Lot Essay
Born in Fuzhou in 1940, Li Xubai is a lover of Chinese classics and worked as editor for art and collecting magazines. He moved to Hong Kong in 1979, and emigrated to Canada in 1996. A painter and a poet, he uses negative space to convey snow, rivers, clouds and mists, radiating a glowing light that contrasts sharply with the darker tones of mountains and vegetation. Li’s landscapes are built from unconventional shapes, formed by jagged lines that twist and turn at abrupt angles. This exotic, geometric perception provides a strange, almost digital sense of modernity in his work.