The Cyclic Year of the Birth Year
LI Zhi Hong`s Works
2007.09.15 - 10.09

I was surprised when I first saw the works of Li Zhihong. His works gave me many imaginations on his life experiences. I also saw his new works later, and they always gave me surprises and the feelings of beauty. When I felt that the art of the “post 70’s” would be settled, Li Zhihong came out as a miracle. He didn’t have formal institutional education, and before 2004, he had not really painted and paintings. He started the painting creation a year before in 2006 when he was 36 years old. It was the cyclic year of his birth year that he painted a group of “maiden works” named “The Cyclic Year of the Birth Year” and he started his career as an artist then. Up to now, he is still an amateur artist. He is a formal employee of a power company for which he has worked for 12 years. Recently, he felt unhappy as he was not promoted by his company. Those paintings named “The Cyclic Year of the Birth Year” really moved me, and I could not imagine that they were made by an amateur artist who just started his career of painting. Starting from the time I talked with him about this article, I was inclined increasingly to believe that Li Zhihong might be a “talent”. It was pressed by the strength of the fate that he found himself and he got liberated through art. In a sunny morning, in the coffee shop of Beijing 798, facing the pickup camera, Li Zhihong didn’t feel anything uncomfortable and talked endlessly about his experiences and feeling of life… He is already a mature man after he has passed his third cyclic year of his birth year. For this talk, he took the train for over 20 hours from Jiangxi to Beijing the day before the talk, and after the talk, he took the train on the same day at night over 20 hours back home. He said that he felt a little bit scared of the life in the big city. When I wrote here, I thought of myself. When I was 18 years old, I also took the train over 30 hours to Beijing and was drowned out in that noisy city since then. I even could not go back to that small town with green hills and clear waters in my memory. From this point, I felt that Li Zhihong might be happy.