By Izzy Bilkus
On a grey Tuesday afternoon I escape the relentless rain to meet painter Li Hei Di at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery as she prepares for her first UK solo show, ‘700 Nights of Winter’. My dampened spirits are quickly soothed by a hot cup of tea and the warm, vibrant energy emanating from the main gallery space, where Hei Di’s paintings are being installed. Kaleidoscopic flurries of colour flood the canvasses. Ethereal, amorphous figures swim beneath swirling ocean blues, while fiery reds and luminescent oranges set other scenes ablaze. It feels like glimpsing into another world – hazy and magical – beneath the veils of paint.
Hei Di’s London show comes hot off the heels of her Los Angeles exhibition at Michael Kohn Gallery. “I haven’t really had a break!” she tells me as we sit down. Born in Shenyang, China in 1997, Hei Di moved abroad as a teenager. Before earning her MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, she received BAs from both the Chelsea College of Arts and the Maryland Institute College of Art. “Studying art in America was very different compared to the UK,” she tells me. “In America, my college had so many rules when it came to painting. I think a professor once told me that every good painting should have at least three elements. I took that literally and tried to paint three objects. All these things I treated as gospel.”
“When I went to Chelsea for my master’s there was more freedom,” she continues. “There were no lettered grades like in America. Being graded like that felt so silly. It felt like I was only working to fulfill someone else’s expectations, and that would come through in my paintings. I painted intending to receive a good grade.”
Her recent paintings are a far cry from the rigid structures Hei Di was bound to as a student. Now 26, the artist has found her footing. The new works in the show focus on different aspects of desire. Primal urges and pangs of repressed longing are whipped up with each brushstroke and Hei Di’s signature fluid application of paint. But this way of working didn’t come easily. “When I studied painting at 18, I didn’t have a strong enough sense of self to really know who I was. I think I was a bit lost at that time. I felt like I didn’t know how to show people my worth or how to paint. It was like I was running on empty. I had to find a direction by myself.”
So how does a young artist find direction? “I decided to make really bad paintings for a couple of years. People around me were confused about what I was doing, but I loved it! I painted random things such as characters from Chinese dramas and scenes from funny video clips. At times, I questioned whether I should be embarrassed about that, but now I feel like it was an important part of helping me find my path. When COVID hit and the world paused, I felt less pressure to achieve things. I felt more relaxed about my work, so I painted a whole bunch of things that I never allowed myself to paint before,” she continues, scrolling through her camera roll to show me the paintings. “This is a chicken I painted. I made it a fake award certificate for being the most civilised chicken. I also painted someone pulling a puppy out of their pants.”
Chatting with Hei Di feels like catching up with an old friend. We share a few more giggles and stories about our times at university. “I’m 26 but I feel like I’m 31 sometimes, but then I sit in a gallery space like this and feel like I’m 14. Do you feel like everything changed after 25? Or your fashion at least? When I was younger I wore really colourful outfits, like a stereotypical artsy kid. My friends would show my girlfriend pictures of me from back then like ‘Did you know she used to wear this and have a shaved head?’ I also remember wearing insane eyeliner. Before I was 25 I’d wear things that were loud – those kinds of ‘look at me!’ outfits and now I wear things that say ‘don’t look at me!’”
The show’s title, ‘700 Nights of Winter’ came from her nocturnal painting habits leading up to the show. “I was mostly working at night. It was like living in eternal darkness because I would go to bed really late and wake up in the afternoon when the sun had set and the sky was a greyish blue. I’d come home from my studio at 3 am. The paintings would get crazier the more I did. I become more insane at night – I think everyone does. I like working at night because you’re undisturbed. During the day there’s too much going on.” Transmuting this frantic and impassioned energy into paint is what Hei Di does best.
For Hei Di, desire is both an emotional and physical force. “Desire is an energy that lives inside your body. I started thinking about it when I was a kid because I had to work and study a lot. I felt like that lack of freedom triggered a repressed energy. It felt so repressed and constrained that it would explode. That’s why I love the physical process of painting – it feels like I’m letting it all out,” she says. “I never know how a painting is going to turn out, and I’ve never tried to control it. It’s like receiving a message from the universe, it feels like witchcraft.”
The message I received when looking at some of Hei Di’s paintings is something musical. With all their movement and electricity, they are like visual representations of songs; soundtracks that are vibrant and multi-instrumental, where manifold realities mesh into one grand symphony. “I know a painting is done when I can hear music coming from it. It’s such a distinct moment. I love listening to orchestral music when I paint. At the moment, I’m listening to the album Echoes from Distant Lands by the composer Peyman Yaz. He made the soundtrack for the film Summer Palace by Lou Ye, a Chinese director who made one of my favourite films, Suzhou River, which inspired me a lot when I first started painting. He also directed Blind Massage, a film about blind people in China who are training as masseurs. The protagonist falls in love with his best friend’s wife just from her scent. In the end, he gets his vision back and realises she’s not very beautiful and that he only loves how she smells. The song that plays at the end has a lyric that says something like ‘Mama, I fell in love with a woman and she has eaten my eyes. All I can see is red.’ That’s what inspired my big red painting in the show. I wanted to have something red to fill my eyes.”
