He once sailed across the ocean to settle in the Seychelles for eight years, later he went to Europe, and then became an immigrant to New Zealand. I do not know whether the ups and downs of life abroad have changed him or the native natural environment of the Pacific island has affected him. Li Nanfeng is not like any Chinese painter. It is even difficult to find a similar style to describe his work.

　　Li Nanfeng graduated from the Printmaking School of the China Central Academy of Fine Arts, with outstanding realism skills. That inner passion when facing a canvas makes him reject analytical sophisticated processes and exquisite cultivation. However, the sense of visually understanding objects is still deeply rooted in his accurate observation and extraction of shapes and outlines. He is somehow affected by tendencies toward the primitivism of Paul Gauguin, probably because the places he has stayed in while abroad all have a strong atmosphere originating in their respective local aboriginal cultures. However, Li Nanfeng’s interest is not in primitive life scenery and original ecological natural landscape, and he can perceive that "wild passion” in them, which echoes and coincides with a “passionate wildness” latent in his heart. Interwoven in his pictures are the bursts of feelings and impulses as well as excitement and fanaticism.

　　He often composes paintings with a very full image, even if it is just a face, letting the image fill the canvas to all four corners, giving a strong and grotesque visual impression. It is as if the eyes in the painting are shadowing you so that you are already caught in the mood before viewing the actual work. His use of the strong contrast of black and white is like heavy metal sounds striking your consciousness. Then there are the deformed facial features, wrinkles of vicissitudes, and expressions of pain or grim experience. Similar techniques are fully expressed in the Michael Jackson Series portraits of Li Nanfeng. The painter rearranges faces & hair, and enlarges the eyes and lips of his subjects to fill their square layouts in order to strengthen expressions related to the emotions. The surrounding black and dark red make the mask-like dramatic face of Michael extremely prominent. And the thick, wild and graffiti-style brush strokes not only show the perceptions the painter has taken from the songs and performances of Michael, but also contain the joys and sorrows, the ups and downs he feels in the glorious yet short life of this international superstar, perhaps insinuating the similarity and symbolic connection with the life of a painter. That trace of an innocent yet terrifying laugh on Michael’s face makes us feel sad, distressed and slightly horrified. A star is the totem of contemporary culture. When faith falls into consumption, what kind of image could capture the human spirit? The paintings of Li Nanfeng always offer people a clue.

　　The wildness of Nanfeng’s works is expressed not only in his spontaneous lines and brush strokes, but also in his reshaping of bodies. Whether considering his works with the theme of football games or those focusing on the female forms he constantly depicts, the painter is good at depicting distinctive bodies using thick ink & bold colors; tough and ferocious male players solid like stones, ample & clumsy female bodies with texture like reliefs. His improvisation in the direct effect of the oil painting medium often combines with his understanding of the five ink colors used in Chinese paintings. The distribution of stirred black and light make his works highly focused and filled with visual tension, and viewers seem to be caught in the picture. In turn, when Li Nanfeng creates ink wash paintings, the simplified communication of the material of bodies combined with heavy yet accurate outlines utilizing random light ink strokes, always evokes the fascination with outline combined with the same powerful understanding of the human form. In this sense, Li Nanfeng is not a simple schematic painter who does not follow the popular style of image construction, but instead expresses his inner agitation with a more willful yet creative approach. It is apparent that this expression is not self closure but opening, an opening of visual experience to contemporary people. Li Nanfeng is a contemporary savage or perhaps a barbarous contemporary person, who does not desire to agree with the accepted styles and disciplines of capital markets in the world today. It is obvious, at least in his own works that he wants to draw and his drawing skill is excellent.

　　Li Nanfeng also produces landscape pieces, from more traditional and realistic paintings to abstract works. In his paintings he is not bound by subject, type, concrete realism or abstraction, complexity and conciseness, inscription and graffiti, or by the brightness and heaviness of colors. In landscape paintings, he is not afraid to create dense composition with repeated images in fresh, exciting and lively forms. His abstract works are fantastical, with willful and occasional lines, colors and digits, even images by Bacchus, who’s interwoven and scattered shapes and colors have no obvious sense at all. However, disorder has a casual co-ordination, like a savage’s call in the wilderness. No matter how chaotic and expressive, sound waves arrive with a certain rhythm, which is the power of nature and ontology. On the perception of chaos, Li Nanfeng is an one of the most outstanding of Chinese painters. Viewers must not miss witnessing his painting talents.

　　When first seeing works of Li Nanfeng, I was filled with shock. Since the deep market operations of the nineties, Chinese fine arts have been indulging in an image formulation tendency for too long. Those works slowly growing pale through continuous replication are everywhere; this has nothing to do with spiritual side of the Chinese people of long ago other than as an exchange for fame and fortune. Behind false prosperity and forced harmony, it is the bureaucratic capital and collective imperial power that deprive people of their freedom. In individual spiritual aspirations, Chinese are facing an extreme cultural dilemma. Nanfeng's paintings are undoubtedly shrill screams, making people enlightened and aware of the existence of the wilderness, civil society, and the bottom parts of society. He reminds me of the wolf Buck in Call of the Wild by Jack London, whose nature can never adapt to established order and discipline, only able to express itself by uninhibited howls resounding through the heart. Li Nanfeng returns with the wildness of a madman. Can he maintain this intensity and continue to voice it? Let’s listen carefully to the call of the wild. China has not yet reached a time to fully appreciate this quietness.

　　Wang Lin

　　Professor in Sichuan Fine Arts Institute & Famous Fine Arts Critic

　　June 10, 2012