Age of Innocence, Ink and Crayon, Li Xin, 2021

Age of Innocence

The most amazing thing in Li’s drawing is the absolute freedom that he has brought to what he has been doing.

Without a formal training in art, Li has shown his talents in all over his drawings since the first one he did. In the earlier days most of his drawings were study after modern masters, but the outbursts of uncontrollable creativity impelled him to find his own imageries to realize his own vision: still, dreamlike, and enigmatic, through extracting, restructuring, and distorting the elements from the original works.

As he rediscovered the long-lost interest in drawing this February, he has been driven by the burst of passion again and unstoppably. He draws with limited mediums. Many of his interesting art works were born out of Q-tips and marker pens. Now he has been exploring and experimenting with brushes, inks, and a box of crayons he found on a staircase to his home after a walk.

Age of Innocence is a drawing full of nostalgia of the fading youth. The washed ink to light and delicate gray spreads into a filmy layer pregnant with melancholy moods. In the center, the little girl in black minidress, faceless, is surrounded by those impressionistic colorful dabs which are overlapped or invaded by white ones, as if dissolving into the gray and emptiness, or oblivion.