NEW YORK, NY.- Jason McCoy Gallery is presenting a cohesive survey of Li-lan’s oeuvre, featuring major paintings and pastels on paper from the past five decades.

The exhibition celebrates the recent publication of The Art of Li-lan: A World Achieved, an extensive monograph by Carter Ratcliff.

Over the years, Li-lan has repeatedly employed imagery relating to written and cross cultural correspondence, such as letters, envelopes, postcards, and stamps, to ponder themes of personal voyage and growth. In addition, every day objects, exotic animals, or ghost-like creatures sprung from Japanese folktales of the Edo period, for example, have populated her compositions. These at times surreal subjects are contrasted against neutral backgrounds and vast architectural spaces that aesthetically reflect classical principles. Throughout the decades, Li-lan’s work has remained consciously independent of linear narratives. Instead, her visuals seem to stem from personal dream sequences, in which protagonists remain intangible and free of specific times or contexts.

Li-lan has exhibited extensively in the USA and internationally, particularly in Taiwan, Japan, and China (primarily Beijing). Her work is in major public and private collections all over the world, including the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, NC; the Parrish Museum in Southampton, NY; the William Benton Museum of Art in Storrs, CT; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Ohara Museum of Art in Kurashiki, Japan; and the Sezon Museum of Modern Art in Karuizawa, Japan. She lives and works in East Hampton and New York.

Published by Hudson Hills Press in November 2013, The Art of Li-lan: A World Achieved portrays the development of the artist within the fabric of the American experience as she cements her own identity. Born in New York to the gallerist Helen Wimmer Gee and the Modernist painter Yun Gee, Li-lan was exposed from a young age to cultural sophistication that matured into a unique art form. Through the author’s extensive research and personal friendship, a sensitive and penetrating narrative guides us through a gentle but hard-fought life of artistic accomplishment.