追梦人

The empress in full regalia stands patiently as a palace attendant in formal red robes and court hat intently makes an adjustment to her coiffure. To the side the emperor in yellow adjusts his chin strap as he looks on. It is an intimate, unguarded moment set in the palace’s inner quarters. The scene is furnished with low couches, a plant stand, and a sturdy dark-framed mirror that reflects a single gourd-shaped wall ornament, a poignant or perhaps ironic reference to immortality. In this painting as in his other work, Di Lifeng creates a moment of total absorption with recreated history, with the immense material richness of premodern China, with the relationships between his subjects, and those subjects and the viewer.

Di Lifeng’s earliest canvases focus on scenes from the late Qing imperial court, whose players faced dramatic and often tragic fates. One presents nesrly life-sized arrays of imperial family members and court ministers behind whom stand turn-of-the-century. Western figures who brought a news kind of challenge to the court and contributed to the eventual demise of the dynasty. The pathes of the lives of the imperial family, the way personal calamity was entwined with power and the obvious more moving delivered in a palette that suggests ghosts.

Another recurring subject in Di Lifeng’s earlier work is the selection of imperial concubines, who are paraded beside courtiers in official garb. These young women are beautiful and finely dressed, but implicit in their promenade is the harsh fact that most were taken from their families to live like caged birds in the inner quarters, forever separated from their former lives and bereft of their own futures.

Di Lifeng draws his vocabulary from several different periods of oil painting. His manner combines unlikely styles-the close description, courtliness, and scale that recall grand portraiture of 18th and 19th century Europe, and the neoimpressionist and abstract fascination with light, paint, and surface. The precise combination of these varies from painting to painting. Some figures are so highly finished that Di Lifeng’s brush-work suggests even the stitching in the extensive and complex embroidery of their attire. Others are deliberately roughened, with applied texture riding beneath the smoothly drawn curve of cheek or forehead. Embroidered sleeves or skirts are built from patterns of dabs applied to the burlap carvas Di prefers for his mostly large-scale works. His sometime disruptive texturing introduces tension between surface and subject that brings a very modern kind of interest to subjects that otherwise would simply be beautiful, exotic, or antique. In almost all of his work, Di painstakingly renders his model’s faces and elaborately posed hands in sharp distinction from the often flattened or more generalized shapes and textures that

make up his backgrounds and sometimes their dress. In several paintings he plays at blurring the figure-ground distinetion, so closely related are the patterns and colors of a subject’s robes and the textured ground against which she is drawn. This recalls a longstanding Chinese tradition of graphic play, but it also calls mind to earlier Western works, perhaps especially those of Klimt. But Di Lifeng’s melding of fine description and abstract texture produces a very different kind of passion, more of dream than of physical desire-his beauties meet Chinese ideals of refinement with their cloudlike hair and skin like jade; their theatrical gestures, glances, costume, and scale engage the viewer in larger fantasies.

For all his interest in the Qing dynasty and familiarity with antique attire, Di Lifeng in the end has a very contemporary eye. His beauties bear little resemblance to photos of Qing-period concubines, and his treatment of traditional subjects draws heavily on the sensibilities of the late 20th century, where perfect regularity and fullness of feature are imperative in flower and fashion model alike. But Di Lifeng goes beyond the stereotyped beauty of this global age: his art takes the modern ideal of consistent perfection (perfect car, perfect hair, perfect clothes) as a starting point for imagining the less-than-perfect but rich world of court culture in Chinese early modern period.