. It tasted like smelly cheese, and the texture was really smooth, maybe because it’s a piglet.”
Throughout our conversation, Li is quick to distance himself from the world of “foodies” and professional food people, and professionals in general. He has a self-deprecating view of himself and his work.
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
“There are a lot of illustrators who can paint food that is more true to reality than me,” he says. “A crab, for example. They paint the exact number of legs that a crab has. But it doesn’t necessarily make you feel the crab is alive. I think my passion for food gives it life, making a radish crispy and juicy.”
“I care as much about its texture on paper as its taste. You have to actually eat it and enjoy it to appreciate it and recreate it,” he says.
“I want to paint everyday life with emotion. It’s beyond imagination.”
Photo by Jia Li /SmartShanghai.com
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