S: I agree. Although, I am always hesitant to attach my name to those two painting modalities. I think to call them paintings is enough.
H: Everyday living is fantastical. I agree with this view, and moreover it is the undercurrent of love and pain hidden within these hybrids of elements. I’m obsessed with Haruki Murakami’s writings, where the mundane reality is a bit off. There is one part in Murakami’s book The Wind-Up Bird, where a character says that sometimes you put instant pudding into the microwave but when it finishes and you open it, you find macaroni. There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe that they must have put macaroni in and just remembered it wrong; and those who insist that they put in instant pudding, but somehow, the reality had shifted, where the pudding was no longer pudding in this world, and had been replaced by macaroni. I should be shocked , but I’m quite relieved that sometimes I get macaroni when I put in pudding; this feels a lot more real.
M: You both deploy intuition in your work, where the image reveals itself through its own making, could you elaborate a bit on this perhaps?
S: Well, one way intuition kicks in for me is when I am trying to figure out what the next painting would be or how to move forward from feeling stuck. I draw a lot and also print out images of my work and alter them constantly. I do believe that moving things around with my hand often will unlock an idea that I could not have arrived at in any other way. For me, I am suspicious of overthinking or over-planning. So, even though I draw and redraw and make a ton of mixed media variations, the painting always has its own reality.
H: I like to start a painting by creating chaos, intuitive scribbling onto the canvas, a flood of raw impulse. Then I assess the chaos, the process is like ancient people reading burnt turtles shells as divination in Shang dynasty. I slowly find order in this chaos and enforce the order, the canvas becomes the battlefield of different forces, by sacrificing some marks that do not contribute to the order, a new layer begins to form like the rising of a new era in the history of this piece of canvas. Every painting day is a struggle, constantly balancing the weight of order and chaos, colour and form, abstraction and figuration, birth and sacrifice…what I’m looking for is a comfortable state of the collision and complementation of the forces, a dynamic balance of the light and the shadow.
M: John Yau wrote in Hyperallergic of your work Sangram, that ‘It seems to me that Majumdar is after that moment of seeing which occurs just before we name the object’ - it feels like this is both something you have in common in your work. In just the same way that Heidi’s organic forms whilst in part tangible, aren’t fully legible, they evoke the sense that they are in the process of becoming, how would you both respond to this observation?
S: Well, John wrote that in relation to paintings I was making from direct observation I believe. But I do think that I am very much interested in redirecting or reorienting the viewer away from any direct readings. This is where my interest in opacity, distortion, layering, and fragmentation come in.
H: I think a lot of my paintings are about being caught in the act, and some of them are about to burst into a pile of water, some of them have already drowned in the water from their own burst, and some of them have already died from drowning and entered a world of ghosts. All these images have strong suggestions of temporality, like momentary peace in the constant years of war.
M: What paintings and artists did you both look at when you first started making work, and perhaps are there artists now you still look to for inspiration?
S: For sure I go through stages of looking and learning about artists. When I was a student I very much poured over artworks. I remember seeing an exhibition of John Singer Sargent’s paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and feeling blown away. Although that feeling didn’t last too long, especially after I visited Madrid and saw the Velasquez paintings. When my paintings were rooted in direct observation, I was very interested in the works of Euan Uglow and Frank Auerbach. Now I am more interested in reading about artists and reading what they wrote. I try to read a bit from the Jack Whitten diaries every time I am in the studio.
H: Liu Xiaodong, Cecily Brown and Doris Salcedo inspired me a lot when I first started making work. Now I look at a lot of films and literature, I really love films by Lou Ye and Fruit Chan.
M: How long do you focus on one painting, do you ever put a work to one side and revisit it? And do you focus on one painting at a time, or multiple?
S: All of the above. I don’t have a set system. Sometimes I get really frustrated and put a painting aside. Other times I just paint over it, and regret that decision a month later. But that’s life!
H: Multiple. Sometimes I would leave a painting for months knowing it’s lacking and one day I turn it around and resolve it by what I knew months before but didn’t feel right to execute then. Sometimes, unresolved paintings are like new love affairs, you just don’t want to move on from the ambiguous state of infatuation.
Li Heidi (b. China) is an artist living and working in London.
Heidi’s painting practice deals with the complexities of image making. Without pre-planning, her canvases tell the story of their own making. Her work is a composite of many references, including the colour palette and freeze frames of Chinese cinema, everyday objects, and nods to her life split between her childhood in China and her recent life in Europe. Keen to embody the sensation of desire, Heidi relishes joyous combinations of forms and colour, completed with a vast variety of brushstrokes. Her compositions allow human organ-like forms to play out a game of hide and seek.
