B. NEW YORK, NY, 1943
Born in 1943 in New York, Li-lan began rendering written correspondence and paper ephemera from memory in the 1960s—producing dreamlike and meticulously executed trompe l'oeil compositions. Imbued with a sense of longing and a desire for communication, her paintings and works on paper are rooted in cross-cultural exchange. As the child of the Chinese-American modernist painter Yun Gee, and the American gallerist Helen Wimmer Gee, Li-lan was immersed in the art world from an early age. After graduating from the legendary High School of the Performing Arts in New York City, Li-lan was drawn to Abstract Expressionism before forging her own distinctive pared-down style. Infusing her practice with her life experiences in Japan, China, and the United States, Li-lan blends Eastern and Western cultural references while melding the aesthetic principles of Surrealism, Pop art, Minimalism, and other art movements.
After spending her early career traveling between New York City and Tokyo alongside her husband, the printmaker Masuo Ikeda, Li-lan settled in East Hampton in the 1970s. The natural daylight of the region influenced her output, which until then Li-lan had produced under artificial lights in dark urban studios. Upon moving out to the East End of Long Island, Li-lan’s practice transformed:
My bright city colors first turned dark, then darker; then white. The paintings became quiet and full of white light. Slowly, the white of the outside became the white of inside. White paper, pads, and notebooks that had been in the background, gradually became the foreground.
This shift in Li-lan’s output is evident in her mature canvases from the 1970s and ‘80s. These paintings offer birds-eye views of open notebooks, torn pages, legal pads, stamped postcards, and other quotidian records of connection or contemplation. The level of precision that Li-lan achieved in these historic works is especially remarkable given that she executed them freehand from memory.
Li-lan has exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally, particularly in Japan and Taiwan. Her work is found in public collections around the world such as the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill; William Benton Museum of Art, Storrs; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Ohara Museum of Art, Kurashiki, Japan; and the Sezon Museum of Modern Art, Karuizawa, Japan.
It started with an exhibition catalog from the 1970s—one with eerily contemporary work and the names of two largely overlooked female artists, Eva Hesse and Nina Yankowitz. Both had been rightfully featured in the 1970 Emily Lowe Gallery exhibition in Hempstead, New York, but their work had been victimized by systematic failure. Female artists in the 1970s—especially those finding creative inspiration outside of New York City—rarely found a market foothold and, to Eric Firestone, needed a proper reintroduction for today’s audiences. For Firestone, the catalog was a catalyst and a moral obligation to reignite dialogue around Yankowitz and Hesse, and present them amongst their peers in the gallery's current show, "Hanging/Leaning: Women Artists on Long Island, the 1960s-80s." Firestone was sold when Yankowitz pulled out Sagging Spiro (1969) from her "Draped Painting" series of linen panels. “They feel so relevant and fresh and in dialogue with multiple artists,” says Firestone. “Once people know about this work. I think it's going to be a revelation.” The mixed media piece, which hangs front and center of Firestone’s Newton Lane outpost in East Hampton, sings with the same harmony as Sam Gilliam and Katherine Grosse, though Sagging Spiro predated the artists by three and 30 odd years, respectively. The work is a perfect introduction for the mixed-media exhibition, which plays with Long Island’s geographic surroundings, the beat-poet vibe of the '60s- and '70s-era Hamptons and general energetic joy in the unsung.
